All language subtitles for the.story.of.ireland.1e01.dvdrip.x264-EN

There is an Ireland shrouded in clich�...

...of heroes and villains,

lost battles and sad songs.

Perched on the margins of Europe,

a claustrophobic island cut off
from the world,

its people turned in on themselves,

victims of their own ancient hatreds
and of a powerful neighbour.

That is not the Ireland of this journey.

Our earliest writings show that we
looked to worlds beyond the green island.

From the patterns of our landscape
to the roots of our cities,

we were shaped by waves
of migration and invasion.

New languages, faiths, cultures
came from outside,

and still do.

I will travel through the physical
landscape and the ideas and peoples

of a story
striking because it is so unpredictable.

But it is also a journey through other
worlds whose history changed Ireland.

Crossing continents -
from Europe, to America, to Africa.

The old view, which saw
the complex history of Ireland

solely within the boundaries
of what happened on this island,

or simply through the prism

of conflict between the British
and the Irish,

is mistaken, but above all, self-limiting.

The real story of Ireland
is so much bigger.

Ripped By mstoll

I remember walking in this garden of
remembrance in 1966 with my father.

It was the 50th anniversary
of the Rising of 1916

and a great wave of patriotic sentiment
swept the country.

Here, they constructed a memorial,
which celebrated revolution, faith...

and an idealised ancient world.

At its centre, this sculpture
of the mythical Children of Lir,

condemned by an evil stepmother
to wander the oceans as swans

until the coming of Christianity
sets them free.

It was intended as a symbol
of national resurrection,

but also to say to my generation
and those that followed

that we belonged to an unbroken line,

stretching back
into a glorious Celtic past.

Our leaders stressed our difference to
the departed British.

The idea of an ancient people of one faith
was central to our identity.

The real Irish were Gaelic and Catholic.

In the Ireland of the mid-1960s,
I knew little of an outside world

or of the Ulster Protestants,
with their British identity.

They seemed to me an alien tribe,

marching to what the poet Louis MacNeice
called "the voodoo of the Orange drums".

But a decade later, in the mid-1970s,

the story of Ireland I was being taught
had changed.

School was no longer an echo chamber
of the like-minded.

In the shadow of the northern Troubles,
the old certainties would not do.

We were being asked to imagine
a more complex set of Irish identities.

The idea of Irishness,
of what it meant to be an Irishman,

that you grew up, that I grew up with,
was pretty simple, wasn't it?

I suppose it was a standard version.

It was a Republican tradition
and you didn't see outside that.

We all marched to that song
and to that drum, you know.

It took a long time to change it.

When you came here to teach people
like me, did you have a sense,

a feeling that you had to
broaden our minds?

I suppose what I was trying to do
was to show

that there were other ways of looking
at maybe the same thing.

I always remember giving an essay,
you know, "Carson, Irish patriot."

The great Unionist Loyalist leader
in the North?

I left it at that.

I remember one kid said,
"Sir, that doesn't make any sense."

I said, "How do you mean,
it doesn't make any sense?"

I said, "Carson wanted the union
of Ireland and Britain."

He wanted what, for him,
was the best thing for Ireland.

Now, can you say that he's not a patriot
because he doesn't agree with you?

I was trying to do that kind of thing.

And telling the true history
is key to that, isn't it?

It is. But you see, you come back then,
"What's truth?"

Walking the streets of Cork now,

I find the city proud of its links with
the world beyond,

and willing to acknowledge
a history made of many influences,

in which Irishness embraced
different allegiances.

Our story of Ireland begins by going back

through a landscape marked by
the change of centuries,

through the scattering of tribes...

the rise and fall of kings...

...through prosperity and war...

...and a revolution of faith.

The first waves of settlers
are thought to have come from Europe

about 10,000 years ago.

This ancient burial site at Newgrange

is the oldest known building in Ireland.

Across the ancient world,
men build monuments to their dead.

But this structure at Newgrange predates
some of the most famous.

It was built 500 years before the Pyramids
of Giza, 1,000 years before Stonehenge.

But what can it tell us about the lives

of some of the earliest inhabitants
of this island?

People first came to Ireland about
8,000 BC, after the end of the Ice Age.

Farming comes into Ireland about 4,000 BC

and Newgrange is built in the centuries
just before 3,000 BC.

Why would they build something
like this? What were they trying to say?

I think,
for early farmers, the notion of ancestry,

that's really the central focus
of this world.

The monuments themselves
contain selected bones of the ancestors.

This is the world of the dead,

but it's capable of influencing
the lives of the living...

which of course is very much orientated
around the farming cycle,

the importance of the seasons.

