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00:00Ireland, a small island on the edge of Europe, between the old world and the new.
00:12As an island nation, the sea is part of who we are.
00:15The sea has allowed us to leave and it also has allowed us to come back.
00:19And that really is the history of the Irish.
00:22These seas were not barriers, these were our highways,
00:27charting the ebb and flow of an island people.
00:31The landscape itself bears the traces of our history.
00:35There were dairy farmers who came here shortly after 4000 BC.
00:40And the people, who are the Irish?
00:43How and when did we become who we are?
00:46People were in tune with the changing seasons and the differences in light.
00:51I can't think of any other name that towers across Europe like the name of Columbanus.
00:59The Irish have been saints and scholars, poets and storytellers, soldiers and sailors.
01:06This was a very big market for sailors. Some of them were Irish and especially from Galway.
01:12The history of the Irish has long been a global one.
01:15An Irishman called Gerald Ainger. He's the founding father of Bombay.
01:19Many came to these shores. Many left, never to return.
01:24This is arguably the largest Irish graveyard on the entire planet.
01:28Today, over 80 million people worldwide say that they are Irish.
01:32The Irish became kinds of Irish gauchos here in the Pampas.
01:37Have the Irish left the legacy in the Caribbean?
01:40You've just got to open a phone book, look at the names and there they are.
01:45From that small island, the story of the Irish tells the fascinating history of an island people
01:50who have truly left their mark on the world.
02:07The story of Ireland's prehistory is still unfolding.
02:25Deep underground, a team of archaeologists are searching for evidence
02:29that could unlock the secrets of our earliest people.
02:32So here you can see a series of layers in the cave. These are sediments in the cave system.
02:42As we follow along my trial here, there you can see a bone possibly of a carnivore
02:49from the Ice Age period embedded within that white material.
02:53But we're obviously excited to think could we find DNA of early humans,
02:57whether that be Homo sapiens or even earlier, even Neanderthals.
03:02You know, we don't know. So it's all up for grabs at the moment.
03:11Ireland was already an island thousands of years before Britain
03:14finally separated from mainland Europe.
03:17This meant that the first settlers, the people known as hunter-gatherers,
03:21would have arrived by boat.
03:24It's always the sea. It's the sea, the sea, the sea.
03:29And I think sometimes we as island people have forgotten that
03:33and how important travel by sea was in the past.
03:36Over the last 20 or 30 years, we have a tremendous richness
03:40and diversity of archaeological evidence.
03:42And that has allowed us to build a very coherent and comprehensive picture,
03:47still with lots of question marks, about prehistory.
03:49The first ancient human genome came out about 2010.
03:54The field has completely exploded in the past decade or so.
03:59Irish hunter-gatherer genomes, they are part of the same broad population grouping,
04:05Western hunter-gatherers.
04:06We see the same mutations involved in blue eye colour,
04:10but none of the mutations we associate with light skin today.
04:15So we get this sort of prediction of quite an unusual physical appearance,
04:19dark skin and the bright eyes.
04:22These first Irish settlers lived off the land,
04:25fishing, foraging and hunting small game.
04:28Like similar groups in Britain and Europe,
04:31they belonged to a population type which genetically no longer exists.
04:35They lived here for 4,000 years before they disappeared into the mists of time
04:40and a new population reached these shores.
04:43These new people were Ireland's first farmers.
04:47And this is a remarkable phase of the human past,
04:54where cattle, sheep, goats, pigs are domesticated,
04:57barley, wheat are domesticated along with other valuable food plants.
05:01Now that changes life utterly.
05:04It leads to more condensed populous societies.
05:07And this new technology is successful.
05:10That's a big deal for the island of Ireland actually,
05:14because we don't have any native wild predecessors of the domesticates
05:19like cattle, sheep and goats, and like wheat and barley.
05:23So those domesticated resources had to have been physically brought over the sea
05:29by people in boats.
05:31That suggests you have a very determined group or groups of people
05:35who really do want to put down roots on this island.
05:39Among these first farmers was a young woman whose skeletal remains
05:46were found near Belfast in County Antrim.
05:49She would become known as Bally Nahati woman.
05:56When we sequenced her,
05:58it was the first ancient Neolithic genome sequenced from the British Isles.
06:03And we found that she had this Anatolian ancestry.
