Ireland: a Celtic Society in Decline

Abstract

Celtic society in Ireland was, if not (as some think) in plain dissolution, at any rate in decadence and decay, in flux and change to no-one can say what: in the process breaking down into chaos, without any foundation of political unity, without the capacity to form a state. What it might have evolved of itself, left on its own, we do not know: the might-have-beens of history are not a very profitable subject of study. For, of course, it did not exist in a world of its own—though all Celts, in revolt against the facts of life, cherish the dream that it might be so. Here in the full flood of Renaissance, Reformation and Counter-Reformation and, ultimately more important, of the discovery and planting of America—in the fairway to America, or not far off it, the island lay—was this anachronistic society: in some respects medieval, in others pre-medieval, in any event thoroughly out of date, enjoying the amenities and outlook of an Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, the ultimate outpost of a vanishing Celtic world. As Bacon wrote at the end of our period, “ the last of the daughters of Europe ” to be “ reclaimed from desolation and a desert (in many parts) to population and plantation; and from savage and barbarous customs to humanity and civility ”.¹