1014: Brian Boru & the Battle for Ireland (14 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

A
TTACK
!

T
he first-century Greek geographer and historian Strabo had written of the Celts: ‘The whole race is madly fond of war, high-spirited and quick to battle, and on whatever pretext you stir them up you will find them ready to face danger, even if they have nothing on their side but their own strength and courage.’ A
thousand
years later this was equally applicable to their Irish descendants.

The Gael and the Northmen had raw courage in common, and also their traditional method of attack. Warriors on both sides began by making menacing
gestures
and screaming insults at one another until their blood was sufficiently heated, then charged forward on a broad front, smashing their way into their opponents.
The side that did the most damage and broke the other’s nerve usually won.

Warfare would continue to be conducted in a more or less similar fashion until the twentieth century. The horrors of World War One, when hundreds of thousands of doomed soldiers were sent ‘over the top’ to certain death, had a profound effect on future combat.

In 1014 tribalism determined the composition of the Irish divisions. The noble lords of the Gael commanded their personal armies of warriors within the ranks of their battalions. But once the battle began, another factor took over. Princes and kings on both sides were easily identified by their banners. The leaders of the two great armies began deliberately targeting one another, as if in a Combat of Champions. Military cohesion began to break down.

Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh
offers the following lurid impression of the opening moments of the Battle of Clontarf: ‘There arose a wild, impetuous, precipitate, furious, dark, frightful, voracious, merciless, combative, contentious, vulture-like screaming and fluttering over their heads. And there arose also the satyrs, and the idiots, and the maniacs of the valleys, and the witches, and the goblins, and the ancient birds, and the destroying demons of the air and of the firmament, and the feeble demoniac
phantom host; and they were screaming and comparing the valour and combat of both parties.’

Beneath this wildly extravagant narrative lies a kernel of truth. The most epic of all Irish battles was
horrendous
in the extreme. Hand-to-hand combat with bladed weapons is physically exhausting. Cinema and television to the contrary, people do not automatically lie down and die when someone sticks a sword into them. The human hide is surprisingly tough. Considerable force is required to drive a blade into a person, and it is almost as difficult to pull it out. Even then your enemy may get to his feet and come at you again. The recently discovered skeleton of Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of
England
, reveals that he suffered a score of incredibly savage wounds before finally succumbing to a fractured skull.

Early in the day, the men of Connacht confronted the Danes of Dublin. A savage battle took place between them in which most of the combatants were killed. Of the Connachtmen, less than a hundred survived. With them died Murray, the Great Steward of Lennox. The Danes of Dublin lost all but twenty of their number. The valiant Dubhgall attempted to take the survivors to join another battalion, but his own survival would be brief. He was slain at the foot of the bridge which was
afterwards
given his name.

Anrud and his battalion in chainmail smashed full force into the Dalcassians, hacking and slashing their way amongst them. In that terrible onrush Murrough’s men fell back at first, but their leader stood firm as the blood began to spray around him. Swinging a sword in either hand – apparently he was one of the few Gaels to possess equal dexterity, striking left or right – Murrough charged headlong into the armoured battalion. Iron met iron and steel met steel. His men followed him. The weapons of the Dalcassians came to life with a mighty clashing against the thrice-riveted armour of their adversaries.

The observers watching from the battlements of Dublin claimed afterwards that they could see flashes of fire in the air all around the warriors.

They were surging back and forth across the uneven ground, up and down the hillocks, through the thickets, around the boulders, fighting every step of the way. There would be no pauses to catch one’s breath and no stop for a rest. When a warrior fell a replacement did not always hurry forward to fight in his stead; and even if one did, he would have to step over his predecessor’s body. If a man grew desperately thirsty – and fighting was thirsty work – he might be lucky enough to come upon a brook, or a spring, or some farmer’s well where he might slake his thirst, but that moment of inattention could easily earn
him a spear in the back.

Whatever moments of glory the combatants originally had imagined soon turned into physical anguish and agonising pain. There was no one available to tend the wounded. Not even a priest to pray over them. Nothing but the imperative to kill.

Murrough’s actions that morning were described by the chroniclers as ‘the fierce rushing of a bull, and the scorching path of a royal champion’. He was said to be the last man in Erin who was a match for a hundred. Against the odds, he and his Dalcassians finally hacked the armoured mercenaries to pieces. This unexpected turn of events so shocked Anrud that he ran amok across the fields, mindlessly dodging the spears thrown at him. The Irish annalists would call Brian Boru’s oldest son ‘the gate of battle, the hurdle of conflict, the sheltering tree and the impregnable tower’.

Those annalists, who were so effusive in their praise of the Gael, were not stinting in their praise of the
foreigners
. It was the Irish tradition for a man to respect the foe he defeated, rather than denigrating him. There was no glory in defeating a mediocrity. Consider the following: ‘The terrible swords maimed and cut the comely,
graceful
bodies of noble, pleasant, courteous, affable,
accomplished
men on both sides. There was the clashing of two
bodies of equal hardness, and of two bodies moving in contrary directions, in one place. And it is not easy to imagine what to liken it to; but to nothing small could be likened the firm, stern, sudden, thunder-motion; and the stout, haughty billow-roll of these people on both sides.’