06:06So we were able to infer, just from one genome,
06:09that when farming came here, it came here with people.
06:21On the edge of the Atlantic, on the rugged North Mayo Coast,
06:24lies Kaja fields, one of the largest and most important Neolithic field systems in the world.
06:35There were dairy farmers who came here shortly after 4000 BC.
06:39In terms of world history, what we have here is an exceptionally early example
06:46of structuring the land into fields and controlled agriculture, if you like.
06:52Underneath this vast area is a complete system of fields laid out by our first farmers
06:58and marked by stone walls.
07:00They remained hidden for thousands of years by the bog which grew over them.
07:05I grew up a couple of hundred yards from here,
07:08and my father, Patrick Hawfield,
07:10when he was cutting turf in the 1930s,
07:13on our own bog,
07:15just over a few hundred yards from here,
07:19he noticed lines of stones
07:21and he recognised that he wasn't an archaeologist,
07:25but that they had to be older than the bog,
07:27therefore very ancient.
07:31When he stripped off Blanket Bog,
07:33the soft-piled centuries fell open like a glib.
07:38A landscape fossilised,
07:40its stone wall patternings repeated before our eyes
07:44in the stone walls of Mayo.
07:51The island of Ireland from the get-go has a very strong relationship with dairying and dairy products.
08:04You see that relationship with milking, with dairying persist in Ireland over time.
08:10At least some of those cows were used for pulling heavy loads,
08:15to move timber, to move manure around fields for example,
08:19big stones, you know, to build megalithon monuments.
08:25Sometimes movement of stones that were several tons in weight.
08:30That's a pretty big statement.
08:34These statements in stone still dominate Ireland's landscape.
08:38These tombs, evidence of a highly developed culture,
08:41allow us an insight into the humanity of these early people.
08:44Some of the earliest human remains we have from the farming period in Ireland,
08:53come from Palnebrone portal tomb in the Burren.
08:57And we sequenced a population of individuals from that site.
09:01We had one result that was quite touching.
09:04I suppose we found one of the infants buried there had three copies of chromosome 21,
09:12which is the cause of Down syndrome.
09:14When we looked at the isotopic data of this individual,
09:18he also had a signature of being breastfed.
09:21So he was being looked after, but obviously passed away when he was an infant.
09:32How do we discover the humanity of people in prehistory?
09:37Our most direct source of evidence are human remains,
09:40because this concern about celebrating and remembering the dead
09:45is something that runs through, in different ways,
09:47runs through prehistoric societies.
09:50The most famous megalithic sites in Ireland are found at Bruna Boyna,
09:55the rich ritual landscape on the banks of the River Boyne,
09:58and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
10:01They include Nouth, Douth and Newgrange.
10:05In terms of time periods for a monument like Newgrange,
10:12the common two sites that are usually used as indices
10:15are Stonehenge in southern Britain and the pyramids of Egypt.
10:24So Newgrange and similar developed passage tombs
10:27are at least 1,000 to 2,000 years earlier than this.
10:31You have to remember these people were farmers predominantly,
10:36but clearly the level of precision and the level of observation,
10:41almost hyper-observation of their environment.
10:43I think this monument itself tells us how keenly people observed their environment
10:49and were in tune with the changing seasons and the differences in light.
10:55Newgrange was designed to mark the turning of the year
10:58through its alignment with the winter solstice.
11:04This is the shortest day, but it means that everything after this day
11:09is getting longer and the light is coming back.
11:11So it's an exciting time, it's a happy time,
11:14and I think that holds through the millennia.
11:22The civilization that produced the enigmatic wonder of Newgrange
11:25would itself come to an end as, yet again, new peoples found their way to Irish shores.
11:33I think one of the most dramatic and unexpected findings in European ancient DNA
11:39is the one that, in the third millennium BC,
11:43a very large migration, a massive migration, took place from the steppe region, swept into Northern Europe,
11:54and also didn't replace, but profoundly changed all the populations of Northern Europe.
12:01These people, these pastoralists coming in, they might have also had a technological advantage,
12:12an advantage in mobility and warfare, and it seems like they had the domestic horse, things like that.
12:17It does correlate with cultural change, including at one stage with metal, with the Bronze Age.
12:31The population changes to the tune of about 90%, which is huge.
