Collectanea de rebus hibernicis

Vallancey: The Collectanea, Vol 1

Though often derided by his contemporaries and later critics for his more outlandish theories, Vallancey arguably did more than almost anyone else in the late 18th and early 19th century to stimulate interest in Irish archaeology and history. Much of this was accomplished through the essays and papers he published in his Collectanea, through which he reached an educated audience.

Let’s take a deeper dive into the Collectanea (pronounced, I have found, collecTAYnea) now. But be warned – these are  my own quirky interests on display here, not a scholarly analysis. I can’t always account for what catches my attention, but isn’t that the real delight of browsing a set of volumes like this – the treasures you will unearth? The other pleasure is just holding it – the feel and smell of such old books, and getting used to the typeface. 

There’s another reason too – the provenance of the set. Hidden inside Volume IV is a telling letter (above) that proves that this set originally belonged to Abraham Abell (1783 – 1851). A vital figure in the antiquarian community of Cork, Abell was  a true eccentric who amassed an enormous library, burnt it all in 1848, and then started again to amass thousands more. In his retirement, he rented a room in the Cork Institute (now the Crawford Art Gallery) where he lived out the rest of his days with his thousands of books stacked from floor to ceiling.

We know that this set of the Collectanea belonged to his first library since it was given to him in 1841 by John Bennett, and that somehow it was not consumed in the burning. I have read two accounts of the burning – one that he did it in a depressive episode, the other that he did it to make room so he could start afresh. However it happened, it’s a minor miracle that the set has survived that cataclysmic event.

Vol 1 begins with A Chorographical Description of the County of West-Meath,1682, by Sir Henry Piers, accompanied by a map of the county. Vallancey published this in 1770 and it is likely that the map dates to then rather than the 1680s, when map-making was far more rudimentary. Chorography, a word not much in use nowadays refers, according to Wikipedia, to the art of describing or mapping a region or district.

While some of the introduction especially refers to the geographical features of the country, much of it, in fact is made up of descriptions of customs, ancient battles, significant places (e.g. Cat’s Hole Cave), ruined monasteries and saints, ways of making a living, and accounts of the degenerate English and oppressive landlords.

Piers belongs in the ranks of those who believe the English civilised the Rude and Barbarous Irish, although he admits that some are not quite civilised to this day. By degenerate, Piers meant Englishmen who had ‘gone native’, married Irish women, spoke Irish and fostered their children with Irish families. From men this metamorphosed, he queries, What could be expected? He admits that English Kings neglected Ireland and that there was substantial corruption among officers of justice. The Irish, he says are given to learning and hospitality and the women are generally beautiful, and love highly to set themselves out in the most fashionable dress they can attain. However, the landlords of old, by which he presumably means the Irish clan heads, were and still are great oppressors of their tenants.

He describes agricultural practices (very dysfunctional and leading to many quarrels) and Bearded Owen’s Law, by which shares in bog-cutting are apportioned, and the practice of driving the cattle through water once a year. Marriages (above) are negotiated between parents and friends on each side. He writes about the May bush, bonfires on St John’s Eve, wakes more befitting heathens than Christians, and the practice of the Month’s Mind (below) which involved a great feast and many masses said in the house, after which every priest and friar is discharged with his largess.

I’ve only picked out a few details from the essay on Westmeath, but you can see from these examples what an incredibly valuable this resource is. We have very few descriptions like this of what life was like in 17th century Ireland, and the fact that Vallancey recognised its importance and published it says much about his appreciation for Irish customs and lore.

The second document is a Letter from Sir John Davis written to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury (above) in 1607. This was shortly after the Battle of Kinsale (1601) which marked the end of the power of the old Gaelic families. In this letter, Davis describes the state of the counties of Monaghan, Fermanagh and Cavan, in preparation for a visit by the earl. 

In 1607 Hugh O’Neill (above) had been restored to his estates in Tyrone following the Treaty of Mellifont, but was to lead his followers into exile in 1607, an act known as The Flight of the Earls. This cleared the way for the English to plan a plantation – the Plantation of Ulster became in effect what established the modern jurisdiction of Northern Ireland. And that’s exactly what is described in the letter – who owns what land (including clerical lands) and what should be done with it. It’s crucial to understanding the development of modern Ulster. That’s a plantation map, below, but not from this volume. It lays out what land the haberdashers could have, or the skinners or the drapers.

