| Before
their political eclipse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Gaelic people of
Ireland and northern Scotland had lived since prehistoric times in a society which was
tribal and pastoral in nature, and whose essential elements had come together toward the
beginning of the medieval period. Gaelic society in the early eighth century A.D. thus
represented a fusion between the old pagan, Heroic traditions and culture and the new
Christian society with its scholarship and monasticism.
This fusion, in its inception, was the bed
upon which Gaelic society would flower. It was a cultural synthesis born of a long history
of ethno-tribal relationships on Irish soil, and it would, through invasions by Vikings
(mainly Norwegians) and Normans, attain new equilibriums with each contact, and continue
on in its essentially Gaelic fashion. The resultant culture would maintain its vitality
well into the modern period, retaining both its ancient flavor and the universality of its
appeal. Far from being on the retreat, it would absorb the Viking and Norman invaders,
while by its own expansion it would convert the Picts of Albany (North Scotland) and the
Britons of Strathclyde (South Scotland) as well, covering most of medieval Scotland in the
process.
The absorption, however, of the Vikings and
Normans who settled in Gaeldom worked both ways. The Vikings brought towns, merchant and
seafaring expansion, and new blood. Their Norman cousins brought castles and mounted
knights in armor, both of which came to play a central role in all later political
struggles in the Gaelic areas. The Normans changed the face of Gaeldom forever with
efficient land use, encouraging the development of the previously emergent
"tribal-dynastic feudalism" of the native kings with a healthy infusion of their
own purely Norman feudalism. Thus, while the Normans were Gaelicized, the Gaels were
themselves Normanized as well.
Gaeldom in its sixteenth century heyday
consisted of a series of tribal kingdoms (tuaths) stretching from the bottom of Ireland,
clockwise, to the northern tip of Scotland. For most of their history these kingdoms were
under the often nominal or largely symbolic high-kingships of either Ireland or Scotland.
Medieval Scotland had in fact resulted from the ninth-century |