12:36An excavation on Rathlin Island, off the Antrim coast, led to the discovery of three Bronze Age skeletons.
12:47One of them would shed new light on the people who had now arrived on these shores.
12:51Well, I suppose, for me, archaeology, it's all about people, and, you know, when I'm laying this person out,
13:03like, I see a skeleton, but I'm always trying to look at what that person was like in life.
13:09He was potentially a brother, father, son.
13:13We reckon he's probably about 40 to 60, so he would have been a good age, you know, for a prehistoric person.
13:18He would have been about five foot eleven, and his genetics are similar to other contemporary people,
13:25and they seem to have been part of a wave of people from the, what we call Pontic Steps,
13:30over in Russia and Ukraine, and they seem to have moved westwards.
13:35So it's really interesting that they got as far as Ireland.
13:38We know he was lactose tolerant, and he carried a marker for hemochromatosis,
13:43which is a condition that affects a lot of modern Irish people.
13:48New technologies, including analysis of ancient DNA,
13:53now allow us to digitally reconstruct faces from the deep past with scientific accuracy,
13:59and come face to face with Rathlin Man.
14:01This is a world-renowned lab where they're undertaking a huge amount of scientific research
14:14in facial identification and reconstruction.
14:16I'm really excited because, you know, I've obviously studied this individual skeleton,
14:23so I'm really curious now to see what the science tells us that he looked like.
14:28So this is the first time you're seeing the face?
14:32Mm-hm, yep. So I will click play.
14:35OK.
14:37Here we've got the skull, we re-articulated the mandible,
14:40and then we rebuild the face where it's missing parts.
14:43Such a sense of anticipation.
14:46So here we have the eyeballs in the anatomical position,
14:49and here we have the tissue of the pegs.
14:51Yeah.
14:54And here you can see the muscles.
14:56They indicate the shape.
14:58And then you see the shape of the head.
15:04Oh, it looks fabulous.
15:08No, no, he looks incredible, and it's, you know,
15:11it's what I would have imagined him, you know,
15:12as somebody of, you know, fairly high social standing in his community,
15:16you know, he has that look about him.
15:18Walking down the street in Rathlin Island,
15:21he would just look like one of the local people.
15:25I mean, this man lived 4,000 years ago,
15:28and we know as well there's genetic continuity
15:31with people from Ireland and Scotland,
15:33so, you know, we're looking at an ancestor.
15:35Ireland in the Iron Age was a highly organised society based on a warrior aristocracy.
15:54The Irish were by now speaking a Celtic language, the precursor to Irish.
15:59They had their own rituals and religious practices.
16:04They had kings, queens, and druids.
16:07Royal sites commanded the landscape.
16:12And at the centre, the Hill of Tara,
16:16seat of the High Kings of Ireland.
16:17Here we have, generation after generation, all the history of Ireland from Neolithic through even to the modern period,
16:32located on the top of a small hill with a magnificent view, deliberately,
16:36because the King of Tara was regarded as the King of the World.
16:43And this was the centre of the world, the Axis Mundi.
16:46The Royal sites occupy an important place in both history and mythology.
17:02They were the inspiration for Ireland's most famous heroic tales.
17:05Navan, like many places across the island of Ireland, is an incredibly storied place.
17:12It's the backdrop for a huge number of Ireland's most important and famous stories, of course,
17:18the Toyn Boculana and all those famous figures.
17:21Some of the earliest vernacular literature in Europe.
17:23Beautiful indeed was the youth who thus came to display his form to the host.
17:35Namely, Cucholling, Mach-Súltim.
17:38In the chariot beside him was a long, shining-edged spear.
17:43In one hand he held nine heads, in the other, ten.
17:48And these he brandished at the hosts.
17:51Those were the trophies of one night's fighting by Cucholling.
17:59The Irish literature is the first big vernacular literature,
18:03after the Greek and Roman literature.
18:06And it takes an enormously important position in European literature,
18:11but also compared with other literatures across the world.
18:14In a sense, these Irish tales occupy a similar position in the cultural heritage, like the Iliad or the Odyssey do for the Greek or Roman literature.
18:26In the first century BC, a new world power came to the fore.
18:39The Roman Empire.
18:40The Roman Empire.
18:42Which was stretched from Europe to North Africa.
