Though there was a High King who, in theory, exercised a position as primus inter pares (first among equals) over the other petty kings his authority depended solely on the strength of his personality and the number of swords whose loyalty he could command. Ireland was a divided land, made up of warring clans and kingdoms, ruled by some 150 different petty kings. By contrast, the Vikings were often veteran warriors, who fought in close order, “a solid, skillful, and firm rampart of strong coats of mail like a thick, dark stronghold of black iron with a battle-wall of gleaming shields around their chiefs.” These Vikings were perhaps the first iron-clad, mailed warriors the Irish had ever encountered: the defending Gaelic warriors “had nothing to defend their bodies… save only elegant tunics, shields, and finely wrought collars” who fought as light infantry in loose-formation. As throughout western Europe, longships crammed with veteran warriors bent on rapine and plunder descended on the coastal settlements and raided deep into the countryside, bringing death and destruction to the unwary inhabitants. The Vikings first began raiding Ireland in the late 8th century. The battle that resulted changed the course of Irish history forever! At stake was the nascent unification of the island under its first true king, Brian Boru and the future influence of the Vikings, who had settled and meddled in Ireland for nearly two centuries. It is thought that they represent a single event – not agricultural ploughing, but the clearing and preparation of land for building.On Good Friday, Apjust north of Dublin a momentous and bloody battle was fought. The marks all run in the same direction and never overlap, suggesting that they were only made once. This was a wide spread of plough marks, covering almost the entire excavated area. Like Waterford, it began not as a town but as a seasonal raiding camp or longphort, and traces of this initial incarnation are thought to have emerged during Georgina Scally and Linzi Simpson’s later work on Essex Street and Parliament Street, where they uncovered the earliest-dated archaeology. The photo was taken by Thaddeus Breen from the roof of Christ Church Cathedral.Ĭentury, was ruled by the same dynasty), but its origins were on a rather humbler scale. The site would quickly blossom into a wealthy commercial centre, part of a powerful political axis with York (which, until the mid-10th above The finds so captured the popular imagination that, in 1978, a 20,000-strong march campaigned to ‘Save Wood Quay’. Ploughshares to swords Dublin’s Viking Age is traditionally defined as stretching from the settlement’s foundation in c.AD 840 until the Norman Conquest of Ireland in 1170 – though with a culturally mixed material record from the 10th century onwards, perhaps indicating a mixed population, the period is more accurately characterised as ‘Hiberno-Scandinavian’ rather than ‘Norse’. The window that it opens on early medieval Dublin is set to transform our understanding of Viking Age towns. The project’s specialist reports have now been transformed by Wallace into a major new publication, telling the full story of the site and its gamechanging finds. Its revelations about urban life in Viking Age Britain and Ireland. Fishamble Street, an area that yielded impressively well-preserved Viking houses, lies in the background to the left. Thanks to these excavations, which ran for seven years, we now know more about 10th- and 11th-century Dublin than any contemporary town north of the Alps, and only York (CA 58) and Waterford (in south-east Ireland – see CA 304) rival left Overlooking the Wood Quay excavations in the heart of Dublin. What it did achieve, though, was buying Wallace and his team vital extra time to carry out a much fuller excavation of the site than would have been possible under the originally agreed timeframe. All in a protest march some 20,000 strong in 1978 and, the following year, a three-week sit-in on the site under the banner ‘Operation Sitric’ (see ‘Further information’ on p.25), named after an 11th-century king of Dublin.ĭespite legal challenges and the vociferous demonstrations, the campaign was ultimately unsuccessful in stopping the work.
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