- 2 days ago
https://t.me/TopFilmUSA1
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00Ireland, a small island on the edge of Europe, between the old world and the new.
00:11As an island nation, the sea is part of who we are.
00:14The sea has allowed us to leave, and it also has allowed us to come back.
00:18And that really is the history of the Irish.
00:21These seas were not barriers. These were our highways.
00:25The landscape itself bears the traces of our history.
00:34The Irish landscape had never been transformed as radically as it was after the arrival of the English.
00:42The history of the Irish has long been a global one.
00:45A man called William Ayres from Galway was on that famous voyage of 1492.
00:51From the late 15th and into the early 16th century, Irish people are coming here, not just to trade and go home, but they actually begin to settle.
01:03From that small island, the story of the Irish tells the fascinating history of an island people who have truly left their mark on the world.
01:10The year 1000, the start of a new millennium.
01:33The age of the Vikings is drawing to a close.
01:39In Ireland, they have now become the Hiberno-Norse.
01:45The population of the island speak the Irish language, practice the Christian religion, and have their own customs and laws.
01:53In the year 1000, Ireland has its own legal system.
02:00It's known nowadays as the Brehon laws.
02:03It is written in Irish.
02:08And it covers everything.
02:11It covers inheritance, it covers land ownership, it covers marriage, it even covers beekeeping, everything.
02:19The cultural unity of the Irish is not mirrored politically.
02:26Society was very hierarchical and stratified.
02:30If I was at the bottom, I would be subject to at least one lord, if not more.
02:36This is a very violent society, endemic raiding of cattle and skirmishes, constantly going on.
02:43So it's politically and militarily a fragmented society.
02:48In Europe, society was equally violent and in the process of rapid change.
02:55Much of that change was driven by the Normans, a land-hungry warrior elite in northern France.
03:10Descended from earlier Viking raiders, they now set about conquering vast territories in Europe.
03:16In the year 1066, they set their sights on England.
03:31After England was conquered by William the Conqueror and the Norman dynasty is founded,
03:36there is an awareness of Ireland as a possible source of trouble, as a possible refuge for political refugees from England.
03:44But there's also this developing imperial ambitions of the Norman elite.
03:52Another type of society was developing in England under their new Norman rulers.
03:56This was a feudal society, very different in its laws and culture to that of Gaelic Ireland.
04:06It would be 100 years after the conquest of England before the Norman elite would venture across the Irish Sea.
04:12When they came, it would be at the invitation of an embittered Irish king.
04:19Diarmuid MacMurrah, King of Leinster.
04:22Diarmuid MacMurrah comes across as a very unsavoury political leader.
04:27He blinded and castrated his political enemies.
04:30He was responsible for the rape of the abbess of Kildare.
04:34He later abducted the wife of Tierney O'Rourke.
04:38And this really meant that there was a coalition in Ireland against him.
04:42Diarmuid is expelled from Ireland, but determines to recover his kingdom.
04:47He goes to Bristol in England before making his way to France.
04:53Hoping to gain the support of Henry II, King of England.
04:58Hear, O noble King Henry, my own people have cast me out of my kingdom.
05:12Your lead man I shall become on condition that you should be my helper.
05:16You I shall acknowledge as sire and lord.
05:23Having received permission from Henry,
05:26MacMurrah made his way back to Bristol to raise an army to regain his land in Leinster.
05:31He made contact with Richard Fitzgilbert de Clare, better known in Irish history as Strongbow.
05:42MacMurray promised Strongbow that if he helped him regain power in Ireland, that he would make Strongbow his heir.
05:58Strongbow would marry Diarmuid's daughter Aoife.
06:01MacMurray gets back to Ireland with a small group of mercenaries and he's able to get back a small amount of his kingdom in Wexford.
06:16It's not until 1169 and 1170 successive groups of fighters come over from South Wales.
06:24Strongbow sends a small group under the command of one of his followers, Raymond Le Gros, Raymond the Fat, to test the waters in Ireland.
06:43This is the beach of Bagenbun, made famous by the rhyme,
06:47At the creek of Bagenbun, Ireland was lost and won.
06:50Now that rhyme has its origins in a very important event that took place here in May of 1170.
07:01Raymond Le Gros comes with his 100 to 150 followers and they set up fortifications on Bagenbun head.
07:09And they haven't got supplies with them, so they raid around the local area, pillaging.
07:13And this obviously causes then a coalition of Irish forces to be raised against him.
07:21The local Irish were joined by a force of Hiberno-Norse from nearby Waterford.
07:26They now outnumber the Normans.
07:29Despite the larger numbers of the Irish and Hiberno-Scandinavian forces that oppose him, they are able to defeat the Irish.
07:37Le Gros used a stampede of cattle to confuse the attackers and they beat them.
