The Flight of the Earls and the beginning of the Ulster plantations in the first decade of the seventeenth century symbolised the slow approach of a new, putatively Protestant order in Ireland. Keating’s book, which is a claim for the essentially authentic character of a Catholic Irish nation going back to the fifth century and with links to a semi-imaginary but very noble pagan prehistory, was, by the standards of the time and place, unusually self-assertive. The complete breakdown of the Catholic and Jacobite cause lay two generations in the future, after Aughrim’s Great Disaster of 1691.
FFE begins with a long and polemical introduction (díonbhrollach) which denounces various English, Welsh and Anglo-Irish (Palesman) historical writers who, in Keating’s view, betrayed their noble academic calling by libelling the Irish, an ancient and noble people who had been the founders of a great and early civilisation on the island of Ireland, later extended to North Britain in the form of the Kingdom of Scotland or, in Irish, Alba (‘Albion’, or the Gaels’ share of Great Britain, Albion being the White Island as seen from France). The argument was that the Irish were learned and that their monks had reintroduced learning and writing into western Europe, including Britain, after the barbarisation of the continent in the aftermath of the fall of the Western Empire in the fifth century. Not only were the ancient Irish very learned, they were also brave, and they had at one stage allegedly invaded Britain under a King Dáithí and got as far as the Alps before going home in triumph, their king having unfortunately got himself killed. Almost certainly, this is a mediaeval fable. The first paragraph of the book sets out his purpose clearly:
Whosoever proposes to trace and follow up the ancient history and origin of any country ought to determine on setting down plainly the method which reveals most clearly the truth of the state of the country, and the condition of the people who inhabit it: and forasmuch as I have undertaken to investigate the groundwork of Irish historical knowledge, I have thought at the outset of deploring some part of her affliction and of her unequal contest; especially the unfairness which continues to be practised on her inhabitants, alike the old foreigners who are in possession more than four hundred years from the Norman invasion down, as well as the native Irish who have had possession during almost three thousand years. For there is no historian of all those who have written on Ireland from that epoch that has not continuously sought to cast reproach and blame both on the old foreign settlers and on the native Irish.6
These allegedly malicious and uninformed writers are accused by Keating of not acknowledging the favourable characteristics of Irish people: their evident bravery, their religious piety, their generosity to the church, their ancient respect for learning and, unlike some of their twentieth-century descendants, their humane treatment of orphans. The writers are accused of ignoring the extraordinary hospitality of the Irish shown to foreigners in their midst and of paying no attention to the literary assemblies of the Irish, institutions unique in Europe. They concentrate on the poor and marginalised among the Irish, thus dismissing the great and the good among the gentry of Ireland; unlike other nations, the Irish are to be characterised by these mainly English or Welsh writers by the features of the deprived and depraved rather than by the virtues of the noble and high-born among them. Keating again demonstrates to his own satisfaction the valour of the Irish by pointing to the great wall the Romans felt forced to build against the allied tribes of the Irish and their Gaelic-speaking colonists in North Britain, the Scots, who were in turn allied with the non-Gaelic Picts. Strabo, an ancient writer, imagined that the Irish were cannibals, but there is only one instance of cannibalism mentioned in the Irish annals, and this was seen as so abnormal as to get special mention.7 Camden claimed there were no bees in Ireland, a ridiculous proposition remarks Keating, easily refuted by casual observation. Here there may be some echo through mistranslation of the well-known fact that there were, and still are, no snakes in the island. St Patrick is traditionally supposed to have banished snakes from Ireland. Giraldus Cambrensis has a celebrated book chapter, one sentence long, which is entitled ‘Snakes in Ireland’. The sentence announces that there are no snakes in Ireland.
Cambrensis, who wrote a celebrated and comically hostile anatomy of Ireland, comes in for special mention by Keating. ‘Gerald of Wales’ alleged that Ireland paid tribute to King Arthur of Caerleon, an absurd story, refuted by Cambrensis himself later in his own work, when he observes that ‘From the first, Ireland has remained free from the invasion of any foreign nation.’ Even the Romans decided not to meddle with the Irish, and Ireland was a refuge for many who wished to flee from tyrannical Roman rule. This seems to be a remote echo of Agricola’s characterisation (in Tacitus’ Agricola) of a first-century independent Ireland living in a notorious freedom and being a provocation to rebellious elements among the British tribes in the time of the Western Empire. Keating twits Spenser’s fraudulent attempts to interpret surnames which are evidently Gaelic or gaelicised Viking as being in reality derived from ordinary English surnames. Here he is attacking a common English and Scottish tendency to describe the Irish as degenerate English and Scots, rather than constituting an historically distinct cultural entity. He rebukes Palesman historian Richard Stanihurst for his apparent hatred of his own countrymen, presumably an emotion often fuelled in invaders by mingled subconscious guilt and fear of vengeance being wreaked on the English lands in the Pale of Dublin by a revived and vengeful Gaelic Ireland. That alternative Ireland was seen as roosting in the hills of Wicklow and looking down hungrily on the fair pastures of Dublin.
From the worthlessness of the testimony Stanihurst gives concerning the Irish, I consider he should be rejected as a witness, because it was purposely at the instigation of a party who were hostile to the Irish that he wrote contemptuously of them; and, I think, that hatred of the Irish must be the first dug he drew after his first going into England to study, and that it lay as a weight on his stomach till, having returned to Ireland, he ejected it by his writing. I deem it no small token of the aversion he had for the Irish, that he finds fault with the colonists of the English province [in Ireland] for that they did not banish the Gaelic [language] from the country at the time when they routed the people who were dwelling in the land before them. He also says, however excellent the Gaelic language may be, that whoever smacks thereof, would likewise savour of the ill manners of the folk whose language it is. What is to be understood from this, but that Stanihurst had so great a hatred for the Irish, that he deemed it an evil that it was a Christian-like conquest the Gaill had achieved over Ireland and the Gael, and not a pagan conquest.8
Here can be seen a major theme of FFE. The Norman incursion into Ireland in 1169 and afterwards is seen as a benign event, one which laid the foundation for a joint Hiberno-English nation in Ireland, united in loyalty to the Catholic faith and acceptant of the union with England under the (Catholic) crown of England, seen as the legitimate successor to the High-Kings of Ireland. There seems to be a tacit paralleling of the 1169 event with the legendary Milesian incursion of a millennium earlier, seen as equally benign. This Christian conquest by the Normans is unconvincingly described as peaceful and involving settling mainly on unoccupied land. It is explicitly contrasted with ‘pagan’ invasions by the English which happened later, after the death of King John in 1215 and which did indeed involve the illegitimate stealing of the lands and properties of the Gaelic nobility and gentry by incomers. It also involved criminal assault on the sacred lands of the Church by these hypocritical marauders, pretending to be civilising the Irish and bringing them back into the fold of a true and civil Christianity:
The Irish were at length enraged by these unsupportable [thirteenth century] oppressions, for when they observed that the English, instead of propagating the religion of Christ, and reforming the rugged manners of the people, had nothing in view but plunder and booty, and that churches and monasteries were not exempt from their covetous and sacrilegious attempts, they formed a design to free themselves from such merciless auxiliaries, and to drive them out of the island. For this purpose the principle of the Irish nobility applied themselves to O’Connor Maoinmuighe, king of Conacht, and offered to raise him to the sovereignty of the island, if he would but assist to expel