And next – who have we here? It’s none other than Archbishop James Ussher (1581 – 1656), later the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland. This is the same man who established to his own satisfaction that the world was created on 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC. Harmless speculation, you say? Alas not so – there are many people in the world today who still believe this, and it was certainly a commonplace belief up to the 20th century.

[Aside – what is extraordinary to me is that Trinity College still has his portrait proudly on display (below) in their Exam Hall. Meanwhile, George Berkeley is being erased from their history – correctly, perhaps – but for the same crime of being ‘a man of his time.’]

Ussher’s piece was written originally written in his own hand in 1609. It is titled Of the Origin and First Institution of Corbes, Erenachs, and Termon Lands. All these were common terms on the early Irish monastic system, to denote land holdings and those who held them. For example, a Termon was thought to be a sanctuary, hence the town of Termonfeckin was originally Tearmon Feichín, or St Feichín’s Sanctuary. Corbe was more usually given as Coarb. In the period following the dissolution of the monasteries, and the plantations that followed the Battle of Kinsale, there was a need to define these terms so that the land could be divided among English settlers. This is a very difficult treatise, written half in Latin, which lays out the meaning and origin of the terms and also the men who held the lands, to whom they paid rents or annuities, or owed labour. Ussher disingenuously disclaims any interest in this treatise besides having described without any partiality the meaning of the terms.

However, a little reading in the late lamented Peter Harbison’s Cooper’s Ireland yields the information that Ussher, in fact, had possession of Termonfeckin. Here’s what Harbison says: 

This ‘palace’, referred to as ‘Termonfechan’ by Austin Cooper, was named after a monastery that once stood on this site, founded by Saint Fechín of Fore in the seventh century.

But the reason why the primate – that is, the Archbishop of Armagh – should have a palace here at all was not out of homage for this early Irish saint. It had much more to do with the religious politics of the later mediaeval period, when the Archbishop – usually an Englishman by birth – was surrounded by native Irish whose language he did not understand. He felt much safer when he could get away from his See at Armagh and reside at Terminfeckin, the southernmost tip of his Archdioceses, and its nearest point to the centre of English power in Dublin some 35 miles away.

The siege mentality of those within is reflected in the small, defendable window slits inserted in the severe looking wall face, as seen in Coopers drawing…Its last inhabitant had been…Archbishop James Ussher.

A Short Account of Two Ancient Instruments, by Vallancey follows. Here we can see many references to Phoenicians and Egyptians. He had recourse to the writings of Homer to inform us that the weapons of the Trojan war were made of copper, thus, of course, implying a Classical date for them. He rambles on about Sabean priests, Arkite forms of worship and fire feasts of Baal, before finally getting to describe the instruments – neither of which appear relevant to the previous discourse. In this case, the instrument are of silver. There is no attempt to interpret their use, and they certainly don’t look like musical instruments but rather perhaps cloak fasteners. 

I had intended to cover all of Vol 1 in this post, but I am not even half-way through. I will have to get a lot better at skimming and summarising if I am ever to emerge from this mountain. But I am hoping that this gives you a flavour of not only the diversity but also the value of the Collectanea. In the first 250 pages alone we have had original documents, not by Vallancey (except for the ‘Instruments’) but collected and published by him, that are invaluable to the understanding of Irish history and culture. This – the collecting, preserving and publishing important documents, as well as listing where others can be found (see Part 1) – may in fact have been his greatest contribution to Irish scholarship. 

I’ll finish with an illustration from one of the Volumes – it is not identified and is certainly not by Vallancey. In fact it looks like one of Beranger’s. Perhaps one of our readers might know what ruin this is. [EDIT: identified! See comments below] The lead image, by the way – the portrait of Vallancey, is taken from VH Andrews’ essay on Charles Vallancey and the Map of Ireland (see previous post) and is described as from an oil painting by Solomon Williams.