07:46According to various contemporary sources, what happened next was that 70 of the men of Waterford were captured.
07:54They gave an axe of tempered steel to a servant girl, who beheaded them all and then threw the bodies over the cliff, for she had lost her lover that day in the battle.
08:13The girl who served the Irish thus was called Alice of Abergavenny.
08:21Why all this brutality was indulged in was to send a message to the Irish that they were not going to be treated as equals.
08:30The Battle of Bagginbun was this event that was seen to give the English a secure foothold in Irish territory, which then led to the loss of much of the rest of the island to English control.
08:44Strongbow, now confident following the victory at Bagginbun, made his way to Ireland, where he joined forces with McMurrah.
08:51Strongbow arrives in August 1170 and one of his first actions is to join his forces with McMurrah's and march on Waterford.
09:02After Waterford is captured, there's a kind of debate about what to do with the Scandinavian rulers and the upshot of it is kill them.
09:11Strongbow now married Aoife, fulfilling Dermud's promise. By marrying Aoife, Strongbow becomes Dermud's heir.
09:19A few months later, Dermud died at Ferns. Strongbow was now King of Leinster.
09:32And that then sets in a trail of events that causes Henry II to personally send forces to Ireland to impose English rule across Ireland,
09:43because what he's afraid of is one of his barons becoming a king in his own right and then opposing his authority.
09:52Henry II was the first King of England to set foot on Irish soil. He would not be the last.
09:57One of the few written accounts of Ireland at the time of the Norman Conquest came from the pen of a churchman and writer, Gerald of Wales, whose family had taken part in the first landings of the Normans in Ireland.
10:12Gerald writes in a highly biased way about the people of Ireland. He tends to be very scathing.
10:20They are a wild and inhospitable people. They live on beasts only and live like beasts. This people is then a barbarous people. Literally barbarous.
10:35He gives accounts of Irish bestiality, trying to make the Irish seem, you know, as though they're semi-animal-like themselves.
10:44One of the things he's most interested in is their marital practices.
10:50So he says that they never avoid incest, that they marry their sisters and their cousins and their dead wives' brothers.
10:58It almost sets in train a kind of colonial literature where we find, you know, even English writers of the 18th and 19th century using the same tropes.
11:06There's this idea of morality and immorality, the good and the evil, that they're somehow trying to justify their deeds of conquest by saying,
11:15well, we're helping the people we're conquering because we're civilising them.
11:19Among the most transformative and long-lasting effects of the arrival of the Anglo-Normans was not their military victories,
11:26but the fact that they had come to Ireland, not only as soldiers, but as settlers.
11:32The earliest conquerors, they all come over with their female relatives.
11:38They were making a statement from the very start that they were here to stay.
11:44They don't get rid of the Irish people that were living on the lands that they conquered.
11:49They were really essential for making the land profitable. You had to have labourers.
11:53There was also, in addition to this established Irish population,
11:56an influx of English and Welsh sort of peasants who are drawn to the colony by the promise of land.
12:04So there is a real significant movement of population.
12:07One of the first places the settlers put down roots was the south-east of Ireland, the most Norman part of the country,
12:19where the transformation was at its most visible and most pronounced.
12:24The Irish landscape had never been transformed as radically as it was in the century after the arrival of the English.
12:35The establishment of castles, in particular, had a military function.
12:40It had an economic function because it was around the castle that the new towns would grow.
12:45But it had a symbolic propagandist feature as well.
12:48It was a physical statement that there were new rulers in town.
12:56As well as castles, new religious establishments were founded by orders such as the Cistercians.
13:04The buildings demonstrate the imposition of colonial power on the landscape
13:10because they show very much a European style of architecture.
13:14These buildings would have been something very strange to the eye of a local Wexford person,
13:21certainly a native Gaelic Wexford person.
13:26The Norman world now stretched from the edge of the Atlantic across the continent of Europe
13:32to the Crusader States in Palestine.
13:37Among the most prominent and mysterious of the Crusader forces were the Knights Templar,
13:42the Knights Templar, an order of warrior monks.
13:48The Knights Templar were given land in County Wexford on the Hook Peninsula.
13:52We're at Kiloggan Castle. It was granted by Henry II to the Knights Templar.
14:00The Knights Templar had been established in the Holy Land.
14:04They were essentially fighting monks. It's a very typical tower house of the period.
14:08And if you look right up to the top of the castle, you have what's known as a machicolation.
14:11And basically this was a defensive feature that at times of attack you could throw probably stones down on the attackers trying to get in.
14:21The Knights Templar, they were established here on the Hook Peninsula to manage all of the lands along the vulnerable coastline.
14:27The Knights Templar were not the only Crusaders to control land in the South East.
14:35William Marshall was a prominent Crusader and something of a celebrity.