So, of course, you want to
align your monuments

to the critical points of the year.

In the case of Newgrange,
on sunrise at the winter solstice.

Newgrange is part of a sort of
international Atlantic phenomenon

of passage tomb building which takes us
from Spain to southern Scandinavia.

So they were conscious
of being part of a wider human race,

- not just stuck on this island?
- Very much so. Absolutely, and I think

these early farmers building this monument
would have realised

and would probably have had stories
about places that were far away,

how things worked in other areas.

Neither archaeology or genetics
can tell us

the names of any of the tribes
who settled in this early Ireland.

But in the beautiful artefacts
of the Bronze Age,

we can see a culture shared with
groups in Britain and Europe,

whom later historians
would call the Celts.

Tiny decorations.

This lovely collar was worn
for decorative reasons, one presumes.

What does that tell you
about the people who made it

and about the times they lived in?

Beyond being just decorative,

they are actually a way of identifying
particular people in society,

because, no more than our own age, um...

you know, I'm not decked out in diamonds,

and I'm hardly likely ever to be, but if
I was at that particular level of society,

whether it's a question of
wealth or position,

then I would have needed
a particular status

in order to be entitled
to wear these objects.

Of course, if I was male, I might have
been entitled to wear a lunula.

So we know there was a hierarchy
by this stage.

Yes, there definitely has to be
a hierarchy.

You also have here something which
fascinated me when I heard about it

because it comes from so far away,
and that's amber.

And you go all the way to the Baltic
to find it.

Yes, amber really comes into its own
in Ireland in the late Bronze Age.

We're really lucky in this country because
most of it has been buried in peat bogs

and as a result
it's extremely well-preserved.

- We've got some here.
- Yes.

- This is part of a necklace...
- How did it get here

from the Baltic coast, from Poland
or somewhere like that?

- You always ask difficult questions!
- Well, that's my job!

This does at least tell us
somebody comes from Northern Europe

here, with this material
in quite considerable amounts.

Well, somebody may not have come,
somebody may have been handing it on,

and it may have come through many
different hands before it reaches Ireland.

What we do know is, a lot of it came
and a lot of it has been preserved,

because of this tendency
to deposit these hoards in bogs.

There is a surface landscape
which offers immediate clues to our past.

And there is the Irish story
concealed beneath our bog land.

One-sixth of Ireland,
more than any other European country,

lies under bog, formed after early farmers
began to clear the upland forest

2,500 years before Christ.

This is a patch of bog in North Kerry

that's been dug by my family for fuel
for the fire for several generations.

The poet Seamus Heaney
described the men who worked the bogs

as "our pioneers,
driving inwards and downwards.

"Every layer they strip
seems camped on before."

And as today's farmers have dug deeper,
they have found

evidence of our earliest ancestors,

and links with a wider world.

This is Clonycavan Man,
a 2,000-year-old Irishman,

whose body was preserved
by the unique chemistry of the bogs.

Do we know anything about this man -
who he was, where he came from?

Well, we know he was found in a bog
on the West Meath border. We know that

he was killed ritually
more than 2,000 years ago.

- How was he killed?
- He was struck first in the face,

which broke his nose.

And when he fell down,
his head was split with an axe.

His stomach was cut across,
he was probably disembowelled as well.

- Why would they have done that?
- We think

that this man was probably
a king who was killed,

and a number of means of execution
were employed

because the goddess to whom he was being
sacrificed appears in a number of forms,

so they had to sacrifice
in all her forms.

You can see,
he had this very unusual hairstyle.

The front of the forehead is shaved

and the rest of the hair was bundled up
a bit like a Mohawk.

An that was held in place with a hair gel

which was made using resin
imported from the Pyrenees.

The very fact that you find resin
from the Mediterranean in his hair

suggests we were trading with that region.

Ireland's position
as an island

doesn't isolate it in ancient times.

It makes it more accessible

because travel by sea is much easier
than travel over land.

Clonycavan Man gives us
our first sight of an Irishman.

And here in the National Museum,
we see some of the finest examples

of what we now consider Celtic art.

But the idea of the Irish as racially
Celtic, unlike the Anglo-Saxon English,

belongs to the 19th century.

For nationalists
and their English enemies,

much depended on
belonging to an imagined finer race.

So, was Clonycavan Man a Celt?

He would have been Celtic
in the sense that he would have spoken

a Celtic language, he would have spoken

an early form of the Gaelic language,
the Irish language.

And the art is associated with
Celtic people on the Continent.

I don't think it means that we are
racially descended from a Celtic nation.