Charles Vallancey: A Colossus and his Collectanea

General Charles Vallancey, in the words of one of his biographers, ‘bestrode the world of Irish antiquarians for almost half a century.’ *

His origins are shrouded in mystery – although he is believed to have been born in Flanders to a French family, moved to England as a child, and attended Eton, there is no absolute proof of any of these facts of his early life. Even the date of his birth is contested – any time between 1720 and 1726. What is certain is that he joined the army, was posted to Ireland before 1760 as a military engineer, and spent the rest of his life, until his death in 1812, engaged with many aspects of Ireland, the country that one writer has called the great love of his life. Given that he had three wives (or maybe four) and twelve children (or maybe only 10, or maybe 15), that’s quite an assessment.

Dublin’s oldest bridge still in use, photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It was designed by Vallancey and originally called the Queen’s Bridge, but re-labelled the Queen Maeve Bridge after independence, and eventually the Mellows Bridge

As a military engineer, Vallancey made real contributions: mapping and surveying large tracts of Ireland including the bogs and the canal systems; proposing a major transport route for Cork which, had it been realised, would have greatly aided trade and commerce in Ireland; building strong defences, such as on Spike Island; designing elegant bridges, and supervising the construction of an earlier version of the famous Dun Laoghaire Pier.

His cartographic achievements have been praised by experts – the extract above from a map of Tipperary is from Charles Vallancey and the Map of Ireland** by JH Andrews, our foremost cartographic historian who notes that Vallancey’s cartographic achievements were far from negligible. He made copies, in Paris, of the Down Survey Maps that had been lost to Ireland when they were captured by the French in 1707 en route from London to Dublin (unfortunately, those copies were destroyed in the Four Courts Fire of 1922).

But it was as an antiquarian that Vallancey made his greatest, and most controversial mark. He was a member, sometimes a founding member, of the serious societies of the time – the Dublin Society, the Royal Irish Academy and its important Committee of Antiquities, and the short-lived Hibernian Society of Antiquarians. Nevin tells us that at least three academic honours were conferred on Vallancey in the 1780s. He received an LLD from Dublin University in 1781 and became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1784: he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1786. Even the French Academy of Belles-Lettres and Inscriptions honoured him.

Unusually for the English and the landed classes living in Ireland at that time, he learned Irish. This allowed him to become familiar with the ancient manuscripts and annals which were being discovered and conserved at the time, and to translate some of them, including fragments of the Brehon Laws. It also led to his interest in Ogham, an alphabet used for inscriptions in stone in a form of Old Irish and he recorded examples of Ogham and reported on others.

His interest in antiquities, fostered by his extensive travels around the Island,  led him to record and draw many, including early plans of Newgrange, and to support the efforts of others, including Beranger, and perhaps Bigari, to record them. In some cases, Vallancey’s drawings are the only early records we have of some monuments.

Most importantly, Vallancey, even if he didn’t always get it right, strove to establish for Ireland and the Irish, a noble heritage, far from the view of most Englishmen at the time of a benighted people speaking a savage tongue. In this, he prefigured the work of Petrie, Wilde, Windel and others to show how the Irish past, and incredible heritage of archaeology, language and mythology, could stand against that of any civilisation. 

His least known but most important contribution to Irish scholarship was his Rerum Hibernicarum, Scripti, et Impressi. This is a handwritten

alphabetical list of material relating to Irish history divided into two sections; a list of manuscripts held in multiple archives and a supplementary list of printed works. The volume is undated, but as the most recent printed work cited is from 1777 the compilation was probably made shortly after this time.

Taking the long way home: the perambulations of Harvard MS Eng 662, Rerum Hibernicarum, Scripti et Impressi, by Charles Vallancey

Dr David Brown

The Rerum Hibernicarum disappeared – it had an interesting journey, entertainingly told by David Brown in his essay for the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, in which a digital copy now resides. An incredibly valuable piece of research, it was the seminal book that initiated a more rigorous approach to Irish studies in the nineteenth century by providing sources for Irish manuscripts, folklore and language to the next generation of antiquarians. Brown says:

All four men, Larcom, Todd, O’Donovan and O’Curry, were committed members of the Royal Irish Academy, the institution Vallancey had co-founded in 1785. Together, this quartet placed Irish studies on a scientific basis and at the centre of Ireland’s main places of scholarship.

Vallancey’s best known work was his Collectanea de rebus hibernicis – Collection of Irish Matters. It is also his most complex and most characteristic – containing as it does a staggering variety of materials, much of it written by him. It contains work by others too, sometimes credited and sometimes presented as if written by Vallancey. He published it himself in limited editions, so that now it is very rare. 