14:41He had come into his lands in Leinster through his marriage to an heiress, Strongbow's daughter, Isabel de Clare.
14:48Marshall decided to build a lighthouse here. It seems to have been based on either lighthouses that Marshall had encountered himself when he was on the Crusades.
15:00There was a fire tower at Alexandria known as the Pharaoh's Fire Tower.
15:05A number of Marshall's castles had defensive towers. So it's understandable that he built a defensive tower here.
15:11Primarily to protect shipping coming in and out of Waterford Harbour. A very important part of the infrastructure of Anglo-Norman Ireland giving access to cities such as the Kenny Waterford and indeed Marshall's own foundation at New Ross.
15:34New Ross is the commercial kind of heartbeat of the Kingdom of Leinster.
15:38You get a kind of a Norman aristocracy coming in, you get merchants coming in, you get the Italian bankers coming in, an elite coming in.
15:47We're standing in the chancel of St. Mary's Church.
15:53It's one of the largest surviving medieval churches in Ireland.
15:58If you went to mass there on a Sunday, there were probably people from right across Europe there.
16:04There is a decision that New Ross needs to be fortified and a circuit of walls is built around the town in 1265.
16:15This act is then celebrated by the commissioning of a poem which is written in Norman French celebrating the fortification of the town of New Ross.
16:22We have a lovely account of each day of the week, different groups come out and work on the wall.
16:29So we have the kind of tanners one day, we have the priests another day and they're singing and they're caroling.
16:35On Wednesday then following goes another group of people, leather workers, tanners, butchers.
16:51On Thursday go the bakers and the small traders, all that sell corn and fish.
16:56And they carol and sing at the tops of their voices.
17:00On Sunday the ladies go.
17:03By the end of the 13th century, English colony in Ireland is starting to go into decline.
17:09Gaelic rulers in Ireland have started to fight back, take back land, bring it back under Gaelic control.
17:15And at this time of political change and dissatisfaction, Edward Bruce, the brother of the famous Robert the Bruce, became king of Scotland, sends a military expedition to Ireland in the year 1315.
17:30And he seeks to unite Gaelic opposition to English rule to overturn the power of the English colony.
17:37And the idea is that Bruce will set himself up as king of all Ireland.
17:45One of the biggest calamities is known as the great European famine.
17:49Very wet weather, destroying the harvest.
17:54Edward the Bruce's invasion occurs in the context of this.
17:58So it was a terrible time to have invaded.
18:01The annals at this time claiming that situation becomes so dire that there's a general breakdown in sort of social cohesion.
18:08There's a general lawlessness.
18:11A lack of food to the extent that yes, there's even cannibalism.
18:18Falshood and famine and homicide filled the country.
18:29and, undoubtedly, men ate each other in Ireland.
18:35It represents one of a series of attempts by Gaelic rulers
18:39to set up their own Gaelic monarch to oppose the English,
18:43but ultimately it failed,
18:44but nevertheless became a rallying point
18:47for ideals of Gaelic nationhood
18:49that would have significance in our later history.
18:51The 14th century
18:59was to begin with a dark cloud over Europe.
19:08The Black Death is the greatest trauma
19:10that Europe experienced in the Middle Ages.
19:14And it's not just a European phenomenon, of course,
19:17it's a global catastrophe.
19:21A very virulent form comes to Europe
19:25in the early 14th century,
19:27initially through trade ports in Italy,
19:29in the Mediterranean.
19:30The plague then spreads through Europe,
19:32and it's devastating.
19:34It kills between one-third and 50%
19:37of the population of Europe.
19:39The 1340s is when the plague comes to Britain,
19:44and then it crosses the Irish Sea.
19:47It was very much the southeast of the country
19:49that was badly affected.
19:51Dublin, Kilkenny, New Ross, Cork.
19:56Of course, it was a very visual disease.
19:59You broke out in great black pustules,
20:01so the fear must have been enormous.
20:05John Klynn, a friar of the Franciscan Abbey in Kilkenny,
20:09would leave behind a vivid and terrifying eyewitness account
20:12of those dark and dreadful days.
20:14He begins to talk about the great calamity that he sees growing up around him.
20:20This pestilence was so contagious that those who touched the dead or the sick
20:25were immediately infected themselves and died.
20:28Perhaps the most tragic part of all is that while he's writing about this,
20:45suddenly his chronicle stops.
20:47He then succumbed to the plague as well.
20:50It's estimated that something between a third and a half of the population was wiped out.
20:55It's also remarked on by several contemporaries
20:58that the plague disproportionately affected the English
21:01rather than the Gaelic population in Ireland.
21:05And partly that might be because it was mainly the English that lived in towns.
21:10We have accounts at the time that they could scarcely bury all the dead bodies.
21:14Many settlers now fled the island.