18:45The Romans conquered Britain in 43 AD.
18:48Ireland, however, was never invaded.
18:50Quite a few textbooks of Irish history start with the fact that Ireland was never part of the Roman Empire, and because it was an island it managed to kind of stand outside this great, you know, powerhouse that existed.
19:05But it was deeply influenced by its contact with the Roman Empire, and we can see that really from the first century AD through trade contacts between Ireland and the Roman Empire.
19:18We have Roman writers commenting on affairs in Ireland, there's this kind of curiosity at this place that lay beyond the boundaries of empire.
19:28Sometimes with a bit of fear and suspicion, but there was always an awareness of Ireland, you know, just across the seaway.
19:34We do have accounts of Ireland written by Romans.
19:47Probably one of the more famous accounts from the first century AD is by the geographer Strabo, who gives us the first ethnographic account of the Irish.
19:59It's not a very flattering one.
20:01Concerning this island, I have nothing certain to report, except that the people living there are more savage than the Britons, being cannibals as well as gluttons.
20:15Strabo says that his information doesn't come from any reliable source, that it's all hearsay, and the people that he heard these rumors from have no direct experience with Ireland whatsoever.
20:29So he himself casts doubt on these accounts.
20:35Although never conquered or invaded, Ireland had connections with the Roman world, as was well known to sailors and merchants.
20:43The geographer Ptolemy based his famous map of Ireland on their accounts.
20:47Ptolemy gives us coordinates from which we can draw a map of Ireland.
20:54Those coordinates are accompanied by place names, and names of rivers, and names of peoples. They would all be on Ptolemy's map.
21:04Roman Britain would suffer raiding by the Irish throughout the 3rd and 4th centuries.
21:15The Irish would also settle in parts of Britain, leaving traces of their language inscribed on stone monuments, known as oam stones.
21:23There are about 400 known oam stones from Ireland, almost all of them in the south.
21:33Oam stones are the earliest type of inscription that we have from Ireland, and the earliest type of evidence that we have in written form of the Irish language.
21:41So oam is an alphabet. In its original form, it consists of 20 letters.
21:49They're quite unusual in the sense that the inscriptions, not like we would normally do, we would write on the face of a stone, but oam inscriptions are written on the edge, on what we call the aris of a stone.
21:59Oam is an ingenious writing system. As to the contents, oam stones contain personal names, usually the name of a man, and his father or his grandfather, or the wider kin group to which the person belonged.
22:17The Roman Empire was coming under increased pressure from all sides. The pressure was particularly intense in those provinces located on the edges of the empire, including Britain.
22:37What we get records of from the late 4th century is that the empire is starting to crumble. And as that happens, it obviously creates political opportunities and this power vacuum emerges and we start to get references of raiders from Ireland attacking Britain.
23:00Many slaves were taken in these raids back and forth across the Irish Sea.
23:05One in particular would leave an indelible mark on the history of Ireland. His name was Patrick.
23:14Despite not being born on the island, he would come to represent the very essence of what it meant to be Irish.
23:21St. Patrick was a member of the Romano-British aristocracy and he was raised, or he would have been raised, in a town very much like this.
23:37We are very lucky in that we do have two texts written by St. Patrick's own hand which has survived into the modern world and one of these is his text The Confessio, which Patrick wrote as a sort of justification and defence of his missionary work in Ireland.
23:54My name is Patrick. So I am first of all a simple country person, refugee and unlearned. I was taken into captivity in Ireland, along with thousands of others. They were pagans and I hoped they might come to faith in Jesus Christ.
24:17Patrick's life was soon woven into the many stories and myths that envelop his memory.
24:24Already by the seventh century, we've got the life of St. Patrick by Merku, where St. Patrick is this miracle working, druid defeating wizard almost.
24:37You know, he's able to kind of, you know, dispel snow on the landscape. He's able to defeat, you know, pagan fire.
24:44And he's much more this kind of almost superhero character.
24:51The Irish took to the new religion with fervour, with many of the kings and the learned classes becoming Christian.
24:57While old beliefs might have lingered, they were very much in the background.
25:14The way that Christianity embedded itself within Irish culture and landscape is very cleverly thought out because it didn't necessarily come through confrontation, but through adaptation.
