Scéal: Going out out for a night in medieval Ireland meant food, merriment, social interaction, sensitive harpists and some odd entertainment
By Katharine Simms, TCD
Medieval Gaelic society was almost entirely rural and people lived scattered across the countryside with little in the way of urban centres or even substantial villages. Consequently occasions for foregathering, whether fairs, saint's days or feasts, held a particular importance.
In the high middle ages, the most formal banquets were hosted by an over-king (ruiri or tighearna) ruling a territory approximating to a modern county, with the local rulers or chieftains (taoisigh) and their families attending as honoured guests. To avoid any disputes or rivalry over precedence, a chief officer of any king's household was the reachtaire or ruler of the feast, who organised the sequence in which guests were served and even the precise cuts of meat each received.
Literary sources also refer to the king’s orator as a master of ceremonies, who could still any drunken quarrels among the guest by knocking a wooden gavel or shaking a stick hung with bells. The weapon racks that adorned the halls were intended to disarm the warriors before they took their seats.
A Lidar model of the Tech Midchuarta banqueting hall at the Hill of Tara
The oldest depiction of the Tech Midchuarta ('House of Mead Circulation'), the legendary feasting-hall at Tara, is found in the 12th-century Book of Leinster. Instead of a circular structure typical of the pre-Viking period, the diagram depicts a long rectangular hall with a vat of mead at one end and guests ranged on banks against the wall on either side in two tiers.
References in the law-texts indicate that the front tiers are composed of lower ranks sitting on the ground with their backs against the knees of the noble guests on the banks or benches. The labels on the Book of Leinster diagram refer to waiters, porters, fishermen, jesters, students, professional chess-players and instrumentalists.
Although this is meant to show a banquet held by the high-king at Tara, the honoured guests are only nobles and scholars rather than subject kings, suggesting the scribe is imagining the feast of a regional king in his own day. Down the middle of the hall runs a long spit, and each grade and profession in society is allotted a particular cut of meat. There are no tables or chairs.
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The twelfth-century satirical text Aislinge Meic Con Glinne (The Vision of Mac Conglinne) confirms many of these details. Here, the King of Munster is possessed of a demon of greed. To achieve a cure, the king is roped against the wall on a bed or bank, while the eccentric scholar Mac Conglinne sits cross-legged before him and deliberately tempts him with delicious meat roasted on spits.
'Taking his knife out of his girdle, he cut a bit off the piece that was nearest to him, and dipped it in the honey that was on the aforesaid dish of white silver…putting it into his own mouth…He cut a morsel from the next piece, and dipping it in the honey, put it past Cathal's mouth into his own.’ The demon of greed was so tantalised that he jumped out of the king’s mouth. MacConglinne immediately prevented his return and ordered the king a soothing draught of ‘new milk and fresh butter…boiled along with honey’.
At the end of the 14th century an eye-witness account of the Great O'Neill’s Christmas feast again confirms the absence of tables and chairs. and states the meat was carried in on spits. As a great delicacy, the foreign visitor was sent two cakes of ‘quickbread’, bread made by setting fire to a sheaf of oats to harden the grain so that it could be ground immediately after reaping. He reported that they were burnt black and full of ashes, "as thin as wafers and as pliable as raw dough", but proved to be very tasty.
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Surprisingly the same observer, Ramon de Perellós, claimed there was no alcohol at O’Neill’s feast, that the nobles drank milk, and common people beef broth. His assertion was repeated by another pilgrim, Bishop Chiericati, in the early 16th century. This is of course contradicted by Irish reports, which record malting and brewing, and indeed drunkenness from the earliest times. The discrepancy might be accounted for by the sporadic availability of alcohol in the earlier middle ages. Ale was freshly brewed for specific festivities and wine depended on the arrival of merchant ships.
But the late 14th century saw the invention of whiskey (aqua vitae, the ‘water of life’ or uisce beatha), most probably developed by Irish medical students in imitation of the relatively recent invention of brandy they would have encountered when studying in France and Spain. This allowed for the long-term storage of alcohol, and whiskey quickly became a staple of the chieftains’ feasts from about 1400 onwards. In the same period, a migration of herring shoals from the Baltic to the Atlantic led to increased trade along the western coast of Ireland, much of which involved the exchange of fish for Spanish wine.
There were singers of Fenian lays, jugglers and clowns. Some of the latter were professional farters, who mooned the audience as they performed
The increased wealth this trade brought to the Irish chiefs in the west of Ireland is marked to this day by the spread of 15th and 16th-century tower houses. Bardic poems addressed to the feasting nobles begin now to refer to tables and chairs in their halls. The bardic poets themselves were only part of an elaborate floor show that entertained guests at these feasts. Together with harpists (who were notoriously insistent on a respectful silence as they played), there were singers of Fenian lays, jugglers and clowns.
Some of the latter were professional farters, who mooned the audience as they performed. Even the twelfth-century MacConglinne was prepared to join in such activity: ‘[he] tied his shirt over the rounds of his fork … in this wise he began juggling for the host from the floor of the royal house (a thing not fit for an ecclesiastic) and practising satire and buffoonery [bragitoracht, lit. ‘farting’] and singing songs; and it has been said that there came not before his time, nor since, one more renowned in the arts of satire’.
The feasts an overlord held for his subjects at Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide were balanced by a series of reciprocal feasts for the ruler and his retinue given by each of his chief vassals in the ‘coshering season’ between Christmas and Shrovetide. The food-rents of the vassals were countered by gifts of clothing and weapons from their lord. In all of this merriment and social interaction, the food - as long as it was fresh, plentiful and distributed with due regard to social precedence - may regrettably have been of secondary importance.
This is an edited extract of the author's piece as published in Irish Food History: A Companion (Royal Irish Academy)
Dr Katharine Simms is a researcher with the Bardic Poetry Project in the Department of Irish and Celtic Studies at TCD, and the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. She is a former Irish Research Council awardee.
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