21:23Bristol was the main destination.
21:28There was deep concern in Bristol about the number of people from Ireland
21:34who were coming to Bristol who had no obvious means of making a living.
21:40And the council here in Bristol passed a series of laws
21:44forbidding merchants or craftsmen to take on people born in Ireland as apprentices.
21:51The English government starts to introduce laws
21:54to try and stop people leaving the English colony
21:56because they can see it's a colony that is at the brink of collapse.
22:01In Ireland, the resurgence of the Gaelic-Irish
22:04was making its presence felt even more strongly.
22:06Large areas that had been under the English crown
22:10now fell back under the control of Gaelic lords.
22:14There's a real shift in cultural, economic and political power
22:18in the 14th century out of the hands of the English colonists
22:22and more to favour the Irish Gaeles.
22:27It's a real sense that the colony could be lost entirely
22:30because there isn't just one Irish lord
22:34who is in danger of taking over the whole country.
22:36All pose threats in kind of different parts of the island.
22:40By the very end of the medieval period,
22:43you have the creation of the Pale around Dublin,
22:46this area surrounded by a ditch to protect it,
22:50the last bastion of control.
22:53The Norman elites that had settled in Ireland centuries earlier
22:58were by now becoming more Irish than the Irish themselves.
23:03The assimilation of the Anglo-Normans is profound.
23:08Anglo-Normans very quickly start to take on aspects
23:11of the Gaelic political system.
23:13So you see the practice of Brehen law,
23:16you see the hosting of Bardic poets.
23:20The third earl of Desmond, Garaud Zierle,
23:23is famous for writing poetry.
23:26These were my three kinds of music.
23:35The playing of O'Brien's harp,
23:37the bell of Ennis on the western side,
23:40the sound of salt water lapping the stones.
23:43The English of England look down on the English of Ireland,
23:47make fun of their accent.
23:48You know, they have a slightly different way of speaking,
23:50different ways of dressing.
23:52And this cultural difference between the two groups
23:56results in real hostility between them.
23:59And this erupts at several times.
24:02In 1966, with the statutes of Kilkenny.
24:05This statute is issued with a series of rules and regulations,
24:09comes in to try and create this sense of apartheid,
24:12that these two cultures must be separate.
24:14They forbade intermarriage
24:16between the so-called native Irish and the Anglo-Normans.
24:19If you wish to be considered a loyal subject of the English king,
24:23you must only speak English.
24:25You had to have an English name.
24:27You had to ride a horse in an English manner.
24:30With a saddle.
24:32You must not play certain ball games.
24:35It's one of the earliest textual references to hurling,
24:37but it shows that the English adopted the culture of Irish sports.
24:40The English of England might call the English of Ireland Irish dogs.
24:45The insult that the English of Ireland used for the English of England
24:49was English hub.
24:51The statutes of Kilkenny banned both of these insults.
24:55The wider world, however, was about to change radically.
24:58The Middle Ages gave way to the beginnings of the modern world.
25:06We used to talk about it as the age of discovery.
25:09It was all very heroic stuff about these galleons
25:12setting off and discovering new lands and all of this kind of stuff.
25:16But of course, this is also the start of colonialism and exploitation.
25:20Thanks to military and naval technological innovations,
25:33the Europeans were able to develop these vast, vast global empires.
25:43Spain and Portugal were to the fore on the trail of spice,
25:47the most valuable commodity of the time.
25:50The spices were very important for two reasons.
25:53One, is because they helped to preserve food and to give flavor.
25:57And second, because it was a really, really expensive, luxury item.
26:03The most famous of these explorers was Christopher Columbus.
26:07Columbus allegedly visited Galway in 1477 on his way to Iceland.
26:12When he later left Spain on his fateful voyage westwards,
26:16he had an Irish sailor from Galway with him.
26:20A man called William Ayers from Galway was on that famous voyage of 1492.
26:29Guillermo Ayres, as he's known in the Spanish sources.
26:32Ayers was put ashore in Hispaniola,
26:36which would be today Haiti, the Dominican Republic.
26:39He lived there for a short time,
26:41but then was killed by the indigenous population.
26:45The vibrant and busy port of Seville was a magnet for Irish sailors.
27:07This was a very big market for sailors.
27:10Some of them were Irish, and especially from Galway.
27:16One of the most famous voyages of the age
27:18was the first circumnavigation of the globe by Ferdinand Magellan.
27:23On board one of the five ships which made up the expedition to the Spice Islands
27:27were two young sailors from Galway.
27:29They would never return.
27:30Juan and Guillermo, they have a terrible, terrible moment.
27:37They got a 12-day storm,
27:40and this is in that moment when the two sailors die.
27:48We're here in the old port of Lisbon, a place called Belém.
27:52The Irish people are coming here not just to trade and go home,
27:58but they actually begin to settle.