25:28Crogpatrick is one example of a mountain in the Irish landscape, which has now become a centre of pilgrimage.
25:34In Pilgrimrid, there's the tale that, you know, St. Patrick espels the snakes from Ireland whilst he's on Crogpatrick as well.
25:41And so those stories still live with us as part of contemporary Irish culture.
25:48The cult of local saints was a central feature in establishing Christianity in Ireland.
25:53Three were preeminent. Patrick, Cullum Kill and Bridget.
26:00St. Bridget's cult is very interesting because there's a debate as to whether St. Bridget was originally a goddess who then became transmuted into a Christian saint.
26:12But then we also have early narratives about Bridget as a real woman who was venerated for her piety and is a founder of a religious community.
26:22And I don't suppose we'll ever know for sure which of the stories is true, but certainly that the early date of the early writings around St. Bridget suggests that she was a real individual.
26:36Incipit Vita Sancte.
26:40Here begins the life of Holy Bridget, the Virgin whose feast day is the first of February.
26:45Cullum Kill would spend much of his life away from Ireland, on the island of Iona of the west coast of Scotland.
26:56Here he founded one of the most important and influential monasteries in Christendom.
27:00Iona is arguably the single most important church in these islands in the period between the mid-6th and the mid-7th century.
27:11There's an amazing amount of material produced by Iona scholars in Irish and in Latin in the period from its foundation.
27:18Iona would also be instrumental in spreading Christianity throughout Britain.
27:25Aidan, an Irish monk from Iona, established the famous monastery at Lindisfarne, on the Northumbian coast.
27:40England was only partially converted at the time when Aidan and his companions arrived.
27:48And Lindisfarne became a really important ecclesiastical centre in the area, sending out missionaries to other parts of England.
28:00The Irish monks that came here had a huge influence on religion in England.
28:04So this site soon became very important as a centre of learning and monasticism.
28:10And it became a renowned centre for scholarship.
28:12So the Lindisfarne Gospels were produced here, which is a very high status manuscript of the Gospels, beautifully illustrated,
28:18that was made around the turn of the 8th century.
28:24Ireland itself was now an island famed for its monasteries and learning.
28:28These shores attracted students from across Europe, with one English writer telling of boatloads of Englishmen going to Ireland to study.
28:39The sons of noblemen and clerics were travelling to Ireland in search of education as well as spiritual enlightenment.
28:45And it really helped solidify this reputation of Ireland as an island of saints and scholars.
28:50The Irish monks and scholars wrote superbly in Latin, but they didn't ignore their own language and traditions.
28:59It's about the 7th century or so that somebody must have made the connection that you can actually start writing your own language,
29:06your own native language, in the Latin alphabet, and that's where the real big written tradition of Irish starts.
29:15The amount of literature in Latin that is produced in this country or by Irish scholars who were taught in this country is far in advance of all the other countries in Western Europe put together.
29:30They're also learned it in the native language, in Old Irish for example, and we have a massive amount of literature from the early period.
29:36One particular characteristic of Irish monks of the period, which would lead to their presence far beyond their native shores, was their willingness to leave Ireland in an act of self-sacrifice for their faith.
29:52One of the things that's invariably associated with the Irish is this idea of wandering, wanderlust, peregrinazio, as it's called in Latin, and the Irish are the peregrini, the scotty peregrini, the wandering Irish.
30:07And there certainly does seem to be an element of self-imposed exile, I suppose, on the Irish from an early period.
30:14They understand this idea of individual saints, the saints of the western desert, St. Antony and St. Paul and so on, taking themselves away from Roman civilization, taking themselves out into the desert and occupying themselves solely with contemplation of God.
30:30And therefore the only way they could do that is by imagining a desert for themselves.
30:35But in their case, the sea is the desert. It's not the sand, it's the sea, because the sea is all around them.
30:44There is a grey eye that backward looks and gazes. Never will it see again, Ireland's women, Ireland's men.
30:59These monks left their mark in some of the most inhospitable locations imaginable.
31:05The most famous, the awe-inspiring jagged rock of Skellig Michael, seven miles off the southwest coast.
31:16The Skelligs are such a phenomenon. In geophysical terms, I suppose, they're just an amazing sight.
31:22So close to the elements, you know, you're, you're, the next stop is heaven.
