Consent and Early Irish Kingship in Medieval and Modern Memory, 1007-1754

Abstract

The cultural memory of early medieval Irish kingship has been deeply intertwined with contemporary politics in Ireland throughout the later Middle Ages and modern period. A tradition of interpreting early medieval kingship as based on the consent of the ruled has developed. This concept has been used by writers and political actors in the later Middle Ages, and modern period, to argue that consent also underpins political rulership in their time, or that it ought to. Such arguments can come from below, in the form of protests against power and attempts to negotiate power, or from above as justification for power, in each instance underpinned by an appeal to an early medieval precedent. In this way, the memory of the role of political consent to early medieval kingship has had an important function in Ireland’s political history and the cultural memory itself was reconstructed through this process. This dissertation considers three features of early Irish kingship that have been used to suggest that it was based on consent in later reconstructions: the recurring explanation of kingship as a contract between kings and the communities they ruled over in early medieval texts, the institution of the óenach, the assembly of a túath or túatha presided over by a king, and the succession of kings through election by the communities they ruled. These three features of early Irish kingship are treated as what Jan Assmann has called figures of memory, subjects that are understood to have existed within a fixed time, but which later societies repeatedly reconstruct through recollection. This reconstruction occurred through the copying of early medieval texts in later periods, in the creation of new texts about the past, and in political action that sought to recreate institutions believed to have existed in the Early Middle Ages. Three key points are examined between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries in which the recollection of one or more of these three figures of memory intersected with contemporary political discourse and practice, which in turn altered the way in which early medieval kingship was remembered. The first point that is examined is the resurrection of the Óenach Tailten in the eleventh century and Cúán úa Lothcháin’s poem beginning “A chóemu críche Cuind caín”, written on the occasion, which reimagined how an early óenach functioned. The second point is the copying of early Irish laws surrounding kingship in Máel Íosa’s Book, an early sixteenth century miscellany, and the appearance of similar concepts of kingship legitimized by consent, explicitly described as ancient and Irish, in documents recording the submissions of Irish local rulers in the courts of the English crown and its representatives in Ireland in the same period. The third point is the publication of Charles O’Conor’s Dissertations on the Antient History of Ireland, an antiquarian work which synthesized these concepts that had been developing in the Gaelic cultural memory and presented them to an Enlightenment-era, English-speaking audience, allowing for an alignment of Gaelic cultural identity and popular constitutionalism from which Irish Republicanism would develop. Studied together these successive instances of reconstruction reveal an evolution of Gaelic political thought that occurred through a repeated re-imagination of the past. Gaelic culture has been characterized as backward looking and as a result, conservative in its modes of political organization. However, by following the cultural memory of the role of consent in early Irish kingship we can see a pattern of Gaelic societies adapting to or creating new modes of political organization by understanding them as continuations of a traditional practice.