Genetically, this man doesn't have
a lot to do with the Gauls of France

or the Celts of central Europe
as described by the Greeks and the Romans.

So we Irish - let me just nail
this one down, because it's critical -

we are no more racially Celtic
than our English neighbours, are we?

No, we're no more so, nor less so.

Our cousins on the other island

have certainly as much a claim
to their Celtic past, I think, as we have.

The murdered man from the Meath bog

reveals something of how the Irish lived
several hundred years before Christ.

Their gods were the gods of nature,
whom they appeased with sacrifice.

They had developed a social organisation,
with kings at the pinnacle of power.

Their artwork was delicate
and distinctive.

And they were already linked by trade
to the cultures of the classical world.

Clonycavan Man and his contemporaries
left no written record.

Our distant ancestors exist for us
as tantalising shadows.

And when the story of that
ancient Irish world starts to be written,

the narrative is scripted for us
by others.

The writers of their classical world
conjured their own stories of Ireland.

In the 9th century BC,

the Greek poet Homer described
the whole of northwestern Europe as,

"A land of fog and gloom,

"beyond it is a sea of death
where hell begins."

But our first detailed account of Ireland

comes long after Classical Greece has been
overtaken by an all-conquering new power.

750 years after Homer,
the Romans invaded Britain.

Julius Caesar landed here
on the Kent coast in 55 BC.

Now, given his restless ambition,

it would have seemed natural for him
to complete the conquest of Britain

and then move on
to invade the neighbouring island.

But in Caesar's mind,
Ireland was a place of fearful myth.

He called it Hibernia, the land of winter.

A geographer living under Caesar's rule
described the Irish as a cannibal race

who deemed it commendable
to devour their deceased fathers

and who lived a miserable existence
because of the cold.

But Mediterranean traders had long
been immune to such dire warnings

and with the knowledge they brought back,

a scholar created
a geographical masterpiece.

In this medieval copy of his book,
Geographia,

we can see how Ptolemy mapped the world

as it was known to the Romans
around 150 AD.

And there, on the westernmost point,
is Hibernia.

This is the first map of Ireland
and its peoples.

We can recognise some of the names.

For example, Eblani
is usually interpreted as Dublin.

The river names -
the Shannon is there, for example.

The River Lee, I suppose, which all
Cork people would like to see mentioned.

There are some names,
interestingly enough...

Here we have Brigantes, for example,

and the Brigantes over here in West Wales,
and they are clearly related.

What does that tell us?

Well, it works two ways.
Either it means that there were Brigantes

here in the west of Britain first of all,
who then migrated to Ireland.

But it is possible

that they might actually represent
population groups

that originated in Ireland and then
came to the western province of Britain,

because you do have

quite substantial Irish settlement
in western Britain,

in Wales as we know it nowadays.

This notion of the Irish
colonising parts of Britain,

it rather turns our historical sense
of things on its head, doesn't it?

We always like to see ourselves
as the eternally put-upon...

- It could be problematical.
...conquered by the other lot.

- We were doing the same.
- In this day and age,

we're insisting that everybody apologise
to us, including our nearest neighbours.

But I suppose

if you go back far enough,
we invaded them before they invaded us.

So, if there are apologies
to be bandied about,

we might take the first step, you know.

It seems the Romans did briefly
contemplate an invasion

until trouble in Scotland
called the legions away.

And so Ireland was never subordinated
to Roman law or government.

But they didn't need to dispatch an army
to exert an influence

that extended well beyond trade,

into the realms of society and culture.

This is a small bronze figure
of one of the minor Roman deities.

It was found in the River Boyne at Navan.

- So, this is pre-Christian, this?
- This is pagan Roman.

It's a bit like if Ireland was on the edge
of the European Community,

you would expect
that it would be trading with it.

Ireland had cattle. Cattle
would have been shipped over to Britain.

Items like leather. The Roman army
consumed vast amounts of leather.

The cattle lords
out on the central plains,

they start getting notions of grandeur

and they become important provincial kings

of early medieval Ireland.

You have the establishment of dynasties

that continued in power
for hundreds of years afterwards.

But again,
they were looking to the Roman world,

to model themselves on the Roman emperors.

By the 4th century, some Irish outposts
on the west coast of Britain

had expanded into kingdoms
as more settlers came.

"They desire to go eastwards,"
wrote an early Gaelic poet,

"into the broad long-distant sea."

A medieval scholar would later write that,

"The power of the Irish
over the Britons was great."

And there's some evidence

that Irish traders were venturing
into the heart of Roman Britain.

Here in 1893,
in the middle of the Home Counties,

Victorian archaeologists
excavating the Roman town of Silchester

made a fascinating discovery.