In literature there are two views of the Battle of Clontarf, one presented by the Irish annalists and the other by the Norse sagas. The Irish rely on spectacular overstatement for their effect. The Norse rely on
tight-lipped
understatement. There is one noteworthy
exception
to this. Old Norse poetry includes ‘The Song of the Valkyries’ which prophesies the carnage of Clontarf. Gleaming with a dark and terrible splendour, it describes a crimson dawn painted by the blood of warriors as the battle maidens with flying hair ride forth on their wild horses, eager to claim the fallen heroes.

In the fields above the Irish Sea the warriors fought man to man and breast to breast, one grimacing face glaring into another. Those on one side who made a kill soon fell victim to someone from the other side.
Battlecrazed
warriors began taking trophy heads, in the style of the ancient Celts.

The conflict took on a life of its own. Seen from above it would have resembled a giant sprawling multicoloured beast clawing its way over the rolling land, a creature
with a broken back, perhaps, that twitched and spasmed, briefly revealing the dark gleam of metal scales along its sides.

Yet all was not as chaotic as it appeared, not at first. Brian had studied classical warfare. Through the chain of command, the few trusted princes to whom the Árd Rí had confided the full details of his battle plan passed the necessary information on to the ranking officers below them. These men were responsible for organising the warriors in the field. The ordinary foot soldier did not need to know the whole picture. All that was required was that he obey the commands of his immediate leader.

Sigurd the Stout had been wrong in his assessment of the battle. It was not quickly over. The Irish did not yield but they moved back slowly, one step at a time, giving away each foot of ground with the greatest reluctance. Forcing the foreigners to come after them.

The tide of battle flowed first one way, then another, but always and ultimately towards Magh Dumha on the heights, where stood Tomar’s Wood.

Although the main action took place on the
battleground
Brian had chosen, there was sporadic fighting elsewhere as well. In the rush to come ashore, several of the Viking ships had made landfall farther along the coast. Bones and remnants of weapons dated to this time
have been found at Fairview, in an area of Marino known until recently as ‘the Bloody Fields’, and on the strand of Sandymount below the walls of Dublin. For several hours tardy foreigners rushed to join their comrades.

Brian’s army had no reinforcements on the way. Every warrior the men of Erin could gather was already fully committed. Or should have been.

Through what became an interminable day the
inhabitants
of Dublin, including Sitric Silkbeard and his wife and mother, watched the fighting from the palisades along the Liffey. They could not see all of the action, or even the climactic moments, but they witnessed a
panorama
of fighting and killing sufficient to satisfy the most bloodthirsty observer. A chronicler relates, ‘The men and women who were watching from the battlements of Áth Cliath saw flashes of fire’ – the sun glinting off helmets and blades.

Swinging and slashing and cutting and chopping. Screams of fury; cries of agony. And still the battle went on.

According to Sitric Silkbeard, ‘not more numerous would be the sheaves floating over a great company
reaping
a field of oats than was the hair flying with the wind, cut away by heavy gleaming axes and by bright
flaming
swords.’ He supposedly remarked to his wife, Brian
Boru’s daughter, ‘Well do the foreigners reap the field; many is the sheaf they let go from them.’ Emer is said to have replied, ‘It will be at the end of the day that will be seen.’

The fiercest fighting took place in the centre of the battlefield. In the only statement of his which survives, Malachy Mór is reputed to have said, ‘I never saw a battle like it, nor have I heard of its equal. There was a field and a ditch between us and them, and the sharp wind of the spring coming over them towards us. In not more than the time it would take to milk two cows, not one person could recognise another, though it might be his son or his brother that was nearest him, unless he should know his voice. We were so covered, as well our heads as our faces, with the drops of gory blood, carried by the force of the sharp cold wind which passed over them to us. And even if we attempted to perform any deed of valour we were unable to do it, because our spears over our heads had become clogged and bound with long locks of hair which the wind forced upon us, so it was half occupation with us to endeavour to disentangle and cast them off. And it is one of the problems of Erin, whether the valour of those who sustained that crushing assault was greater than ours who bore the sight of it without running distracted before the winds or fainting.’

Again and again Brian Boru said to his attendant, ‘Your eyes are younger and sharper than mine, Laiten. Can you still see the standard of Prince Murrough?’ And Laiten replied, ‘I can indeed, lord; he is hewing his way across the battlefield with the enemy falling to the right and the left of him.’ Satisfied for a time, the old man knelt on his cushioned prayer stool and folded his hands.

Laiten did not tell the Árd Rí when he saw Flann’s banner go down, nor when Conor’s banner disappeared beneath the trampling feet of the foreigners. Brian
probably
did not ask. He knew too well the nature of battle.

Men died by the hundreds; then by the thousands. Maelmora, king of Leinster, was slain by Brian’s nephew Conaing, he of the ill-fated chess match at Kincora. The enmity between them lasted to the end; before he fell lifeless, Maelmora inflicted a fatal wound on Conaing.