27:59And you have the formation really from the late 15th
28:02and into the early 16th century
28:04of a small, expanding Irish colony
28:07composed of all sorts.
28:09Merchants, as you'd expect,
28:11cobblers, tailors, students,
28:15people from all sorts of backgrounds.
28:16And it becomes a really vibrant and varied community here in that period.
28:26As Spain and Portugal pursued their global interests,
28:30England saw the rise of a new dynasty.
28:36The Tudors.
28:38The effects on Ireland and the Irish
28:40would be profound and devastating.
28:42In the reign of Henry VIII,
28:44who ascended the throne in 1509,
28:47we start to see different attitudes
28:50being taken towards
28:52who was in control in Ireland
28:53and how closely they were to be monitored
28:56by the English king.
28:59This was also a period
29:00of great religious turbulence in Europe.
29:04It was the era of the Protestant Reformation,
29:07and we'll see England under Henry
29:09break with Rome.
29:10In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his thesis
29:16to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral,
29:18and this would ultimately precipitate
29:20a schism in European Christianity
29:23that had enormous implications for Ireland.
29:27We have the Reformation,
29:29and that introduces this big cleavage in Europe
29:32between Catholic Europe, Protestant Europe.
29:35That led then to a series of religious wars,
29:38the main theatres for which were France,
29:40the German states,
29:41the Netherlands equally torn apart,
29:44north and south,
29:45between Protestant and Catholic components.
29:49The king's great matter,
29:51the royal divorce from Catherine of Aragon,
29:54in order that Henry might be able to marry Anne Boleyn,
29:57was clearly the extremely important factor
30:00in leading to the separation with Rome.
30:02England are suddenly becoming conscious of themselves
30:08as a power that is separated from the continent
30:13in terms of it's now English-speaking,
30:16proudly English-speaking,
30:17and is Protestant in its identity.
30:20During Henry's daughter's reign,
30:22Elizabeth I,
30:23you get a sustained attempt
30:25to press ahead with the introduction
30:27of the Reformation and the Protestant faith.
30:31The Elizabethan conquest develops,
30:33which pits the state in Ireland
30:36in a series of escalating confrontations
30:39with Gaelic and Gaelicised lordships.
30:41It's about trying to assert
30:43an English royal presence in the country,
30:45and in the process then,
30:47as that advanced,
30:48to Anglicise the population.
30:51Contemporaries would say
30:51to civilise the wild Irish.
30:54Increasingly, the leading magnets
30:58make common cause with the Gaelic-Irish.
31:01And we get this extraordinary situation,
31:04the traditional English population of Ireland,
31:07the Anglo-Norman population,
31:09rooted there from the 12th century,
31:11who consider themselves to be English in identity,
31:14who are loyal to their English sense of themselves,
31:19who are loyal to the English monarch,
31:21become alienated from their own government.
31:23Religion becomes that important badge of,
31:27well, are you loyal or are you not?
31:29So if you're Catholic, you're disloyal.
31:31If you're Protestant, you're loyal.
31:33It creates huge tensions.
31:37The Gaelic-Irish and the Old English of the towns
31:40now have a common cause,
31:43their Catholic religion.
31:45If you're looking for assistance against Elizabeth
31:47in wars and rebellions,
31:50then the logical place to look
31:52is to her continental enemies.
31:54And those continental enemies
31:55are Catholic and above all, Spain.
31:58The Irish now look to Spain,
32:06the major Catholic power in Europe,
32:08for help against their common enemy,
32:11Elizabeth Zinglin.
32:12The king of Spain has the title of Catholic king.
32:19So it's moral duty to protect persecuted Catholics
32:24at home and abroad.
32:27There's this constant connection now of Ireland,
32:32petitioning for support to come from the continent.
32:35And it does.
32:36It comes in 1580.
32:38A papal delegation comes of Spanish and Italians
32:41and it arrives in Smerich.
32:47Munster is in the throes of rebellion
32:49when Spanish and papal forces 600 strong
32:52land in Smerich harbour on the Dingle Peninsula.
32:56They are met by the English on land and sea
32:59and put under siege.
33:01The English are led by the Lord Deputy of Ireland
33:04and have among their number
33:06favourites of the Elizabethan court,
33:08including Sir Walter Raleigh
33:09and Edmund Spencer.
33:14The Spanish and Italians,
33:16they're cut off at sea
33:17and they're cut off on the land or inside
33:20of this little peninsula.
33:21It's early October,
33:22the equinoxial storms are coming in.
33:24It's wretched, it's miserable.
33:26They negotiate and they are offered terms on mercy.
33:32Despite the surrender,
33:34no mercy is shown.
33:36The siege of Smerich turns into a massacre.