It was a 4th-century clue to the existence
of a long-vanished Irishman.

This type of inscribed stone
is usually found only in Ireland

or the far western fringes of Britain.

These lines represent
the oldest form of the Irish language.

Michael, what is this stone?

Well, it's a... it's a small Roman column.

But what's very different about it

is it's got this inscription on it
in Ogham,

and this transliterates into a man's name.

Tepicatus.

And here on this line,
he's beginning to describe his lineage

- just as you'd find on any Ogham stone.
- I mean, I've seen these,

you know, tucked away in graveyards
in Ireland or in the middle of fields,

- surrounded by trees.
- Yes.

- Here it is, an hour's drive from London.
- Yes.

Away, away, away
from other finds of such stones.

It's extraordinary to me,

this idea that you have
an Irishman who sets out,

settles among people from everywhere,
from all corners of the empire.

It truly was a multicultural,

- multilingual world that he lived in.
- Yes. Yes.

And it's not just the one person,
but it's a group, it's a family,

and it's other people
supporting a community.

Now, it may be he was a big figure,
he was a local king. I mean, who knows?

Because we have another Celtic man

from another end of Roman town story
up in Wroxeter,

who did describe himself as a king.

So, you may have had Irishmen
who had his domain here

in those sort of end days of
the Roman world, in the 5th, 6th century.

The Roman Empire in which
Tepicatus lived was already in decline.

But its impact was still profound.

Christianity had become
the state religion.

Clerics were dispatched all over Europe
to spread the word.

The faith that would come to be seen
as a core part of Irish identity

was brought to an island
steeped in the worship of pagan gods.

Rome's first Bishop to Ireland
was dispatched in AD 431.

He was Palladius, the son of a Roman
general, who found, by one account, that,

"The fierce and cruel men
did not receive his doctrine readily."

His memory would be obliterated

by events which would create

Ireland's first and most enduring
cult of personality.

It is the story of a spiritual revolution
born in an age of imperial collapse.

Since the beginning of the 5th century,
barbarian attacks on Rome had escalated

and the legions were called from Britain
to defend the eternal city.

In the vacuum
after the departure of the army,

Irish raids on the British coast expanded.

The expansion was driven
by a lust for plunder and by trade,

and one of the most lucrative markets
of all was slavery.

From harbours
up and down the Irish coastline,

slave raiding boats set out
to attack British settlements.

But one of those raids
would have consequences

that the rough warriors on board
could never have imagined.

For amongst the thousands carried off

was a Welshman who would become
the most celebrated Irishman of all.

The St Patrick we commemorate
each March 17th

escaped from Ireland,

but returned after a vision
in which the pagan Irish called him back

to spread the Christian faith.

But much of what was taken to be the truth
of his life was invented by others,

like the 18th-century clergyman who
claimed the shamrock was used by Patrick

to explain the Holy Trinity.

Patrick hovers between the pagan past
and the Christian future.

He is the man who vanquishes
troublesome kings with magic spells,

banishes the snakes
from the face of Ireland.

But what do we know of the real Patrick,
beyond myth and symbol?

What is his practical impact
on Christianity's development here?

He himself says that
he went where no man went before.

It's a famous expression
that survives down to the present day,

and he clearly did go where no other
Christian missionary had gone before,

and that's important, because in the
history of the Western Christian Church,

that wasn't the practice.

People, generally speaking,
didn't head out into the brave blue yonder

cos it was too dangerous a thing to do.

And you certainly get the impression
from his own writings

that he was able to get on with the Irish

to a degree which wasn't possible,
say, for continental missionaries.

Patrick was not the druid-destroying
figure of myth.

He left two documents,

the most important, his confession,
notable for its humility.

"I am a sinner,"he apologised,
"the least among all Christians."

It was these writings
that would provide the later Church

with a vital unifying symbol.

At the end of the 7th century,

the Church has an interest
in a far more stable society,

the idea of a single island,
and therefore a single people,

and therefore a single nation,
and therefore a single faith.

Every other Church could look back
to the great converting saint.

"Gosh, we need to be as good as that."

And it looked back to its origins and
it had no documents, with one exception,

and that was Patrick's apology,

so that had to be carefully edited

and that becomes the myth
of the great patron saint.

Patrick died around 460 AD.

But there were other missionaries

who blended Gaelic traditions
with the Christian faith.

Monasteries were founded.

As a later Gaelic poem put it,
"Heathendom has gone down.

"God the Father's kingdom
fills heaven, earth and air."

But Ireland was not luxuriating
in a Celtic idyll.