31:41The beginning of the 7th century, during what some would call the Dark Ages, Europe was a continent ravaged by war and conflict after the final collapse of the Roman Empire.
31:51Irish monks and scholars would bring their faith and their scholarship with them as they journeyed throughout Europe.
32:06Among the most famous was Columbanus.
32:09We're in a rather remote but very beautiful part of Northern Italy.
32:18We're in the magnificent village of Bobbio.
32:21And it got its name and it got its fame from an Irishman who came here 1500 years ago and died here, St Columbanus.
32:31By the time he came to Europe in his 40s, he was one of Ireland's outstanding scholars.
32:41He was one of Europe's outstanding scholars.
32:44We know of him in the same way almost as we know of St. Patrick because he has left some writings.
32:53Very few, relatively speaking, but those that have survived are quite extraordinary.
32:57The freedom of my country's customs, to put it so, has been part cause of my audacity, for among us it is not a man's station, but his principles that matter.
33:11The character, the personality that comes through in the letters is really quite extraordinary.
33:16He may not have been the most straightforward of individuals.
33:20You might not have liked to meet him.
33:21You might not have liked to be a member of his community.
33:24But you couldn't doubt his sincerity.
33:26You know, the letters really do strike you as somebody who's quite exceptional.
33:37He died in the early part of the 7th century.
33:40But a thousand years later, the impact he had was so profound, his legacy so rich, that they build this magnificent basilica in his name.
33:54And they take his body from what would have been a very, very modest grave.
33:59And his body is moved here.
34:05The legacy of Columbanus would be long lived.
34:07In the aftermath of the Second World War, Europe needed a new vision more than ever.
34:13We just had two world wars.
34:15Europe has been a killing field for millions.
34:18And people are tearing their hair out saying, is this always going to be the future?
34:22Have we nothing else to offer each other except perpetual enmity and war?
34:27And four men from an intellectual tradition in Europe in which the story of Columbanus, the thinking, the talking of Columbanus is embedded.
34:37They put their heads together and they say, we've got to do something better than this.
34:44They go back to the life of Columbanus.
34:46These are the forefathers of what we call today the European Union.
34:51Irish monks and scribes would leave a lasting legacy in Europe.
35:01Some of the most famous and most precious of early medieval manuscripts were created by these Irish saints and scholars.
35:08We are in the city of St. Gaul in modern-day Switzerland.
35:21It gets its name from the Irish saint Gallus, who was one of the companions of the famous Columbanus.
35:26The monastery of St. Gaul picked up massively in the 8th century and a beautiful library was created with amazing Irish manuscripts that we can still see housed here.
35:38This is a Gospel book that is dated at around 800.
35:48It's the Gospel of John.
35:50The Gospel of John was particularly revered among the Irish.
35:53What you can see here is ornamentation on the page that is very similar to what we have in our famous books at home.
36:01And this one here will have survived because it is so beautiful to look at.
36:12The earliest examples of old Irish are to be found written in the margins of manuscripts preserved here.
36:19They give us a remarkable insight into the humour and humanity of these Irish monks toiling in their scriptoria far away from home.
36:27And this is where you then see either interesting remarks about the terrible ink that they were using,
36:35the terrible shape that they were in after a long previous night of boozing, I suppose.
36:43In the margin of a manuscript on Latin grammar, we find an inscription written in Oum's script that reads,
36:49Lahert, meaning excessive drinking or hangover.
36:56This hungover scribe was able to lament his state while keeping the knowledge safe from the prying eyes of anyone other than his fellow Irish.
37:04The Irish monks did not confine themselves solely to the Gospel books for which they were renowned.
37:19The Irish were at the forefront of mathematics and astronomical art in the early Middle Ages,
37:24and many of their texts are still hidden in continental copies.
37:28And we'll browse the libraries of Europe in search for those lost texts.
37:33One such library is located in a Benedictine monastery high in the Alps.
37:45One such library is located in a Benedictine monastery high in the early Middle Ages.
37:55So I first came to Einzelen in 2006 looking for texts written by Irish monks in the early Middle Ages on astronomy and mathematics.
38:04This text, this was written by an Irish scholar at around 700.
38:21It is an amazing find on various levels.
38:26And this is the oldest textbook on the reckoning of time,
38:29with a very strong mathematical and astronomical basis that exists.