33:39Sir Walter Raleigh goes in with his forces
33:41and they haw and pound,
33:43that is a stab to the throat,
33:45a stab to the belly.
33:47The beautiful turquoise water of Smerich harbour
33:50turns red with the blood of these papal forces.
33:54This causes repercussions.
33:56On the continent.
34:00Little mercy is shown either
34:02to the inhabitants of Munster,
34:04who become the victims of a brutal policy
34:06of scorched earth,
34:08leading to famine and devastation.
34:11Perhaps up to a quarter of the Munster population
34:13died during the Desmond rebellion.
34:16The irony is,
34:18the very people who are so emblematic
34:20of the Elizabethan court in all its glamour,
34:24the court of Gloriana,
34:26like the very dashing Sir Walter Raleigh
34:28with his beautiful jewel in his ear,
34:31and he's putting down the cloak
34:33for Queen Elizabeth to step over the puddle.
34:35He's the person who in Smerich
34:37is hawing and paunching.
34:39So we have this paradox the whole time
34:41between these people
34:43who are bringers of civility.
34:45I mean, that's very much how they narrate this story.
34:48The Irish, they are described by one person
34:50as having an incurable botch.
34:53They just can't be mended.
34:54From the late 16th century,
35:01you have a series of English writers
35:03who pick up on the rhetoric,
35:04but they take it even further.
35:07The Irish are subhuman.
35:10They're grasshoppers.
35:11They're hogs.
35:12They're dogs.
35:13And particularly important here is John Derrick,
35:16who publishes a book
35:18with these extremely graphic woodcuts
35:21that really show the Irish as being uncivil,
35:27with their mantles hiding in the woods.
35:30So there's this real attempt
35:32to vilify the Catholic Irish at every opportunity.
35:37We get exactly the same thing in North America,
35:40and later we get exactly the same thing
35:43in the Indian subcontinent.
35:45It's a feature of English imperial rule.
35:48The Old English of Ireland and the Gaelic Irish
35:53were now looking across the water
35:55to Catholic Europe for their education.
35:58From the 1530s and 1540s,
36:01we definitely notice increasing numbers of Irish names
36:05appearing in the matriculation records
36:07of European universities.
36:09And the first one,
36:10and perhaps the most important one,
36:12is University of Louvain or Leuven
36:14in modern-day Belgium.
36:16This was a really important centre
36:34in the intellectual landscape of Western Europe.
36:39These sources are a combination
36:41of the matriculation records for the university.
36:44And it is incredibly poignant
36:50to find the name of an Irish student
36:53from as far back as 1548.
36:58A particularly special, I think,
37:00is to see the entry for Richard Cray
37:03as a young student.
37:05Richard Cray,
37:06after he completed his studies here,
37:09went back,
37:10he became a person of interest
37:13to the Tudor authorities
37:14because he was seen as a focal point
37:17for Catholic dissidents
37:18and Catholic discontent.
37:21At a time when Catholic Old English
37:24were feeling increasingly disillusioned
37:28with the Dublin government,
37:29he ends up dying in the Tower of London
37:31in the mid-1580s.
37:34He died as a result of being poisoned
37:37by agents in the Tudor administration.
37:42And so it is poignant to see his name there.
37:45Behind us is the Mooraria,
38:02which is the very oldest part of Lisbon,
38:04where in the 16th century,
38:06the very first of the Irish colleges
38:09in the continent was founded.
38:11It was founded by a man called John Howland,
38:13who was a Jesuit from County Wexford.
38:16It was founded in 1590
38:18and it was founded in response
38:20to a very significant influx
38:23of Irish people coming here to Portugal,
38:27some of them as economic refugees,
38:29some of them as religious refugees.
38:32And although Catholicism was tolerated,
38:35the education of priests
38:37regarded as potentially subversive
38:39to the Tudor regime,
38:41that was not allowed.
38:41So if someone was to be educated
38:44for the priesthood in Ireland,
38:45it had to happen abroad.
38:49Trinity College Dublin was founded in 1592
38:52with the explicit purpose
38:55of civilising the Irish
38:58and of training Protestant clergymen
39:01who would go on then
39:03and convert the Irish at home.
39:05At the end of the 16th century,
39:10there is a big change.
39:12The English are going to create
39:13Trinity College.
39:15So now the Spanish monarchy
39:16is going to create Irish colleges.
39:19The first is going to be this one,
39:20it's Salamanca,
39:22one of the oldest universities in Europe.
39:26This is a royal initiative.
39:27This is always the Real Colegio.
39:29So it has the royal patronage.
39:31It will provide for the people
39:32who want to get religious training in Spain
39:35and go back to the ministry in Ireland.
39:39In 1588,
39:41Philip sent a large fleet
39:43to invade England.
39:44It would be known to history
39:46as the Spanish Armada.