The early missionaries
moved through kingdoms

frequently at war with each other.

Tell me what happens
when the monks arrive.

They would have first
of all made their way to the local king,

the local lord or something like that,

because you couldn't just arrive off
the next available flight and announce,

"I am your new local Christian mission."
You'd end up dead.

So, you'd have to get
some kind of physical protection.

Once you had the king's protection,

on that basis go around,
spread the message.

Certainly with the passage of time,
monasticism is the growing trend,

if you like, and it's a cool thing
to have a monastery on your land,

it's cool to have a member of your family
a member of a monastic community.

If you can have a brother,
a sister who's actually a saint,

somebody who's so high in the hierarchy,

then obviously that adds
a certain prestige as well.

As the influence of Patrick
and his successors expanded,

the monasteries would emerge as the focal
points of intellectual and artistic life.

Patrick was born
a child of the Roman Imperium.

But by the time of his death
in the 5th century,

that empire had disintegrated,

and across Europe there was
a catastrophic decline in learning.

In the 6th century,
the scholar Gregory of Tours wrote that,

"In the cities of Gaul
there could be found no scholar

"trained in ordered composition,

"who could present a picture
in prose or verse,

"of the things that have befallen."

Everywhere except Ireland.

There, a cultural revolution
was under way.

The Church in Ireland was untouched
by the traumas afflicting Europe.

And as the kings of Ireland
were converted,

the monks found protectors and patrons,

a culture that blended the native
and the Latin flourished.

At the centre of this flowering
were the monasteries.

And this is the great settlement
of Clonmacnoise.

As you sweep round this turn in the
River Shannon, you get the round towers,

the churches and everything,

and you get the first idea that this is
a really substantial monastic foundation.

Had we arrived here
at the height of its powers,

what would we have seen
coming around the bend?

If you believe the sources,

there were several thousand people here
living already

in the 6th and 7th centuries, so you can
imagine a pretty dense settlement.

There would have been an obvious
substantial farming element.

This would have looked like
a very prosperous economic unit.

And there would have been markets

and people would have been coming
both by land

and here on the sea as well, on the water.

And the whole place would have been pretty
much a bustling, buzzing kind of place.

Not just trade, of course,

but the whole business
of setting down in text.

A place like Clonmacnoise
would have had

a thriving school of people
who were coming here,

not only from other Irish monasteries,

but we know of people who would have
been travelling from either England

or even from continental Europe.

- From that far away?
- Oh, yeah.

We had a reputation as scholars
all the way back,

and certainly it was the place to be
in the 7th century.

If you wanted higher learning, if you
wanted advanced knowledge of the Bible

or grammar or something like that,
then you came to Ireland.

Perhaps the greatest bequest
of the monastic tradition in Ireland

was literary.

The monks transcribed the Bible
and set down in writing ancient laws.

But not only in Latin.

They developed a written form
of the people's Celtic tongue.

Religious and legal texts were translated
into Gaelic by the intellectual elite.

Ireland had the most abundant
vernacular literature in Europe.

One of the greatest examples is the
Lebor Gab�la �renn, the Book of Invasions,

an imagined history of Ireland.

This extraordinary book

is the first written story of Ireland.

It purports to tell the story
of how the Irish came into being.

The tales here come from the 7th century,

and they would have a profound impact on
the way the Irish came to see themselves.

What it says is that the Irish
are at the centre of the world.

They are not a small,
insignificant people.

It was woven together in the 11th century
from earlier sources

as a statement of Irish uniqueness.

They didn't want to be seen as peripheral
people living at the edge of Europe.

One of the main themes
in early Irish history

is the sense
that Ireland is central, culturally,

to what happens in the Christian world.

So, what they do
is they insert the Irish at various points

into key events in world history.

So, what they're doing is they start off
with the creation of the world

in the Book of Genesis,

so it's almost like the Scripture of
Ireland, the Old Testament of Ireland.

And then they show the ancestors of
the Irish appearing at various key events.

So, when Moses goes on the exodus,
an Irish guy sort of pops up

so he can find out
what the Ten Commandments are.

They look about the sort of origins
of their own language,

and an Irish guy pops up
at the Tower of Babel

and he makes Irish
from all of the best bits of the languages

when they're divided up.

At a very early point,
the Irish begin to write in Irish,

and one of the things
that Lebor Gab�la does

is it brings in
an awful lot of traditional lore.

So you get elements of popular culture and
elite culture being brought in together,

along with sort of the learning of
the Old Testament or of Christian writers.

What were they trying to do by setting it
in such an international context,

this idea that we came from everywhere?

The basic framework which it takes

is that Ireland has been populated
by various waves of people over time.

