ANCIENT IRISH CIVILISATION [Illustration: PLAN OF TARA, AS IT EXISTS AT THE PRESENT DAY. Constructed to illustrate Dr. Joyce’s Social Histories of Ancient Ireland. From the two Plans given by Petrie in his Essay on Tara.] THE STORY OF ANCIENT IRISH CIVILISATION BY P. W. JOYCE, LL.D., M.R.I.A. _One of the Commissioners for the Publication of the Ancient Laws of Ireland President of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, Ireland_ LONDON: LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. DUBLIN: M. H. GILL & SON, LTD. 1907 _Printed by_ PONSONBY & GIBBS, _University Press, Dublin_. PREFACE. This little book has been written and published with the main object of spreading as widely as possible among our people, young and old, a knowledge of the civilisation and general social condition of Ireland from the fifth or sixth to the twelfth century, when it was wholly governed by native rulers. The publication comes at an appropriate time, when there is an awakening of interest in the Irish language, and in Irish lore of every kind, unparalleled in our history. But the book has a further mission. There are many English and many Anglo-Irish people who think, merely from ignorance, that Ireland was a barbarous and half-savage country before the English came among the people and civilised them. This book, so far as it finds its way among the two classes above mentioned, will, I fancy, open their eyes. They will learn from it that the old Irish, so far from being barbarous, were a bright, intellectual, and cultured people; that they had professions, trades, and industries pervading the whole population, with clearly defined ranks and grades of society, all working under an elaborate system of native laws; and that in the steadying and civilising arts and pursuits of everyday life they were as well advanced, as orderly, and as regular as any other European people of the same period. They will find too that, as regards education, scholarship, and general mental culture, the Irish of those early ages were in advance of all other countries of Europe; that they helped most materially to spread Christianity, and to revive learning, all over the Continent; and that to Irish missionaries and scholars, the Anglo-Saxons of the Heptarchy were indebted for the greater part of their Christianity, and for the preservation and restoration of learning when it was threatened with extinction all over England by the ravages of the Danes. But there were, and are, Englishmen better informed about our country. More than three hundred years ago the great English poet, Edmund Spenser, lived for some time in Ireland, and made himself well acquainted with its history. He knew what it was in past ages; so that in one of his poems he speaks of the time “When Ireland flourishèd in fame Of wealth and goodnesse, far above the rest Of all that beare the British Islands name.”