̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Ireland

A treasure trove of unseen writing by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney reveals a vital creative friendship

ta385 — Sat, 14 Nov 2020 06:00:00 +0000

A unique archive acquired by Pembroke College Cambridge transforms our understanding of the two poets, showing how they drew career-defining inspiration from a little known friendship circle, and a shared passion for Ireland, water and fishing, spanning five decades.

Lost Irish words rediscovered, including the word for ‘oozes pus'

ta385 — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 07:00:00 +0000

If you were choosing where to live in medieval Ireland you might insist on somewhere ogach which meant ‘eggy’ or ‘abounding in eggs’, but in reference to a particularly fertile region. By contrast, you would never want to hear your cook complaining brachaid, ‘it oozes pus’. And if you were too boisterous at the dining table, you might be accused of briscugad (making something easily broken).

All three words have been brought back to life thanks to a painstaking five-year research project involving a collaboration between Queen’s ̽��ֱ�� Belfast and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��team has scoured medieval manuscripts and published texts for words which have either been overlooked by earlier dictionary-makers or which have been erroneously defined.

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Professor of Celtic and Medieval Studies at Cambridge says: “ ̽��ֱ��Dictionary offers a window onto a fascinating and important past world. ̽��ֱ��project extends our understanding of the vocabulary of the time but also offers unique insights into the people who used these words. They reveal extraordinary details about everyday lives, activities, beliefs and relationships, as well as contact with speakers of other languages.”

̽��ֱ��revised dictionary spans the development of the Irish language over a thousand years from the sixth century to the sixteenth, from the time just after the arrival of St Patrick all the way down to the era of Elizabeth I. ̽��ֱ��team has amended definitions, presented evidence to show that some words were in use much earlier than previously thought, and even deleted a few fake words. One of these is tapairis which had been taken to be some kind of medicinal substance but in effect is not a word at all, since it arose from an incorrect division of two other words literally meaning ‘grains of paradise’, the term for Guinea grains.

Lost words

̽��ֱ��rediscovered lost words include a term for ‘becomes ignorant' – ainfisigid, based on the word for knowledge: fis. Other words have been shown to have been attested hundreds of years earlier than was previously thought, such as foclóracht meaning vocabulary. Yet, other examples emphasise that the medieval world continues to resonate. One of these is rímaire, which is used as the modern Irish word for computer (in its later form ríomhaire).

Professor Ní Mhaonaigh explains: “In the medieval period, rímaire referred not to a machine but to a person engaged in the medieval science of computistics who performed various kinds of calculations concerning time and date, most importantly the date of Easter. So it’s a word with a long pedigree whose meaning was adapted and applied to a modern invention.”

̽��ֱ��historical dictionary on which the electronic one is based was originally published by the Royal Irish Academy in 23 volumes between 1913 and 1976. “Advances in scholarship since the publication of the first volume had rendered parts of the dictionary obsolete or out of date,” says Greg Toner, leader of the project and Professor of Irish at Queen’s ̽��ֱ�� Belfast. “Our work has enabled us to resolve many puzzles and errors and to uncover hundreds of previously unknown words.”

̽��ֱ��online Dictionary serves up a feast of information on subjects as diverse as food, festivals, medicine, superstition, law and wildlife. One of the newly added phrases is galar na rig, literally the king's disease, a term for scrofula which is known in English as king's evil.

Outlaws and turkeys

̽��ֱ��project sheds new light on Ireland’s interactions with foreign languages, cultures and goods in the medieval period. ̽��ֱ��Dictionary points out that útluighe, meaning an outlaw, ultimately goes back to the Old Norse word útlagi, though the term was perhaps borrowed into Irish through English or Anglo-Norman. Its use appears to have been limited – the researchers have only found it once, in a thirteenth-century poem by Giolla Brighde Mac Con Midhe.

Another loanword in Modern Irish is turcaí (turkey) but before this was borrowed from English, this bird was known as cearc fhrancach (turkey hen) or coilech francach (turkey cock). Strictly speaking, the adjective Francach means 'French' or 'of French origin'. This usage to denote a bird native to the Americas may seem odd but in other languages, it is associated with various countries including France, for reasons which remain unclear.

Spreading the word

Professor Toner says: “A key aim of our work has been to open the Dictionary up, not only to students of the language but to researchers working in other areas such as history and archaeology, as well as to those with a general interest in medieval life.”

In a related project, the researchers have been developing educational resources for schools in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

̽��ֱ��Dictionary launched on 30 August 2019 at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. A History of Ireland in 100 Words, drawing on 100 of the Dictionary's words and tracing how they illuminate historical changes will be published in October 2019 by the Royal Irish Academy.