Some of these people are invaders,

some are more refugees than invaders,
for example,

and they admit that
not everybody who lives on the island

in the early medieval period
are descended from one group of people.

So there is an acceptance
in the Lebor Gab�la

that the Irish are of multiethnic origins.

At what point do we lose that sense
of being part of something greater

and take on board this narrow idea
that it's us in a misty Celtic past...

- Yeah...
...a people alone?

Certainly from the 18th century.

If you look at the Irish themselves
during this period

when they're putting together
the Lebor Gab�la

and the very elements that go into it,

the one element
they don't pick themselves is Celtic.

They know about the existence

of groups called Celts and Gauls
from classical writers.

They never identify with them.

In fact, they're far more confident
about their identity, you could say,

than maybe modern people are about theirs.

Irish monks would carry their Gospel
across the seas.

Men like Brendan the Voyager,

Colum Cille in the Irish kingdom
of D�l Riata in Scotland,

or Aidain at Lindisfarne in Northumbria.

"Now the Lord had said, 'Get thee out
of thy country and from thy kindred

"'and from thy father's house
unto a land that I will show thee. "'

The words of Abraham,
from the Old Testament,

and they would echo
in the minds of Irish monks.

At their heart, a simple concept
in the Latin, potior peregrinatio,

a lifelong pilgrimage for Christ.

And it would bring
some of those Irish clergy here

to the lands at the heart
of the old Roman Empire.

The monks arriving
in northern Italy in 613

had already established monasteries
in Gaul.

Their zeal persuaded
the powerful king of the Lombards

to offer them land at Bobbio,
in the Apennines.

These Irish churchmen brought
their own version of Christianity.

They were told to avoid
earthly temptation and Church power.

"Fear women and bishops,"
their leader said.

He was austere and querulous
and a fierce disciplinarian.

His name was Columbanus.

It meant "dove".

But this reforming Irish monk
railed against the abuse of power,

sparing neither clergy nor princes
from his censure.

Columbanus even had the temerity
to confront the Pope.

It was a complex dispute
about the dating of Easter.

To Columbanus,
it wasn't simply spiritual pedantics,

he felt he was standing up for something
he truly believed in.

And when the Gallic bishops
summoned him to account for himself,

he simply refused to go.

He saw them as an elite,

ministering only to the chosen few.

But Columbanus was deeply loyal
to the idea

of a Church led by the Pope from Rome.

He was a dissenter, not a revolutionary.

He looked beyond the monastery walls,

imagining a Europe
united in faith and culture.

In the letters and words of Columbanus,

Europe heard an Irish voice that was
learned, sometimes uncompromising,

and always thoughtful.

At Bobbio he established one of the
greatest libraries of the medieval world.

Columbanus described himself
as a "dissenter whenever necessary".

I can't help thinking of James Joyce
writing about

setting out to forge
the uncreated conscience of his race.

Columbanus, it seems to me,
was doing it centuries before.

By the time he died, here in Bobbio,

Columbanus had established
a thriving monastic centre,

and he would look back, too, at Ireland
with some satisfaction.

For the monasteries were still producing
great works of art.

He might have been less enamoured
at the political manoeuvring.

The status of clergy
could have much to do with their alliances

and family ties
with the local aristocracy.

Indeed, from the earliest times,

monasteries could be the launching pads
for earthly ambitions.

The Abbot here at Ardmore
in County Waterford

came from a powerful local family.

Declan was said to have been
a contemporary of St Patrick.

The story goes that, together,
they went to a banquet of local nobility

and, together,
chose the new king of the region.

Was this story true?

Well, we've simply no way of knowing.

But it does underline
a significant truth -

churchmen were becoming
increasingly powerful political players.

And this foreshadows
an enduring theme of the Irish story -

that embrace between spiritual
and temporal power.

Christ and Caesar together.

So the abbot of the monastery is
much more than a spiritual man.

He becomes a major political player.

He controls a vast
number of people and enormous resources.

And if you think the Abbot was getting up
in the morning

to say a five o'clock Mass, he was not.

He was much more like a Medici prince.

Because the church is rich, the church
gets involved in political violence.

There's one famous one in which there was
a battle between Cork and Clonfert

in which the annals say
there was "an innumerable slaughter"

of the ecclesiastical men
and superiors of Cork.

It sounds an extraordinary idea

that you have religious men,
spiritual figures,

going to war with each other.

I mean, it doesn't fit the notion we have
of this island of saints and scholars.

It doesn't fit the notion,
but it is the reality.

The Abbot of Armagh
or the Bishop of Clonmacnoise

had a social status
equal to that of a king.

