Analysis: the great households of medieval Ireland were experts at wielding their hospitality and their power at Christmas festivities
Many Irish people will know what it's like to feel anxious about whether the hospitality offered to Christmastime visitors is sufficient: was enough tea offered, was the 'good china’ used, were there any ‘fancy biscuits’ left? If the welcome isn’t warm enough, or the meal not lavish enough, will people wonder about the size of your wallet or the sophistication of your taste? These anxieties are as prevalent today as they were in the Middle Ages, when the élites of medieval Ireland hosted great Christmas celebrations to impress others not just with their hospitality, but also with their power and authority.
On Christmas Day, 1351, William Ó Ceallaigh, ruler of Uí Mháine, did just that when he invited ‘the learned of Ireland, travellers, the poor and the indigent … both good and bad, noble and ignoble’ to a grand dinner at his recently built castle on the shores of Lough Ree. The revellers likely relished the kinds of food much prized by our medieval ancestors: beef, pork, and oatcakes slathered with butter and honey. It’s said that so many guests showed up that temporary housing had to be built for them. The festive feast was such a success that it gave rise to the Irish-language saying, Cuireadh fáilte Uí Cheallaigh romhainn (‘We got the O’Kelly welcome’), to describe outstanding hospitality.
A few decades later James Butler, 4th earl of Ormond and one of Ireland’s foremost political figures, spent Christmas 1393 at New Ross in a manner befitting his high rank. The shopping list for his festivities was lengthy: dozens of sacks of grain, hundreds of kinds of poultry and fish, ‘60 good bullocks; 4 boars; 80 large pigs; 60 small pigs’, and more. It seems safe to assume that the earl’s household was well fed that year.
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Admittedly, not every guest at a royal Irish feast walked away impressed. In 1397, the Catalan pilgrim Ramon de Perellós was the guest of Niall Óg Ó Néill, king of Tír Eoghain. He wrote that the nobles of Niall Óg’s court were badly dressed, the king wiped his mouth on grass, and ‘there was no bread or wine’—although ‘great alms of oxflesh’ were distributed to the poor.
A generous table wasn’t the only way for the great households of medieval Ireland to make their power visible at Christmas. Leases often began or rents came due at this time of the year. In 988, when Máel Sechnaill mac Domnaill, king of Meath, seized control of Dublin, the city’s inhabitants agreed to pay him and his descendants ‘an ounce of gold for every garden, to be paid on Christmas night, for ever.’ Many tenants elsewhere in Ireland had to hustle to make the midwinter instalment of their rent. In the diocese of Cloyne, Cork, in the mid-fourteenth century, many were required to pay either a hen or a penny each Christmas.
Of course, Christmas was also a time when élites could have demands made on them. In 1401, Stephen Scrope began his governorship of Connacht and custody of Galway City and Athenry on Christmas Day—a weighty job to undertake at a time when tensions between Anglo-Irish lords and their Gaelic counterparts was high. Spare a thought, too, for the unfortunate William Roughead, bishop of Emly in Tipperary, who had to miss a meeting of parliament in Dublin in 1329 because he fell from his horse and broke three ribs on Christmas Eve.
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All the feasts described above are examples of what scholars term ‘soft power’: wooing people with gifts or opportunities so that they’re co-opted to your side rather than coerced. However, Irish Christmases also saw their fair share of ‘hard power’ incidents, when threats and military force were used.
Raiders from the Uí Cricháin of Monaghan travelled south to attack the monastic settlement at Termonfeckin, Louth, on Christmas night 1025, while in 1091, Muircheartach Ua Briain—king of Munster and a great-grandson of Brian Boru—launched a raid into Leinster territory. Even a pause in fighting for Christmas itself didn’t guarantee a happy new year. Edward Bruce, younger brother of Robert I of Scotland, invaded Ireland in 1315 aiming to become high king, and cut a swathe from Antrim south to the Midlands. He spent Christmas at a manor house he’d seized at Ballymore, Westmeath, but then razed the site to the ground as he left—surely making for a particularly bleak January for those left behind once Edward and his forces moved on.
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However, prominent people could also use ‘soft power’ events to remind their guests who it was who held the sword. Henry II of England held a lavish feast in Dublin during Christmas 1171. Many Gaelic Irish leaders travelled there to make their submission to him. The feast took place in a specially constructed post-and-wattle palace near to the present-day College Green. The historian Gerald of Wales tells us that the guests ‘greatly admired the sumptuous and plentiful fare’ and ‘the most elegant service’, but that ‘in obedience to the king’s wishes’, they had to eat ‘the flesh of the crane, which they had hitherto loathed.’ Cranes rarely end up on a dinner menu thanks to their unpleasant taste and tough texture.
Deliberately serving up something that he knew his guests would find difficult to choke down demonstrates that, like many others who celebrated Christmas in medieval Ireland, Henry knew what made for an effective festive power play.
This is an edited extract of the author's piece as published in Christmas & The Irish: A Miscellany (Wordwell) edited by Salvador Ryan
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Professor Yvonne Seale is a historian of medieval women and the social history of religion at SUNY Geneseo.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