For more on the newly discovered words, see a piece by Dr Sharon Arbuthnot, a researcher on the project, in the Brainstorm series on National Irish Television (RTÉ).

Researchers from Cambridge and Queen’s ̽��ֱ�� Belfast have identified and defined 500 Irish words, many of which had been lost, and unlocked the secrets of many other misunderstood terms. Their findings can now be freely accessed in the revised version of the online dictionary of Medieval Irish (www.dil.ie).

̽��ֱ��Dictionary offers a window onto a fascinating and important past world

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh

National Library of Ireland, Manuscript G11 403a10. Image, Irish Scripts on Screen

National Library of Ireland, Manuscript G11 403a10

Funding

Work on the Dictionary has been supported by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. ̽��ֱ��related project developing schools’ resources is funded by a grant from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, School of Arts and Humanities Impact Fund.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution

Ireland’s Troy?

tdk25 — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 07:41:57 +0000

̽��ֱ��standard account of the Battle of Clontarf – a defining moment in Irish history which happened 1,000 years ago this week – was partly a “pseudo-history” borrowed from the tale of Troy, new research suggests.

̽��ֱ��findings, which are to be published in a forthcoming book about the intellectual culture of medieval Ireland, coincide with extensive celebrations in Dublin marking the millennium of Clontarf, which was fought on Good Friday, April 23, 1014.

In popular history, the battle has been characterised as an epic and violent clash between the army of the Christian Irish High King, Brian Boru, and a combined force led by the rebel king of the territory of Leinster, Máel Mórda, and Sitric, leader of the Dublin-based Vikings. ̽��ֱ��disputed outcome saw the Vikings beaten off, but at huge cost. Brian himself was killed, and became an iconic figure and Irish martyr.

According to the new study, however, much of what we know about Clontarf may be rooted not in historical fact, but a brilliant work of historical literature which modelled sections of its text on an earlier account of the siege of Troy.

Rather than a trustworthy description of the battle itself, this account – Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaibh (“ ̽��ֱ��War Of ̽��ֱ��Irish Against ̽��ֱ��Foreigners”) – was really a rhetorical masterpiece designed to place Ireland’s legendary past in the context of a grand, classical tradition, stretching back to the works of Homer and classical philosophy.

̽��ֱ��study argues that this in itself should be seen as evidence that the cultural achievements of Brian Boru’s successors in medieval Ireland were complex, highly sophisticated, and the equal of anywhere else in Europe.

It also means, however, that despite the widespread portrayal of Clontarf as a heroic, quasi-national conflict in which the lives of Brian and others were sacrificed in the Irish cause, the historical truth is unknown. While the advent of the battle itself and its significance is beyond question, the details of what happened are likely to remain a mystery.

̽��ֱ��research was carried out by Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, a Reader in medieval literature and history at St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. It will appear in a new book called Classical Literature and Learning in Medieval Irish Narrative, published in Boydell and Brewer’s ‘Studies in Celtic History’ series and edited by Ralph O’Connor.

“ ̽��ֱ��casting of Clontarf as a national struggle in which the aged, holy Brian was martyred still defines what most people know about the battle, and it has probably endured because that was what numerous generations of Irish men and women wanted to read,” Dr Ní Mhaonaigh said.

“Academics have long accepted that Cogadh couldn’t be taken as reliable evidence but that hasn’t stopped some of them from continuing to draw on it to portray the encounter. What this research shows is that its account of the battle was crafted, at least in part, to create a version of events that was the equivalent of Troy. This was more than a literary flourish, it was a work of a superb, sophisticated and learned author.”

Another reason that the story may have endured is a lack of physical evidence for the battle. No archaeological remains have been found, and the precise location, presumed to be somewhere around the modern Dublin suburb of Clontarf, is disputed.

Compared with the very basic information in contemporary chronicles, Cogadh provides by far the most comprehensive account of what happened. It was, however, written about a century later, probably at the behest of Brian’s great-grandson. Historians have rightly treated it as partial, but also as the written version of oral accounts that had been passed on from those who witnessed the battle itself.

̽��ֱ��new research suggests that this pivotal source was even more of a cultivated fabrication than previously thought. Through a close study of the text, Dr Ní Mhaonaigh found that the imagery, terminology and ideas draw inspiration from a range of earlier sources – in particular Togail Troí ( ̽��ֱ��Destruction of Troy), an eleventh-century translation of a fifth-century account of the battle for Troy.