But a new power was
to loom out of the northern seas.

In 795, monks on an island near Dublin
saw a fleet of ships approaching.

The long ships with a dragon's head carved
on the bow carried a force of warriors

who would plunder the treasures
accumulated by the monastery

over two centuries.

A monk wrote later
of the terror of Viking attack.

"There were a hundred hard-steeled
iron heads on one neck,

"and a hundred sharp, ready, never-rusting
brazen tongues in every head.

"And a hundred garrulous, loud,
unceasing voices from every tongue."

The age of the Vikings had arrived.

We're probably standing
about three metres under street level,

and this is where people would have been
walking in the Viking age.

I mean, there's no whitewashing
the incredible terror that they sowed.

From a fairly early stage,

once Vikings are raiding the Irish coast,

they're taking people captive
to sell them on as slaves.

So a good early example of that is in 821,

the Vikings raided Howth,
just north of Dublin,

and took a great prey of women.

So I think their fate was probably
the slave market.

It must have stricken absolute fear
into the hearts of people,

the idea of being captured
and then sold abroad.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are
some kind of snippets of Irish poetry

testifying to the fear that people had.

"Lord protect us from these foreigners
coming in and taking people away."

There's an early 11th-century tale
about an Irish poet

who's said to have been taken captive
by Vikings and, and even as a man,

he's been gang-raped by the Vikings
on the ship.

There's also a record in 940
of an Irish bishop taken captive

from Dalkey Island,
and he's so eager to escape

he tries to swim out from the island
and he drowns.

The Vikings offer us
the earliest example

of those figures who will dominate
the written and spoken stories of Ireland,

the foreign invaders.

But where did the raiders come from?

And what drove them to Irish shores?

The Vikings who would eventually
descend on Ireland

had their ancestral roots here in Norway.

From these fjords,
they created a maritime empire

that stretched from the shores of America
in the West

to central Russia in the East.

The Viking world of the 7th and 8th
centuries was in a state of flux.

Warrior clans fought for control
of the best land.

Land meant wealth and power.
But there was too little to go around.

In an early Norse poem, a mother says
to her son, "Get thee a ship

"and go out on the seas and kill men."

They're lines which reflect a society

where a man's worth was defined
by his skill with the sword.

What kind of society did
these Viking warlords inhabit?

Competition was actually the key element
in this society.

Who could travel the furthest,
who was the bravest in battle,

who could eat the most,
and who drank the most.

What is the principle dynamic

that's driving them
out of these fjords towards Ireland?

It was important for the local chieftains
to be able to give good gifts

to their followers, their friends,
or throw big parties.

And there was not a lot of wealth
in Norway.

So I think that one of the main reasons
they actually left for Ireland

was just to plunder some Irish monasteries
and churches and steal the goods.

The Irish, in popular memory,
tend to see the Vikings

as rapists, pillagers and killers.
Is that something you'd go along with?

Partly, yes.
But you have to look at the Vikings,

that they can actually change... shapes
over the night.

One day they're actually killers,
the next day they are actually traders.

And on the third day they are cattlemen.
On the fourth day they're settlers.

For over 40 years,

the Vikings raided Ireland's
coastal villages and monasteries,

carrying off plunder and slaves
in their longboats.

They struck suddenly
and caught the Irish unawares.

So the Vikings became bolder and began
to sail down the rivers of Ireland.

The raiders were to become settlers.

The east coast of Ireland was
strategically well placed

for trading with
an expanding Viking world.

In the winter of 842, a substantial Viking
fleet rounded the headland at Howth

and sailed up the River Liffey.

Here, at the "black pool" -
in Irish, Dubh Linn -

the Vikings hauled their longboats ashore.

And just a few yards away
from the banks of the River Liffey,

they began to construct
the first defensive stockade.

From these small beginnings,
Ireland's greatest city would emerge.

Over the next century,
Dublin would become a boom town,

with the largest slave market in Europe.

The Vikings had
a huge trading network, which spread

all the way down the Russian river systems
to the Middle East,

Constantinople,
all the way across the North Atlantic,

and Dublin was quite centrally placed
within these long-distance routes.

Ten bananas there, one euro.

What kind of things would people
have been buying in these markets?

Amber from the Baltic,
silk from Byzantium.

Gold, silver, looted goods
from Irish monasteries,

all would have been traded
through the port of Dublin.

It would have been a very noisy place,
bustling, crammed,

houses next to each other, narrow streets.
Lots of people milling around,

shopping, exchanging things, gossiping.
Kids, pigs, everything.

And you'd probably have seen
people from right across Europe in Dublin

at this point.

