Clontarf

A kingship won late is rarely a kingship kept long. The man who unifies a fractured country by force outlives, if he is fortunate, the work of unification; he seldom outlives the day on which it is tested. The hinge of such a life is not the crowning, nor the last battle, but the hour in which the king, having done what cannot be undone, sits still while younger men finish the matter for him. Ireland in the spring of 1014 turned upon such an hour, and upon an old man at prayer in a tent above the strand.

THE LONG ROAD TO THE HILL

Brian Bóramha was seventy-three. He had been king of Munster since 976, when his brother Mathgamain was killed by treachery and the kingship of the Dál Cais fell on him in a week. He had been ard rí, high king of Ireland, since 1002. The cattle-tribute his line had taken from the lands north of the Shannon had given him his by-name, Boru, and the by-name had outgrown the cattle. He had broken the Eóganacht in Munster, brought Connacht and Meath under tribute, and walked into Armagh in 1005 to lay twenty ounces of gold on the altar of Patrick and to have his secretary write him into the Book of Armagh as imperator Scotorum, emperor of the Irish. The phrase was Maeilsuthain Ua Cerbhaill's; the gold was Brian's. No man before him had held the whole island under one hand.

Leinster did not forgive him. Máel Mórda of Leinster and Sigtrygg Silkbeard of Norse Dublin rose against him in the winter of 1013 and sent across the sea for help. The ships came in: Sigurd Hlöðvisson from Orkney with his raven-banner, Bróðir from the Isle of Man, men from the Hebrides, men from Manx. Brian called up Munster and the men of Connacht and Meath, and marched north along the line of the Liffey in Holy Week. On the morning of Good Friday, the twenty-third of April, the two armies stood on the strand at Clontarf, between the mouth of the Tolka and the woods at the north edge of the camp, with the tide out and the sun coming up over the bay.

THE TENT ABOVE THE STRAND

The tent is on a low hill above the strand. The high king of Ireland is in it, alone but for his confessor Maeilsuthain Ua Cerbhaill and a single household man at the door. He is on a stool, in a russet mantle, with a psalter open on his knees. He is reading the fifty-first psalm: Miserere mei, Domine, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam. He has said it in Latin, half under his breath, every Good Friday morning for fifty years. He cannot bear arms today. The custom of the day forbids it, and he has not broken the custom in any year of his life, and he is not breaking it in this one. The battle has been on since first light. It is now mid-morning. Maeilsuthain has been to the tent door and back twice, and each time has said the same thing: the line is holding, Murchadh is in the centre, the Norse have not broken.

THE FIFTY-FIRST PSALM

Murchadh is on the centre. His son. Fifty-one years old. He has not let a centre give in twenty-five years and he will not let one give today. Tairdelbach is at the river-mouth. His grandson. Sixteen, in his first field. The tide is coming in; the river will rise on the tide. A man on the strand can be standing on dry sand at the third hour and to his waist in salt water at the sixth. The boy has been told. The boy has not been told everything that cannot be told. There is no one on the strand who has not been on a strand before except the boy. The thing the king has not yet said, even to Maeilsuthain, even to the psalter open on his knee, is that he should be down there; and the thing he has said instead, fifty Good Fridays running, is the verse he is reading now. Cor mundum crea in me, Deus. Create in me a clean heart, O God. He goes back to it. He says it under his breath. He does not look up at the household man at the door. Outside the tent the noise of the strand is the noise of the strand: the long sound, like surf, of men in line work, and under it the shorter sound, like a stone dropped on wood, of axes finding shields. The confessor has said the line is holding. The line is holding. He turns the page.

THE AXE AT THE DOOR

A small party of Norse comes up the hill from the strand. They are the rear of a rout. They have been fleeing south-west from the broken Norse line, heading for the woods. They are six men. They are led by a tall Norwegian in a leather hauberk with a battle-axe and a long sword. He is Bróðir of the Isle of Man. He has crossed the line of the king's tent because the rout was not going that way and there was no one on the hill. He sees the gold of the king's torc through the tent flap. He sees the russet mantle, the psalter, the silver hair of an old man at prayer. The household man at the door dies first. Brian Boru lays the psalter aside. The Annals of Innisfallen record that the king had time to lay one stroke of his sword on Bróðir's leg before Bróðir's axe took him in the head. Bróðir was killed within the hour by a household man of Tairdelbach who came up from the strand looking for the king.

THE STRAND AT EVENING

The Norse line broke in the late afternoon. Sigurd of Orkney was killed in the rearguard's stand around his raven-banner; the banner was said by his own men to bring victory to the army that bore it and death to the man who carried it, and on Good Friday at Clontarf both halves of the saying came true. Sigtrygg Silkbeard watched the rout from the walls of Dublin and did not come out. Murchadh fell late in the day on the centre, killed by Anrad the Norseman in the same blow that killed Anrad himself. Tairdelbach, sixteen years old, was found drowned at the river-mouth, swept off the strand by the rising tide, his hand caught in the hair of the Norseman he had pulled down with him into the water. Three generations of one house lay on the field by the time the sun went down behind the woods.

THE TWELVE DAYS TO ARMAGH

The bodies of the high king and his son were lifted from the field and carried in solemn procession from Clontarf to Armagh: twelve days, with the abbots and clergy of every church on the road coming out to meet them. They were buried side by side in a stone tomb on the north side of the cathedral. The Annals of Ulster wrote of Brian that year, in the entry the monks of Armagh kept, that he was ard rí Gaedhel Erenn, 7 Gall, 7 Bretan, August iartair tuaiscirt Eorpa uile, high king of the Irish of Ireland, and of the foreigners, and of the Britons, the Augustus of all the north-west of Europe. The phrase was generous; the kingship it described did not survive him by twelve hours. The country fragmented again into its provincial kingdoms within a generation. Clontarf has long been read as the day that broke Norse political power in Ireland, and the reading is too tidy: the Hiberno-Norse towns kept their trade and their walls and their place in Irish life for another century and a half, until the Anglo-Normans came in 1169 and changed the question. What Clontarf did break was simpler. It broke the idea that the high kingship could be held by force from one house.

THE NAME THAT CARRIED

The house itself did not break. The dynasty Brian founded, the Uí Briain, the descendants of Brian, took its surname from him and ruled Thomond, the north of Munster, for the next six hundred years from the rock at Cashel and the castle at Bunratty and the keep at Carrigogunnell. Donough his son carried his father's crown to Rome and laid it on the altar of St Peter. Murtagh his great-grandson was king of Munster and high king with opposition. Conor na Siudaine was killed at Suidaine in 1268 and his line went on. Murrough the Tanist made his peace with the English crown in 1543 and was created Earl of Thomond, and the earldom held through the wars of the next century. There are more O'Briens in Munster today than there are members of any other Irish dynasty descended from a single named ancestor in any province of Ireland. The kingship Brian won by force did not outlive the day. The name did. A king is measured, in the end, not by the years he held a crown but by the centuries in which his name is still spoken on the strand where he died: the long low hill above Clontarf, the tent gone, the psalter gone, and the sound of the tide still coming in over the place where the boy was found.