In particular, the unknown author explicitly cast Brian’s son, who it is believed led a large part of his father’s army at Clontarf, as an Irish Hector, whom he describes as “the last man who had true valour in Ireland”. Tellingly, Togail Troí is also found in the same manuscript as Cogadh – suggesting that the author had this to hand when describing the battle.

Rather than pouring cold water on the millennial celebrations by showing the main account of Clontarf to have been an elaborate piece of story-telling, however, the study points out that the work bears witness to the cultural achievements of Brian’s successors.

̽��ֱ��parallel between Murchad and Hector in particular was in fact part of a complex and deeply scholarly analogy which drew on the recurring classical motif of the “Six Ages of the World” and “Six Ages of Man”. It shows that whoever wrote it was not simply describing a battle, but crafting a brilliant work of art.

“Whoever wrote this was operating as part of larger, learned European tradition,” Dr Ní Mhaonaigh added. “People should not see the fact that it is a fabricated narrative as somehow a slur against Brian, because what it really shows is that his descendants were operating at a cultural level of the highest complexity and order.”

For further information about this story, please contact: Tom Kirk, tdk25@cam.ac.uk

As Ireland marks the millennium of the Battle of Clontarf – portrayed as a heroic encounter between Irish and Vikings which defined the nation’s identity - new research argues that our main source for what happened may be more literary history than historical fact.

This was more than a literary flourish, it was a work of a superb, sophisticated and learned author

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh

Isaacs Art Centre, via Wikimedia Commons

An 1826 painting of the Battle of Clontarf by the Irish artist, Hugh Frazer

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution

Whose fault is famine? What the world failed to learn from 1840s Ireland

ns480 — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:24:58 +0000

In the Horn of Africa a humanitarian disaster is fast unfolding with the spectre of famine looming. ̽��ֱ��worst drought for 60 years means that crops have failed and livestock has perished, leaving impoverished communities increasingly vulnerable to malnutrition and hunger-related diseases. Poverty, climate change and rising grain prices are combining to tip an already vulnerable population into a state of crisis.

An estimated 10 million people are affected across a vast swathe of Africa taking in areas of Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. Huge numbers of people are on the move, leaving their homes and walking hundreds of miles to seek food in camps and feeding stations. Harrowing media reports describe mothers having to choose between seeking medical treatment for their weakest child and nourishment for the others. They live in a situation in which their everyday decisions have the most extraordinary consequences.

Fewer than 170 years ago, a similarly terrible famine occurred within the British Isles, then the most economically advanced region in the world. In Ireland, at that time part of the UK as a result of the Act of Union in 1801, 1 million people perished in what became known as An Gorta Mór or ̽��ֱ��Great Hunger. There was not one food crisis but several as the potato crop failed in 1845, 1846, 1848 and 1849. ̽��ֱ��rural Irish poor, many of whom were subsistence farmers renting small plots of ground, were reliant on the potato for their staple diet.

When a mysterious blight, now known as Phytophthora infestans, destroyed the potato harvest huge numbers faced starvation. Millions of people fled the country with the population of Ireland dwindling from around 9 million in 1845 to 6.1 million in 1851. ̽��ֱ��tide of emigration continued to swell long after the harvest failures: in 1866 Ireland’s population was roughly equivalent to its 1801 figure of 5.5 million. In comparative terms, the Great Irish Famine was one of the worst demographic tragedies of the 19th century and possibly the worst famine in recorded history when judged in terms of the mortality rate.

In Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine, Dr Nally examines the complexities and nuances of the political, economic and social context of the Irish Famine - and in doing so throws up some disturbing parallels between what happened in the 1840s and what is happening in Africa today. In particular, the book looks at 19^th-century sources to shine a light on the dialogue, sometimes taking the form of heated exchanges, that went on between economists, politicians and public officials.

By studying archives of contemporary material, Nally analyses the fundamental human perceptions that shaped political decision-making and had a direct bearing on the lives of millions of poor farmers. Many of these discourses are as topical and controversial today as they were almost two centuries ago, centring on the ethics of free markets and non-intervention versus intervention in the form of government aid.

Nally’s book borrows its title from a pamphlet written by the maverick English MP, George Poulett Scrope (1797-1876). In a scathing critique of British policies in Ireland, Poulett Scrope claimed that the Irish were being treated as mere “human encumbrances”, biological impediments to the long march of progress and agricultural development that characterised European modernity. This description neatly sums up the perception of the Irish smallholders as expendable, and their way of life as backward, immoral and in urgent need of reform. Poverty was associated with idleness, lack of intelligence, and improvidence.