39:49Defeated at sea,
39:51what was left of the fleet
39:52attempted to make their way homeward.
39:54Many of these ships were wrecked
39:56on the rocky shores
39:57of the west of Ireland.
40:03It means that the Irish
40:05get very interested
40:06in Spanish support.
40:07And a particular part of Ireland,
40:09north of Galway,
40:10right round to Antrim,
40:12which really hadn't been
40:13much affected by Spain before,
40:15now becomes connected to Spain
40:17through the Spanish Armada
40:19being shipwrecked there.
40:20What we find is that
40:25in the early 1590s,
40:27Hugh O'Neill,
40:28second Earl of Tyrone in Ulster,
40:30greatest political figure in Ireland
40:32in that era,
40:33has agents
40:34in the Spanish court
40:36who are actively negotiating
40:39for military assistance.
40:41Once he gets an assurance
40:42that he has that military support
40:45from Philip II of Spain,
40:47he openly declares war
40:49in 1595.
40:53The rebellion led by O'Neill
40:55and O'Donnell
40:56would become known
40:57as the Nine Years' War.
41:00Evidence of the connection
41:02between the Spanish authorities
41:03and the Irish rebels
41:04is still preserved
41:05in a 16th century archive
41:07in Samancas,
41:09in Spain.
41:13This is a report being sent
41:15from the rebels
41:17explaining how
41:18the war is going on.
41:21The Spaniards
41:22are sending help,
41:23weapons,
41:24and they are sending supplies
41:25to the Irish.
41:28This is a map of Malin
41:29in Colt-Tonegal,
41:31which is where the Spaniards
41:32are sending their supplies.
41:33We have the letter
41:39that Red Hugh and O'Neill
41:42are sending to Prince Philip,
41:45asking him for support
41:47to the Irish rebels.
41:49This is signed
41:50by Red Hugh and O'Neill.
41:52The war began
41:56with notable Irish success.
41:59Red Hugh is making
42:01his famous reeds
42:02into Connacht
42:03and O'Neill
42:03is attacking down
42:04the east of Ulster
42:05and into the Peel.
42:08One of the great battles
42:09of the Nine Years' War
42:11was the Battle of the Yellow Ford
42:12in August 1598.
42:15News of the victory
42:17of Hugh O'Neill's side
42:19in that war
42:20over the English forces
42:21was sent post-haste
42:23to El Escorial,
42:25where Philip II
42:26lay on his deathbed.
42:29The culmination
42:30of that engagement
42:31between the Spanish
42:32and the Irish
42:33was the Battle of Kinsale.
42:39The promised Spanish
42:41reinforcements
42:42finally arrive,
42:43but it was too little,
42:45too late,
42:45and most importantly,
42:47they arrived
42:47in the wrong place.
42:49The Spanish had landed
42:50not in Ulster,
42:51but in Kinsale,
42:53the furthest part of Ireland
42:54from the rebellion's heartland.
42:59The Irish
43:00didn't fight very well,
43:02but in terms of the battle,
43:04the Spanish
43:05did not fight at all.
43:06It was a great debacle,
43:07it was a great defeat
43:08for the Irish
43:09and the Spanish.
43:13After the battle,
43:14red hue departed
43:15for Spain
43:16to seek further aid.
43:18That, however,
43:19was not to be.
43:21He was taken ill
43:22suddenly on his way
43:23to meet the new Spanish king
43:25and died
43:26at Samaenca's castle.
43:29He was 30 years old.
43:33He's given a state funeral.
43:36They consider so
43:37that he's a Catholic hero.
43:39He's someone
43:40that he has been serving
43:41on the behalf
43:42of the same cause,
43:44the protection
43:44of Catholicism.
43:46Any possible Spanish plans
43:48to send further assistance
43:50to the Irish
43:50were now abandoned.
43:53After the battle
43:53of Kinsale,
43:54the English used
43:55these scorched earth tactics
43:56to force the country
43:58in turn
43:59to surrender
44:00their leaders
44:01like O'Neill
44:02because there's now
44:03a price on O'Neill's head.
44:05But the extraordinary thing
44:05is that O'Neill
44:07is not surrendered
44:08to the crown.
44:16In the years
44:17immediately after
44:18the battle of Kinsale,
44:20there is the first
44:21mass movement
44:22of Irish migrants
44:23to continental Europe,
44:25the vast majority
44:26of whom
44:27head for northern Spain
44:29where they land
44:30in boatloads
44:32in their thousands.
44:33Large numbers
44:34of decommissioned military
44:36are arriving
44:37in Spain.
44:39The ordinary townsfolk
44:40are not so keen
44:41on having
44:42all these charity cases
44:44basically on their hands,
44:45sometimes
44:46with law and order
44:47issues attached
44:48and, of course,
44:50constantly larger numbers
44:51coming.
