Everything about High King Of Ireland totally explained
A
High King of Ireland (
Irish:
Ard Rí na hÉireann) is a historical or legendary figure who claimed lordship over the whole of Ireland. The High-Kingship was never a political reality in Ireland, but has a strong literary and folkore tradition.
The meaning of High Kingship
While the traditional list of those bearing the title "High King of Ireland" goes back thousands of years, into the second millennium BC, the earlier parts of the list are largely mythical. It is unclear at what point the list begins to refer to historical individuals, and also at what point these individuals can genuinely be said to be "High Kings" in the later sense of the word.
Most scholars believe that the idea of the High Kingship was a
pseudohistorical construct of the eighth century that placed a king of all Ireland atop the fragmented pyramid of kingship which actually existed at that time . This notion of a high kingship acted as a spur to greater centralisation and was converted into political reality by the middle of the ninth century. High Kingship claims were in the genealogies of many of the dominant septs, but were never a political reality. Until quite recently the development of the pre-
Norman kingship of Ireland has been expressed in simplistic terms, with both
unionist and
nationalist historians happy to portray pre-Norman Ireland as an immutable hierarchy of kings for their own purposes. In unionist historiography the picture painted has been one of tribal chaos, while that of nationalist historiography has been a Utopian harmony. Modern-day historians reject both of these portrayals as simplistic, presenting a history of Irish kingship that's more complex and parallels the development of national kingship elsewhere in Europe.
Sacral High Kings
Early Irish kingship was
sacral in character. In the early narrative literature a king is a king because he marries the sovereignty
goddess (Medbh), is free from blemish, enforces symbolic
buada (prerogatives) and avoids symbolic
geasa (
taboos). According to the
seventh and
eighth century law tracts a hierarchy of kingship and clientship progressed from the
rí (king of a single petty kingdom) through the
ruiri (a
rí who was overking of several petty kingdoms) to a
rí ruirech (a
rí who was a provincial overking). Each king ruled directly only within the bounds of his own petty kingdom and was responsible for ensuring good government by exercising
fír flaithemon (rulers truth), convening its
óenach (popular assembly), raising
taxes,
public works, external relations, defence, emergency legislation, law enforcement and promulgating legal judgement. The lands within the petty kingdom were held
allodially by various
fine (agnatic kingroups) of freemen with the king occupying the apex of a pyramid of clientship within the petty kingdom (progressing from the unfree population at its base up to the heads of noble
fine held in immediate clientship by the king) and so being drawn from the dominant
fine within the
cenél (a wider kingroup encompassing the noble
fine of the petty kingdom).
The kings of the
Ulster Cycle are kings in this sacred sense, but it's clear that the old concept of kingship coexisted alongside Christianity for several generations.
Diarmait mac Cerbaill, king of Tara in the middle of the 6th century, may have been the last king to have "married" the land, and indeed there are accounts from the century after Diarmait's death at the hands of
Áed Dub mac Suibni which have him killed by the Three-Fold Death - by wounding, by falling from a tree, and by drowning - and
Adomnán's
Life tells how Saint
Columba forecast the same death for Áed Dub. The same Three-Fold Death is said to have put an end of Diarmait's predecessor, Muirchertach macc Ercae, in a late poem, and even the usually reliably
Annals of Ulster record Muirchertach's death by drowning in a vat of wine.
A second sign that sacral kingship didn't disappear with the arrival of Christianity is the supposed law-suit between
Congal Cáech, king of the
Ulaid, and
Domnall mac Áedo. Congal was supposedly blinded in one eye by Domnall's bees, from whence his byname Cáech (half-blind or squinting), this injury rendering him imperfect and unable to remain High King. The enmity between Domnall and Congal can more prosaically be laid at the door of the rivalry between the
Uí Néill and the kings of Ulaid, but that a king had to be whole in body appears to have been accepted at this time.