Contemporary reports established distinctions at every level, between ruler and ruled, the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving,’ the indolent and the industrious. Even the very diets that the people relied on were viewed in moral terms: the feckless and slothful Irish were potato-fed, whereas the thrifty and hard-working English were wheat-fed.

“In terms of perceptions,” comments Nally, “not much has changed since the 19th century. Dominant economic institutions like the World Bank still consider poverty in the Global South in much the same way as the Victorians judged the Irish: the natives are fundamentally incapable of autonomous development and, in certain situations, corrective measures will be needed to stimulate social reform and promote agricultural development.

This tendency to ‘blame the victim’, as it has been described, allows rulers and élites to ignore the deeper injustices that expose populations to calamities – making disasters like famine more likely to occur in the first place – and to leave untouched the political and economic arrangements from which they clearly benefit. You could say that we are blinded by an ideology of poverty that the Victorians bequeathed to us.”

A key phrase in Nally's book is “structural violence”: a term used to describe how certain institutional arrangements can render entire communities vulnerable to famine and at the same time impede alternative reforms that nurture local resiliencies. For Nally, the current emphasis on increasing food production through market integration and technological fixes, ignores the well-established fact that there is enough food to feed the world's present population - in fact recent estimates suggest that there is 20 per cent more food than the world needs. ̽��ֱ��relationship between food supply and starvation has long been a contentious issue and the Irish Famine is no exception. Contemporary accounts describe ships carrying relief from England passing ships sailing out of Ireland with cargos of wheat and beef to be sold for prices out of reach to the starving population.

“In the analogous way,” Nally suggests, “Africa, a land synonymous with disease and starvation, is a major supplier of raw materials including diamonds, gold, oil, timber, food and biofuels that underpin the affluence of Western societies. ̽��ֱ��current focus on food availability and supply effectively masks how resources are unevenly distributed and consumed.”

As Nally’s research shows, famines not only destroy lives but very often whole ways of life. ̽��ֱ��culture and language of the Irish people were ‘silent’ victims of the Famine. In 1800 half of the population conversed in Irish; at the turn of the 20^th century that figure had been reduced to a mere 14 per cent. Evidence collected in the Irish Folk Archive alludes to the disruption of rural social relations, and in particular, an ethic of care that was thought to characterise pre-Famine modes of living.

In the wake of the Great Hunger, the Irishman Hugh Dorian described his native Donegal as a place “where friendship was forgotten and men lived as if they dreaded one another”. Such descriptions stand in contrast to accounts of middle class farmers (and some English and Scottish settlers) who gained land and power as a result of the dispossession of smallholders.

“Famines leave behind a tense landscape of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. We ought to be honest about the fact,” continues Nally, “that life and death decisions are woven into the texture of economic relations. Hunger persists because its presence serves an important function in the global economy: scarcity and abundance, privilege and suffering, are in fact mutually constituted.

"To tackle global hunger we must therefore address the legal and institutional structures that directly restrict certain people’s ability to subsist. ̽��ֱ��reason that this is not done is because these same structures guarantee the high standard of living that many of us have become accustomed to.”

As several observers of Irish events recognised, hunger is not a natural disaster: it is a human-induced problem that demands political solutions. According to Nally, effective solutions will require joined-up thinking.

“At present, the problem of ‘food insecurity’ – to adopt the modern, sanitised term for widespread starvation – is generally conceptualised as a scientific and technical matter: geneticists and plant scientists will engineer harvests that produce more efficient, more abundant crops that are more tolerant of climatic stress, more resistant to attacks by pathogens, and so on. This, we are told, will be the basis for ending global hunger. While the physical sciences do have an important role to play, it is wishful thinking to believe that hunger can be avoided by simply ‘turbocharging’ nature – that we can, if you like, engineer our way out of scarcity,” he argues.

̽��ֱ��food activist and writer Frances Moore Lappé maintains that the real scarcity we face is one of democracy, not food. Nally insists that there is an important truth to that statement, which is routinely ignored.

“One is reminded of the French writer Guy de Maupassant who apparently used to take his daily lunch at the Eiffel Tower because it was the only place in Paris where he did not have to look at the imposing structure. We are behaving a bit like Maupassant: we can continue to enjoy ‘lunch as normal’ as long as we maintain the fiction that hides us from the ugly truth that is otherwise staring us in the face.”

A new book by a Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� academic revisits one of the worst famines in recorded history. ̽��ֱ��Irish Famine of the 1840s had terrible consequences: 1 million people died and several million left Ireland. Today the world is watching as millions in Africa face a similar fate: starvation in the midst of plenty. Dr David Nally’s analysis of what happened in his native Ireland less than two centuries ago reveals some shocking parallels with what is happening in Africa.