44:51In early November 1605,
45:07the Chancellor of France
45:09wrote two letters
45:10to the King of France,
45:12Henry IV,
45:13and he wrote about
45:13a matter of really
45:15pressing concern
45:16for the city of Paris.
45:18And that was
45:19the presence of
45:20somewhere between
45:211,200 and 2,000
45:23Irish men
45:24accompanied by
45:25women and children
45:26who were said
45:27to be living
45:27in most filthy conditions
45:29here beneath
45:31the Pont Neuf,
45:32right in the centre
45:32of the city.
45:35You're talking about
45:36people who have
45:37minimal food,
45:38they're begging
45:39for their living.
45:40They have undoubtedly
45:41a substantial number
45:42of them wouldn't
45:43have had French,
45:44probably Gaelic speaking.
45:45The Parisian authorities
45:48were afraid
45:49that these
45:50strangers
45:51who were living
45:52in filthy conditions
45:53would introduce
45:54the plague
45:55into the otherwise
45:56safe city.
45:59In 1606,
46:01these unwelcome Irish
46:02were rounded up,
46:04put on board a ship
46:05and expelled from Paris.
46:07In Ireland,
46:08Hugh O'Neill decided
46:09to reach peace
46:10with Elizabeth.
46:12He signs the Treaty
46:13of Mellifont
46:13and returns to Ulster.
46:17In an ironic twist,
46:19Elizabeth had died
46:20in London
46:21several days earlier.
46:25Unknown to O'Neill.
46:30With the defeat
46:31of Hugh O'Neill,
46:33we see,
46:33for the first time,
46:34all of Ireland
46:35is now controlled
46:37by England.
46:39O'Neill finds out
46:40that he's no longer
46:42master in his own house.
46:43English common law
46:45is rolled out
46:46across the island
46:47from Malonhead
46:48to the Bear Peninsula.
46:51O'Neill finds
46:52the increasing pressure
46:53from the new English regime
46:54untenable.
46:56Finally,
46:57on the 4th of September,
46:591607,
47:01O'Neill makes
47:01one of the most
47:02fateful decisions
47:03in Irish history.
47:05His departure from Ireland,
47:08together with his followers,
47:09would go down in history
47:11as the Flight of the Earls.
47:15With the Flight of the Earls,
47:16O'Neill, O'Donnell,
47:18Coo Connock Maguire
47:19and the creme de la creme
47:21of the Gaelic
47:22Ulster aristocracy,
47:24we anchor here
47:25in Rathmullen,
47:27make their way out
47:27into the Bay of Biscay.
47:32O'Neill's original destination
47:34was Spain,
47:35but their ship
47:36was blown off course,
47:38and O'Neill and his followers
47:39made their way through Europe.
47:45Eventually reaching Rome.
47:48Hugo Neill arrived in Rome
47:49at the end of April of 1608.
47:53All the eight years
47:54he remained in Rome,
47:55he was planning,
47:56he was preparing strategy,
47:57and he was hoping
47:58to have some money
47:59from the Pope,
48:00from the Papal Curia,
48:01in order to go back to Ireland
48:03and to fight against the English.
48:04But he never got actually
48:05any money from the Pope.
48:06So he was extremely disappointed
48:08about his permanence in Rome.
48:13O'Neill's time in Rome
48:14was also marked
48:15by family tragedies,
48:17losing his son
48:17to the ravages
48:18of the Roman summer.
48:20He never received
48:21the help he was promised
48:22from either Spain
48:24or the Pope.
48:25He finally died in Rome.
48:28A broken man.
48:31When Hugo Neill died,
48:32there was a huge
48:33funeral procession.
48:35Thousands of people.
48:37And all the cities stopped
48:38because the cardinals,
48:40the member of the Curia,
48:41was celebrating this man
48:42as a hero.
48:45It's not just that he has died,
48:47but with him,
48:48the dreams of Gaelic Ireland
48:51have died as well.
48:53A nacht is oignach Eire
48:57da vair phlogra e fyrreden.
49:00This night sees Eirel desolate.
49:04Her chiefs are cast
49:05out of their state.
49:07The grieving lords take ship.
49:09With these,
49:10our very souls pass overseas.
49:12Gaelic Ireland
49:18in desolate.
49:19k
49:24jew depends what
49:25a song
49:26one
49:26one
49:28over
49:29over
49:30the
49:30u
49:31always
49:32be
49:33observable
49:33through
49:34police
49:34of
49:35the
49:35working
49:36to
49:36see
49:37the
49:38women
49:39saying
49:39one
49:40over
49:40the
49:41out
Recommended
45:33
|
Up next
46:38
1:01:54
1:03:58
1:09:14
1:00:44
41:02
49:59
50:02
1:44:14
50:47