38:34So this is the founding text of a monastic discipline that was there throughout the Middle Ages,
38:41where the Irish were instrumental in creating this discipline
38:46and then from scratch designed a new landscape of knowledge.
38:51In Ireland, artistic production was also flourishing.
39:01This golden age, as it became known, has left us artefacts of world renown.
39:09With the coming of Christianity, a whole new range of objects were required in the service of the church.
39:15And probably the best example we have surviving from Ireland is the Ardat Chalice.
39:22This 8th century object is, you know, one of the most important in terms of achievements for Irish civilisation in the first millennium AD.
39:30The craft workers who are working on the Ardat Chalice, they're taking, you know, interlays from the Mediterranean world
39:36and they're imitating that in their own style.
39:37Like, it's almost an Irish interpretation of other motifs that they're gathering from around Europe.
39:44And that's what makes this period, the 8th century in particular in Ireland, so significant,
39:49is that you see this mix of art styles on a single object.
39:53Also then, on the very famous Tarra brooch, which is just over 8 centimetres in diameter.
39:58And again, they've crammed every single motif and material onto this tiny object that they can possibly do.
40:06So it is the finest piece of Irish jewellery from the first millennium AD.
40:13But there is no doubt that the wealth of the church and the importance of the church caused a lot of these objects to be created.
40:19This wealth would soon attract the attention of violent sea raiders from the north.
40:30The monastery founded by Saint Aidan was one of the first to be attacked.
40:34Vikings arrived at Lindisfarne in the year 793 and the attack really sent shockwaves through Europe at the time.
40:41The contemporary scholar called Alcuin talks vividly of the blood of God's priests being splattered across the altar at Lindisfarne.
40:49It's the night in the night.
40:56Bitter and wild is the wind tonight.
40:59Tossing the tresses of the sea to white.
41:02On such a night as this, I feel at ease.
41:05Fierce northmen only course the quiet seas.
41:09The fear implicit in the monks' lines was well-placed.
41:12The rich and famous monasteries were an easy target for Viking sea raiders.
41:22Iona saw a devastating series of attacks.
41:26It was attacked by Vikings in 795.
41:29They returned again in 802.
41:31They came again in 806 when 68 members of the monastic community were slaughtered.
41:36And they returned again in the year 825.
41:38So as a result of the series of Viking attacks on Iona, they were granted land at another site at Kells in County Meath in the second decade of the 9th century.
41:50Where a new community was set up as a place of retreat for the monks who were on Iona.
41:56And it's thought that as a result of that, the famous Book of Kells, which scholars think was created at the Church of Iona, moved across to Ireland and that's why it's called the Book of Kells today.
42:04Monasteries in Ireland, especially those near the coast, were also subject to relentless attack.
42:21Contemporary accounts for the year 825 tell of raid after raid by what they called heathens.
42:29Heathens.
42:30Heathens.
42:31Oregon Benneker.
42:32Heathens invaded Bangor the Great.
42:33Slade the Leckleshe.
42:34Down was plundered by the heathens.
42:35Losguh maile bille.
42:36My villa with its archeries was burned by the heathens.
42:37Oregon in she dammler.
42:38The plundering of in she dammler by the heathens.
42:39The plundering of in she dammler by the heathens.
42:40The plundering of in she dammler by the heathens.
42:41Even the most remote of all Irish monasteries, the rocky fastness of Skellig Michael didn't escape.
42:48Contemporary accounts tell the fate of the abbot Edgal.
42:55Edgal of Skellig was carried off and died shortly afterwards of hunger and thirst.
43:24By the middle of 837, the nature of the Viking raids had changed.
43:31The raids grew even more ambitious and the attackers no longer confined themselves to coastal locations.
43:37They're raiding further inland, they're using the riverways of the Boyne and the Shannon to travel to other Irish religious sites.
43:47And by the end of the 830s, we start getting references to Viking camps being established in Ireland.
43:53And this leads to the coining of a new word, Longfort, which basically means a ship camp.
44:00These camps would become permanent settlements in Ireland's first cities.
44:04Limerick, Cork, Waterford and Wexford.
44:08The largest and most important was Dublin.
44:15The sheer volume of Viking warriors actually flooding in can't be underestimated.