Dr David Nally

Illustrated London News, December 16, 1848.

Irish tenants are evicted and their homes torn down under the supervision of troops

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Mapping the origins of a masterpiece

sjr81 — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:01:24 +0000

John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine is one of the world’s great cartographic treasures. Published in 1611/12, it marked the first time that comprehensive plans of English and Welsh counties and towns were made available in print.

To celebrate its 400^th anniversary, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library has digitised each of the proof maps and put them online at www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/maps/speed.html. ̽��ֱ��Library is also selling copies of the 60 plus images that make up Speed’s masterpiece.

Inset into the corner of each county map is a plan of its county town and each spare inch of space is used to illustrate famous battles, local coats of arms, as well as Roman and pre-historic sites.

̽��ֱ��atlas, bought by the ̽��ֱ�� Library in 1968, is now considered priceless. It contains a single sheet for each county of England and Wales, plus a map of Scotland and each of the four Irish provinces, and paints a rich picture of the countryside at the turn of the 17^th century.

A slice of Tudor and Jacobean life in miniature, its influence was so great that it was used by armies on both sides of the English Civil War.

Rivers wriggle through the landscape, towns are shown as huddles of miniature buildings, woods and parks marked by tiny trees and – with contour lines yet to be invented – small scatterings of molehills denote higher ground.

̽��ֱ��countryside bursts with human life: a ploughman and his two-horse team are at work in fields outside Worcester, a group of bathers enjoy the Roman spa at Bath, ducks paddle in the River Ouse at York, and the seas around Britain teem with fabulous sea monsters and ships in full sail.

Anne Taylor, Head of the Map Department at the ̽��ֱ�� Library, said: “Although the Library holds several copies of the published atlas – including a first edition – it is the hand-coloured set of proofs produced between 1603 and 1611 that is one of its greatest treasures.”

“It was bought by the ̽��ֱ�� Library in 1968 after the government refused an export licence for the proofs to be sold abroad. We know it as the Gardner copy after its previous owner (Eric Gardner). It really is a rare and delightful item.”

̽��ֱ��Cambridgeshire sheet includes portraits of robed academics, a pair of them holding the map’s scale bar as well as 24 coats of arms of the ̽��ֱ��, colleges and local nobility.

Accompanying each map in the published edition (but not the proofs) is a description of the county. Derived largely from William Camden’s Britannia, a topographical and historical survey of Great Britain and Ireland, the text offers an affectionate portrait of the city and its university, but a rather less appealing description of the Cambridgeshire countryside.

“This province is not large, nor the air greatly to be liked, having the Fenns so spread upon her North, that they infect the air far into the rest. ̽��ֱ��soil doth differ both in air and commodities; the Fenny surcharged with waters: the South is Champion, and yieldeth Corn in abundance, with Meadow-pastures upon both sides of the River Came,” he notes.

Born in Farndon, Cheshire in 1551 or 1552, John Speed was a historian as well as a cartographer, who paid tribute to earlier map-makers whose work he drew on, especially the county maps of the great Elizabethan surveyor Christopher Saxton. “I have put my sickle into other mens corne,” Speed wrote.

̽��ֱ��county maps were the first consistent attempt to show territorial divisions, but it was Speed’s town plans that were a major innovation and probably his greatest contribution to British cartography. Together, they formed the first printed collection of town plans of the British Isles and, for at least 50 of the 73 included in the Theatre, it was the first time these towns had been mapped.

̽��ֱ��Theatre was an immediate success: the first print run of around 500 copies must have sold quickly because many editions followed and, by the time of the 1627 edition, the atlas cost 40 shillings. It was a supreme achievement in British cartography. It made John Speed into one of the most famous of all our map-makers and became the blueprint for folio atlases until the mid-18^th century.

Published 400 years ago, the first comprehensive atlas of Great Britain is being celebrated by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library, home to one of only five surviving proof sets, all of which differ in their composition.

Although the Library holds several copies of the published atlas – including a first edition – it is the hand-coloured set of proofs produced between 1603 and 1611 that is one of its greatest treasures.

Anne Taylor, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

John Speed's proof map of Cambridgeshire

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Eyewitness accounts of 1641 Irish rebellion released

bjb42 — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��unparalleled collection of accounts, which provide graphic details about the massacres and plunder accompanying the Catholic uprising of 1641, will be available for free at www.1641.tcd.ie, giving users the chance to scrutinise their contents in depth for the first time.