It would have been a really cosmopolitan
place, with traders from all over Europe.

And this is followed by a series
of royal intermarriages

and a lot of cultural interchange.

So, by the 10th century,
you've got a whole new culture emerging

which is a kind of hybrid
of Scandinavian and Irish,

and it's very distinctive.
You can see it in art styles

and the culture of these two peoples.

By the 11th century,
the Vikings who had settled in Ireland,

the Hiberno-Norse, had been here
for over a century and a half.

They'd intermarried, become Christian
and formed local alliances.

They'd founded thriving port cities,

like Waterford, Wexford,
Cork and Limerick.

They became enmeshed in Irish politics.

They would learn the lesson
of all conquerors here -

the longer you stay around,
the more likely you are

to become drawn into the quarrels
of your neighbours.

This was a country
where local Gaelic kings were fighting

for land and supremacy.

They did so as power was being centralised
across Europe.

Small kingdoms were eaten up
by the leaders of emerging dynasties.

In northern France, Rollo the Viking
had founded the Norman empire.

In England, power was consolidating
around the house of Wessex.

Such change could hardly have escaped
the attention of an ambitious Irish king.

This new leader was a man
with the ruthlessness and energy

to humble kingdoms.

He stormed the strongholds of his enemies,

and in four years was able to come here,
to the great Rock of Cashel,

and proclaim himself king of all Munster.

He demanded tributes from the defeated -
of wine and gold,

and the most precious commodity
of the age - cattle.

They called him
Brian of the Cattle Tributes.

In the Irish, Brian Boru.

Brian did not see himself
as a king among equals,

but as high king of all Ireland.

And with a mighty army,
he set about trying to control the island.

In the only
statement of his that we know about,

he describes himself as Imperator
Scottorum, Emperor of the Irish.

Imperator means a man who rules
over many different peoples,

and he saw himself as ruling equally
over the Irish and the Vikings.

He subjected Limerick to himself
and made Limerick a dynastic capital.

He subjected Cork and Waterford
to himself.

Dublin was next on the list.

In Dublin City Hall, the legend of Brian
is commemorated on the dome.

In the telling of Ireland's story,
he would become

an icon of native resistance -
the first nationalist hero...

...his soldiers holy warriors
who defeated a Viking invasion.

But the truth is more complex.

In 1014, after defeating
the city of Waterford,

Brian moved to confront
the Gaelic kingdom of Leinster

and the Viking port of Dublin.

Irish and Viking united
in defence against Brian.

They recruited Viking mercenaries
from Britain.

It's thought Brian too
had Vikings in his army.

For both sides,
Dublin was the glittering prize.

The Battle of Clontarf is not a battle

between savage Vikings and the Irish.

It's not the saving of Holy Ireland
from the pagans.

It is a power struggle in which Brian Boru
was finally going to get Dublin,

because every king wanted
to control the trading cities.

On Good Friday 1014,
the opposing forces faced each other

at Clontarf, outside Dublin.

There were two Irish armies,
but both with their Viking allies.

Of these Vikings, it was said
they carried arrows,

anointed and browned
in the blood of dragons.

The monks who wrote this account
were highly partisan.

After all, they'd been commissioned
by a descendant of Brian Boru.

Of his men, they said
they had beautiful white hands.

Hands that they would now use
to hack, hew and maim.

The battle lasted all day.

Late in the afternoon, the Dublin men
and their allies began to fall back

to the River Liffey
and into the advancing tide.

An account written years later records

that they "retreated to the sea
like a herd of cows,

"tormented by heat and insects.
They were pursued closely."

By nightfall,
bodies drifted on Dublin Bay,

and the field at Clontarf
was strewn with corpses.

Brian had won the battle, but he wouldn't
live to enjoy the fruits of victory.

A Danish Viking called Brodar came
hacking his way through the Irish lines

and found Brian's tent.

Entering inside, he saw the old king
on his knees at prayer,

and lifting his giant battleaxe,

he cleaved Brian's head
from his shoulders.

In this version of the story,

Brian becomes the first martyr
for faith and fatherland in Irish history.

Without Brian, his dynasty declined.

There would be no all-powerful
high king of Ireland.

Clontarf resolved nothing.

Indeed, so great was the fighting
after Brian's death

that one annalist described
how competing kings

had turned the country
into a trembling sod.

Ireland was now a ripe prize
for foreign adventurers,

and they would come here in the shape
of the greatest military force in Europe,

to launch on these shores
a fateful conquest.

Next week, we will see how
the rise of the Norman empire

changed the Story of Ireland.

Ripped By mstoll