44:22They were all very young, between 17 and 20.
44:25So this, you know, life was very short in the Viking world.
44:33From almost the very beginning, the Viking warriors were intermingling and intermarrying with the Irish population.
44:39So straight away you're getting a mix of cultures.
44:41Viking Dublin grew to be a thriving city.
44:44Exotic items such as amber and jet were being imported from all over the Viking world.
44:51Trade also went the other way, with Dublin made goods being traded across the North Atlantic.
44:57This booming economy, however, had a very dark side.
45:02Dublin had become one of the largest slave markets in Europe.
45:05Dublin was a very important international slave trading station.
45:13We have references to, you know, 780 people being taken in our ma.
45:18Of course they would have taken the most able, probably from about the age of seven up.
45:22And they would have left the infants and the elderly people.
45:25They were also importing slaves.
45:27Slaves were being brought into Dublin, where they were being literally sold, probably at auction,
45:32and then shipped out around the Viking world.
45:35And so it was a very vibrant place, but it was founded on a lot of misery.
45:43By the year 1000, Dublin had become increasingly Christian, and also increasingly wealthy.
45:51Its king was Citric Silkenbeard.
45:53His major enemy was Brian Beru, King of Munster and High King of Ireland.
46:02Brian Beru is a very important king in Irish history.
46:07He's the only medieval king that managed to unite all of Ireland under his rule.
46:14As such, he becomes this iconic figure in Irish history.
46:18Brian's success was largely built on being able to take control of the Viking towns of Ireland,
46:24because these were great resources of wealth and manpower and fleets.
46:28So he's able to take control of Limerick, Waterford.
46:32But the reluctance of Dublin to be under the leadership of Brian Beru
46:36is what gives rise to the very famous Battle of Clontarf,
46:39which was fought on Good Friday in the year 1014.
46:48Contrary to popular relief that this was a battle between the native Irish and the Vikings,
46:53the Battle of Clontarf was a battle of alliances.
46:57On both sides of the Battle of Clontarf,
47:00there were Irish and Vikings fighting side by side.
47:02So Brian Beru's forces included troops from the Viking town of Limerick
47:06and the forces of Dublin that were fighting against Brian Beru
47:11included their allies from Leinster,
47:13who also didn't want to be under the power of Brian Beru.
47:18Clontarf was also significant because it brought in combatants from outside Ireland as well.
47:23So we hear of a leader from Alaba, modern day Scotland,
47:27fighting on the side of Brian Beru.
47:29But we also hear of Vikings from the Orkney Islands and the Hebrides
47:33fighting on the Dublin side.
47:34The battle raged from sunrise to sunset on that bloody day on land and by sea.
47:43You do have fleets and they were fighting from ship to ship.
47:49You would have had a lot of stabbing and a lot of blood and beheading clearly
47:55because Brian's son is beheaded and Cunning, who is his nephew, is beheaded.
48:02It's very bloody.
48:04Brian's forces prevailed, but it was to be a bittersweet victory.
48:09He was killed shortly after the battle by a Viking warrior.
48:15Brian had been at prayer in his tent at the time.
48:18Broder ran out of the woods and cut his way through the shield wall and swung at the king.
48:26The blow cut off the king's head.
48:29Then Broder called loudly, let word go from man to man.
48:34Broder, kill Ryan.
48:36Its significance has been talked up in later centuries to make it this epic narrative of good versus evil,
48:44Christianity versus paganism, Irish versus foreign oppressors.
48:48For centuries afterwards, the Battle of Clontarf would be portrayed as a significant victory for the Irish.
48:57And Brian would be seen as a martyr who gave his life for his country and his faith.
49:02Clontarf was far too important to be left simply to the hands of historians and instead it passed into the hands of makers of legends.
49:18And he could be saved.
49:21He was found by the fighters.
49:24Who was a mystery of his dream?
49:26He was found the true leadership in the world.
49:27That's what he was doing toBY.
49:29He was inspired by the world to be left of his younger and their brother's father.
49:30The first game was all about the doubt.
49:32It was definitely something that he was disappointed.
49:35He was Wanna-kite.
49:37He was very lucky to be left in the world.
49:38He had a story of his childhood, And the world was who was killed.
49:41He waswant to be left two times a day.
49:44He was a no-kite man.
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