It follows a painstaking three-year research project in which all 19,000 pages of the original depositions (more than 5,000 separate sworn statements), many of which are almost illegible, were transcribed by a team of researchers, led by the Universities of Cambridge and Aberdeen and Trinity College, Dublin.

̽��ֱ��project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with substantial contributions from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and Trinity College, Dublin.

Researchers believe that the site's launch will enable historians to understand much more fully what remains one of the least-understood massacres in European history, in which many thousands of men, women and children lost their lives.

Experts are still divided over whether the uprising by Irish Catholics in October 1641, which followed decades of simmering tension with English Protestant settlers, was meant to be bloodless, or if violence was always intended.

In the event, the rebellion only enjoyed brief and partial success, before it sparked a decade of savage warfare that culminated in Oliver Cromwell's equally brutal conquest which began in 1649 (with the infamous Drogheda Massacre).

In its aftermath, half of all the land of Ireland was taken from Catholics born in Ireland and given to Protestants from Britain. So deep was the impression left on the national consciousness that images of the massacre are still used on banners by the Orange Order.

Despite their significance, however, the depositions have never been studied in full - partly due to their poor condition, and partly because of the sheer quantity of material involved. ̽��ֱ��digitisation means that they can now be examined by historians and members of the public anywhere in the world.

Professor John Morrill, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, one of the project's principal investigators and chair of the management committee, said: " ̽��ֱ��events of 1641 transformed Irish history and, as a result, can be justly said to have transformed British and world history as well."

"GK Chesterton once wrote that the problem with the English conquest of Ireland is that the Irish cannot forget it and the English cannot remember it. Now, for the first time, the Irish will be able to read about what happened in full and the English will have complete access to an episode that they have frequently overlooked."

Professor Tom Bartlett, Chair in Irish History and principal investigator from the Aberdeen arm of the project team, said: " ̽��ֱ��sheer volume of witness testimony is what makes the depositions so valuable. Transcribing them has enabled us to get down to what ordinary people were saying about these events and is of interest not just in terms of what they were saying but how they were saying it. "

"There is a huge amount to be learned from the language they were speaking and the words they were using about the make-up of the population and everyday life from their views of the world around them to the agricultural instruments they were using."

"We knew when we began that this was a very significant resource but the range of what we can learn from it has been wider than any of us expected and will be of interest to economic, social and cultural historians, linguists, genealogists and anyone interested in popular action."

As a result of the digitisation of the depositions, linguists from the ̽��ֱ�� of Aberdeen were awarded £334,000 under the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Digital Equipment and Digital Enhancement for Impact scheme, to help devise new techniques to analyse the manuscripts.

̽��ֱ��year-long project, which began in March, will see a team of researchers interrogate the database for a variety of information including the development of the English language in Ireland and the settlers' lifestyle there in the 1640s, the language of atrocity appearing in the witness testimony and the reliability of the evidence in the depositions.

Few gory details were spared when the testimonies were first compiled, as the newly-digitised collection reveals. One of the best-known is that of Eleanor Price, a widow and mother of six from County Armagh, who was imprisoned by insurgents before five of her children were drowned, along with other settlers, in the River Bann at Portadown Bridge.

̽��ֱ��account describes how the rebels "then and there instantly and most barbarously drowned the most of them: And those that could swim and come to the shore they either knocked them in the hands and so after drowned them, or else shot them to death in the water."

As a result of the new online resource, users will be able to view both the transcription of the testimonies, and a digitised version of the original document, side-by-side on their computer screens.

Ahead of the launch of the digitised collection, and to mark the 369th anniversary of the rebellion itself, an international seminar was held at Trinity College Dublin on Friday, 22 October. Professor Jane Ohlmeyer of TCD spoke about the project, Professor John Morrill of Cambridge spoke about the consequences of the Rebellion and Massacre for Britain and Ireland, and Professor Ben Kiernan of Yale compared the Irish massacres of 1641 with massacres in modern times.

An exhibition, "Ireland in Turmoil: the 1641 Depositions", was also opened by the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, and Dr Ian Paisley spoke at the event. ̽��ֱ��display runs until April.

̽��ֱ��first-hand testimonies of thousands of people who witnessed the bloody rebellion that paved the way for centuries of sectarian conflict in Ireland have been released online.

̽��ֱ��events of 1641 transformed Irish history and, as a result, can be justly said to have transformed British and world history as well.

Professor John Morrill

Extract from the 1641 Depositions at Trinity College Dublin Library

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Under the sea

bjb42 — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

For the first time scientists have mapped the layers of once molten rock that lie beneath the edges of the Atlantic Ocean and measure over eight miles thick in some locations.