Succession order
The business of Irish succession is rather complicated because of the nature of kingship in Ireland before the Norman take-over of 1171. Ireland was divided into a multiplicity of kingdoms, with some kings owing allegiance to others from time to time, and succession rules (insofar as they existed) varied. Kings were often succeeded by their sons, but often other branches of the dynasty took a turn - whether by agreement or by force of arms is rarely clear. Unfortunately the king-lists and other early sources reveal little about how and why a particular person became king. To add to the uncertainty, genealogies were often edited many generations later in order to improve an ancestor's standing within a kingdom, or to insert him into a more powerful kindred. The uncertain practices in local kingship cause similar problems when interpreting the succession to the high kingship.
The High King of Ireland was essentially a ceremonial, pseudo-federal overlord (where his over-lordship was even recognised), who exercised actual power only within the realm of which he was actually king. In the case of the southern branch of the Uí Neill, this would have been the Kingdom of Meath (now the counties of Meath, Westmeath and part of County Dublin). High Kings from the northern branch ruled various kingdoms in what eventually became the province of Ulster.
Nevertheless, the Uí Neill were apparently powerful in ceremony if not in politic, so that political unification of Ireland wasn't aided by the usurpation of the high kingship from Mael Sechnaill II and the southern Uí Niall in 1002 by
Briain ‘Boruma’ mac Cennédig, of the Kingdom of Munster. This was the third of the so-called "Three Usurpations of
Brian Boru."
Brian Boru was a strong king who could have unified Ireland politically, and there's some suggestion he intended to make himself High King of Scotland as well. But he was killed in the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, and twelve years as High King wasn't long enough to unify the island politically. Mael Sechnaill II was restored to the High Kingship but he died in 1022, too soon to undo the damage done by Brian's "coup." From 1022 through the Norman take-over of 1171, the High Kingship was held alongside "Kings with Opposition".
Because the native Irish high kingship never adopted any set of rules for succession, be they based on primogeniture or any other system, there can be no realistic
pretender to an Irish 'throne', and modern claims can't be taken seriously. Alternatively, given the great number of Irish kings in the early Middle Ages, it's scarcely possible to believe that there's one person of Irish descent today who doesn't also have kingly blood -- given the lack of rules of succession and the contrived genealogies of the time, all Irish males might lay claim to a kingship of one sort or another.
Early Christian High Kings
Even at the time the law tracts were being written these petty kingdoms were being swept away by newly emerging dynasties of dynamic overkings. The most successful of these early dynasties were the Uí Néill (encompassing descendants of
Niall of the Nine Hostages such as the Cenel Eoghain) who as kings of
Tara had been conquering petty kingdoms, expelling their rulers and agglomerating their territories under the direct rule of their expanding kindred since the fifth century. Native and foreign, pagan and Christian ideas were comingled to form a new idea of Irish kingship. The native idea of a sacred kingship was integrated with the Christian idea in the ceremony of
coronation, the relationship of king to overking became one of
tigerna (lord) to king and
imperium (
sovereignty) began to merge with
dominium (ownership). The church was well disposed to the idea of a strong political authority. Its clerics developed the theory of a high kingship of Ireland and wrote tracts exhorting kings to rule rather than reign. In return the
paruchiae (monastic federations) of the Irish church received royal patronage in the form of shrines, building works, land and protection. The concept of a high king was occasionally recorded in various annals, such as an entry regarding the death of
Máel Sechnaill mac Máele Ruanaid in 862 in the Annals of Ulster which lists him as
rí Érenn uile (king of all Ireland), a title which his successor,
Aed Finliath apparently never was granted. It is unclear what political reality was behind this title.
Later High Kings
By the twelfth century the dual process of agglomeration of territory and consolidation of kingship saw the handful of remaining provincial kings abandoning the traditional royal sites for the cities, employing ministers and governors, receiving advice from an
oireacht (a body of noble counsellors), presiding at reforming synods and maintaining standing armies. Early royal succession had been by alternation between collateral branches of the wider dynasty but succession was now confined to a series of father/son, brother/brother and uncle/nephew successions within a small royal
fine marked by an exclusive
surname. These compact families (O Brien of Munster, MacLochlainn of the North, O Connor of Connacht) intermarried and competed against each other on a national basis so that on the eve of the
Anglo-Norman incursion of 1169 we find the agglomeration/consolidation process complete and their provincial kingdoms divided, dismembered and transformed into fiefdoms held from (or in rebellion against) one of their number acting as king of Ireland.
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