I am honoured to have been entrusted with a set to examine and write about, by Inanna Rare Books and have spent many happy hours browsing through the volumes. Reading it thus, from cover to cover, I began to see how enormously clever he was – and how obsessed, as he returns again and again to his favourite theme: that the Irish were a noble race descended from the ancient Phoenicians.

In this pursuit, Vallancey was not merely riding a personal hobby horse. In fact, he was very much in the mainstream of European intellectual thought. Vallancey believed that the Irish people were descended from the Scythians, Phoenicians, and Indians, and he used linguistic analysis, comparative mythology, and archaeological evidence to support his claims. In his essay, Phoenician Ireland: Charles Vallancey (1725–1812) and the Oriental Roots of Celtic Culture, Bernd Roling posits that Vallancey’s work, while ultimately based on speculation, reveals the powerful influence of ‘orientalizing’ models of history that were popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. He argues that Vallancey’s work is not simply a collection of outlandish ideas but rather a reflection of the enduring influence of ‘baroque’ antiquarianism and its commitment to finding connections between cultures and languages, even if these connections were ultimately based on speculation and incomplete understanding of the past.

Perhaps it was his enthusiasm for technology and the continuous journeys through Ireland required by his work that led Vallancey to find there the great love of his life of his life, namely Ireland herself. . . 

In the eighteenth century Ireland was not the centre of the world. It was a land dominated and exploited by England, with a rural population who were regarded as barbarians at best by the gentlemen at home in the clubs and coffee houses of England’s cities. For them, the native language of the Irish was no more than an incomprehensible squawking that needn’t be accorded any further significance. Would it not, then, be a magnificent surprise, almost a humbling of Anglophile arrogance, if the Irish turned out to be the descendants of the ancient Chaldees, Phoenicians, Scythians and Indians, the crowning jewel in a chain of heroic acts reaching back into a prehistory, which was able to supersede any other chain of historical events? Would it not be a wonder if the Land of Saints and Scholars, with its ancient monuments, poetry and songs, were the final record of a primordial European people whose wisdom united the learning of the whole ancient East?

Yes, indeed, Vallancey, himself a bit of an outsider, was consumed with the need for that humbling of Anglophile arrogance. Unfortunately, as with anyone blindly obsessed with a cause, and simultaneously lacking self-doubt, this led him into many false conclusions and leaps of imagination in his interpretations of how Irish Gaelic related to ancient and oriental languages. His philological arguments were thoroughly debunked, starting almost immediately upon publication. 

And it wasn’t just language – he had equally startling views about round towers, proposing that they were built by Scythians. He suggested that they were part of the “Scytho-Phoenician settlement of Ireland” and linked to ancient Chaldean religion. He drew on the work of other scholars to support his argument, citing the discovery of similar towers, called misgir or “fire towers,” in the Volga region formerly inhabited by the Bulgars. Vallancey also referenced Geoffrey Keating’s account of a druid named Midghe, who supposedly taught the Irish the use of fire during the third invasion by the followers of Nemed (from the Book of Invasions, a mythological origin story for Irish History). This association with fire, combined with the architectural similarities to the towers in the Volga region, led Vallancey to believe that the round towers served as observatories for an astral, or sun-worshipping, cult that had been brought to Ireland by the Phoenicians.

Similarly, with ogham, an early Irish script mainly found carved into standing stones, he argued that the word ogham itself was derived from Sanskrit, meaning ‘sacred or mysterious writing or language’ and pointed to the visual similarities between ogham and the Old Persian cuneiform script found at Persepolis as further evidence of an oriental connection. This view aligned with his broader theories about the druids as practitioners of a sophisticated astral cult with origins in Chaldea and connections to the Indian Brahmans

His research on ogham was extensive, including the study of ogham inscriptions and the publication of scholarly articles and drawings of ogham stones in his Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis. Next week, we will take a deep dive into that Collectanea. Meanwhile, I’ll try to figure out how to pronounce that word correctly.

*General Charles Vallancey 1725-1812 by Monica Nevin. The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland , 1993, Vol. 123, pp. 19-58

** Charles Vallancey and the Map of Ireland, JH Andrews. The Geographical Journal, March 1966. Available here. Highly recommended if you want to know more about Vallancey as a map maker, which is slightly outside the scope of this series.