̽��ֱ��research, reported in this week's edition of Nature, gives us a better understanding of what may have happened during the break up of continents to form new mid-ocean ridges. ̽��ֱ��same volcanic activity in the North Atlantic may also have caused the subsequent release of massive volumes of greenhouse gases which led to a spike in global temperatures 55 million years ago.

̽��ֱ��scientists, led by Professor Robert White, FRS at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, also developed a new method of seeing through the thick lava flows beneath the seafloor to the sediments and structures beneath. ̽��ֱ��technique is now being employed to further oil exploration of the area which was previously restricted by the inability to image through the lava flows.

When a continent breaks apart, as Greenland and Northwest Europe did 55 million years ago, it is sometimes accompanied by a massive outburst of volcanic activity due to a 'hot spot' in the mantle that lies beneath the 55 mile thick outer skin of the earth. When the North Atlantic broke open, it produced 1-2 million cubic miles (5-10 million cubic kilometres) of molten rock which extended across 300,000 square miles (one million square kilometres). Most of the volcanic rock is now underwater and buried by more recent sediments. However the edge of this huge volcanic region is visible on land in a few places including the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.

For the first time scientists mapped the huge quantities of molten rock in the North Atlantic. ̽��ֱ��rock had been injected into the crust of the earth at a depth of 5-10 miles (10-20 kilometres) beneath the surface along the line of the continental breakup 55 million years ago. Using seismic methods, they were able to map the layers of lava flows both near the surface and deep into the earth.

There is a considerable controversy at present as to whether the large scale volcanism was caused by abnormally hot mantle deep in the earth (a 'hot spot') or whether it was caused by some other means, such as a compositional change in the mantle that mean it could more easily be melted. ̽��ֱ��researchers demonstrate in this paper that the volcanic activity requires a temperature anomaly, supporting the 'hot spot' model.

Additionally, the scientists hope that a better understanding of what happened 55 million years ago will also provide insight into the changes that occur to the atmosphere and biosphere during volcanic activity.

Professor White said: "At the time of the break-up of the North Atlantic 55 million years ago there was a very sudden increase in global temperatures: in fact the earth has never been as hot since then, although the global warming that humans are now causing is likely to take the earth back to the same high temperatures as existed for a short period then.

" ̽��ֱ��increases in global temperatures are thought to have been caused by a massive release of methane from under the seabed - methane is almost 25 times worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. A better understanding of volcanism and the underlying hot spot will help us understand how such activity might have triggered the methane release and subsequent global warming."

̽��ֱ��researchers' findings also have implications for oil exploration in the region. Large volumes of oil have already been discovered (and are being extracted) in the sediments under the seabed between the Shetland Islands and the Faroe Islands. If these same sediments extend westward towards the Faroe Islands, as geological models suggest they do, there may be a lot more oil to be found.

However, because the sediments had thick layers of lava flows (molten rock) poured over them at the time the north Atlantic broke open, conventional exploration techniques have not been able to see through the lavas because they reflect the seismic energy. ̽��ֱ��scientists succeeded in developing a method of seeing through these thick lava flows to the sediments and structures that lie beneath them.

Scientists explore huge volume of molten rock now frozen into the crust under the ocean’s floor.

At the time of the break-up of the North Atlantic 55 million years ago there was a very sudden increase in global temperatures: in fact the earth has never been as hot since then, although the global warming that humans are now causing is likely to take the earth back to the same high temperatures as existed for a short period then.

Professor Robert White

CLF from flickr

under the sea

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Rebellion, repression, retribution

tdk25 — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��true course of events of the Irish rebellion of 1641 has never been fully known. Initiated by disaffected Irish Catholics rebelling against Protestant settlers, the rebellion quickly escalated in violence, resulting in widespread killing. But was the rebellion intended to be a bloodless coup that spiralled out of control, or were the thousands of Protestants deliberately driven out and massacred? What’s clear is that the years that followed were a time of savage revenge for the events of 1641 – Oliver Cromwell arrived with 30,000 English troops to conquer Ireland in the name of the English Republic and to exact ‘a just judgement of God upon those barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood’ – and the groundwork was laid for Ireland’s Catholic–Protestant divide.

A curious aspect of the rebellion is that although it is the least understood of all the great massacres of European history, it is amongst the best recorded. Historical narratives in the form of eyewitness accounts of those who lived through the rebellion are still in existence in the library of Trinity College Dublin, where they have remained largely unstudied. This is chiefly because there is too much of a record of what happened and it has taken until now, with improvements in technology and the political climate, to conspire finally to make it possible for the secrets of the ‘1641 depositions’ to be unlocked. A team of scholars in Cambridge, Dublin and Aberdeen are poised to do just this. Professor John Morrill from Cambridge’s Faculty of History is chairing the three-year project, working alongside Professor Jane Ohlmeyer and Dr Micheál Ó Siochrú (Trinity College Dublin), and Professor Tom Bartlett ( ̽��ֱ�� of Aberdeen).

Roots of an uprising

̽��ֱ��1641 rebellion had roots stretching back to the mid-16th century, when the Irish provinces were heavily colonised by English settlers. Throughout the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the English government, fearful that continental Catholic kings would use Ireland as a springboard for invading England to exploit the dynastic weaknesses (Elizabeth was, in Catholic eyes, a heretic bastard tyrant, unmarried and the last of her line), sought to impose strong Protestant control of Ireland. This led to a dreadful cycle: Catholic rebellion, repression of the uprising, replacement of Irish landowners by English as part of a ‘Plantation’ policy, then more rebellion, more repression and further Plantation.

In and after 1610, the largest of the Plantation policies, in which not only the Irish landowners but also the tenant farmers and urban elites were displaced, affected large parts of Ulster in the far north of Ireland. Previous Catholic owners and occupiers were driven into exile, where thousands either became mercenary soldiers (‘Wild Geese’) in the armies of the Habsburg kings or fell into destitution.

For 30 years, the strong authoritarian government, softened by a blind-eye to private Catholic worship, kept the dispossessed of Ulster and elsewhere in check. But in 1641, England was paralysed by the disputes that were to lead, a year later, to civil war.

King Charles I’s puritan opponents had plans to introduce much more effective religious persecution of the Catholic Irish and to make Ireland increasingly part of an enlarged English state. This provoked, from late October 1641, a series of pre-emptive strikes by members of the Catholic nobility and, in the ensuing chaos, a series of what (unless this research project tells otherwise) appear to be spontaneous revenge attacks on Protestant settlers that quickly got out of control.

An imperfect account

Although we have no idea how many people were killed during the events of 1641, the most prudent estimates are that 4000 died through acts of violence and that 6000 more died of the consequences of being driven out naked into the winter cold, while many more fled from their homes and made their way eventually back to England. So much is clear. But the precise chronology and geography of the rebellion have remained hazy at best.

̽��ֱ��English government had to do something to protect the English Protestant settlers, but their own country was in chaos. They could not raise taxes to fund the army. So they borrowed money from 2000 venture capitalists (the ‘Adventurers’) against the promise that they would receive two million acres of Irish land once Ireland was conquered. To establish which land was to be confiscated, all (mainly Protestant) witnesses to the rebellion were questioned by government-appointed commissioners and their accounts recorded as ‘depositions’ that could be used in court.

Today, 3400 depositions are in existence, providing the fullest and most dramatic evidence we have for any event of this kind before the 20th century. They add to up 19,000 pages of testimony in crabbed 17th-century hands. Trinity College Library acquired the documents in 1741 and for centuries there they have remained, far too extensive for any one scholar to explore them all and in too poor a condition for widespread access. Even with a team of researchers, it will take a total of more than eight person years to transcribe the accounts.

A new kind of history

̽��ֱ��spirit of co-operation between the UK and Irish governments following the Good Friday agreement has made it possible to fund a project of this size – the most ambitious British-Irish collaboration in the humanities ever undertaken. Separate but linked funding streams in the UK and Ireland have raised more than 1 million euros from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK, the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) and Trinity College Dublin.

Once the depositions are captured and online, they will constitute a database that can be arranged and re-arranged in any way a scholar would like: by date, by map reference, even by act of violence. Many of the depositions give detailed inventories of goods taken and destroyed, affording unique insights into the material culture of a colonial society. Members of the general public might even use depositions to trace family trees. There are endless possibilities for further study, both looking backwards to the pattern of exploitation that provoked the explosion of Catholic violence, and forwards to the way in which these massacres resulted in the confiscation of 40% of the land of Ireland and its transfer from Catholics born in Ireland to Protestants born in England. These are events that transformed Irish history and therefore British and world history. This collaborative project represents a new kind of history: one where the medium and the message can change how we understand ourselves in time.

For more information, please contact the author Professor John Morrill (jsm1000@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of History.

John Morrill explores one of the most extraordinary and least understood aspects of Anglo-Irish history - the rebellion of 1641.

But was the rebellion intended to be a bloodless coup that spiralled out of control, or were the thousands of Protestants deliberately driven out and massacred?

Credit- the Board of Trinity College, Dublin

Deposition taken from a witness to the 1641 Irish rebellion

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes