Irish Antiquarians

Vallancey: The Collectanea 4 and 5 and Conclusion

As promised this will be a skip and a hop over Vols 4 and 5, as this is my last post and I want to leave time for a final evaluation of Vallancey and his work. I’m just going to pick out items that caught my attention or appealed to me for my own quirky reasons. For everything I write about, there will be a dozen that might appeal to you more. But then, as a friend of mine said recently about an interminable novel – we’ll be reading it at your funeral.

After his usual lengthy preface (this one is only 60 pages and yet another opportunity to talk about Phoenicians) we come to a series of short articles about archaeological objects.  Below is what archaeologists call a gorget – its a gold collar, beautifully worked. There are fewer than a dozen of them known from Irish contexts and they have some parallels with others found on the continent. 

Of solid gold, they were heavy and obviously made to be worn by a high-status individual, perhaps a king. Vallancey concludes it is a Druid’s (what else?) breast plate and christens it the Iodhan Morain. He comes to this conclusion by examining the Bible and accounts from ‘the Chaldees’. It is to be worn, he asserts, as the Druids are making their most solemn pronouncements. And while he’s on the subject of druids, here’s another one of his evidence-free assignment of purpose. This is what he calls the Liath Meisicith.

It is a box, the size of the drawing, and two inches deep, it is made of brass cased with silver : it contains a number of loose sheets of vellum, on which are written extracts of the gospel and prayers for the sick, in the Latin language, and in the Irish character. There are also, some drawings in water colours of the apostles, not ill executed : these are supposed to be the work of Saint Moling, the patron of that part of the country.

So – a fairly straightforward conclusion might be reached that this box dates from the medieval period and was some kind of Christian votive object, right? Alas no – for Vallancey sees only the absence of a cross or any other Christian symbol, and concludes that this is for containing incense or oil to be used as part of a druidic fire ceremony.

How this fire was communicated, I cannot pretend to say, but, as it is well known, that Cobalt ground up with oil, will lye an hour or more in that unctious state and then burst into an amazing blaze :  it is probable that the Druids, who were skilled chimysts, (for their days) could not be ignorant of so simple an experiment. A fire lying so long concealed, would afford them ample time for prayers and incantations.

I think this one example gives you, as a microcosm of the whole Collectanea,  how eagerness to embrace an exotic and far-fetched explanation, and shoehorn it into your overall theory, can get the better of a man. And it was this exact kind of thing that led to him being derided by his contemporaries and those who followed.

A final example, as it is meaningful to me – a little reliquary figure comes next. This figure bears a striking resemblance to one of the figures on St Manchan’s Shrine. One of the missing figures was located and returned to it – it’s known as the 11th figure and it’s on the far left, below.

Could this be a 12th – and what has happened to it? We know it was still extant when our old friend George Victor du Noyer was recording archaeological items – here is his sketch of the same one as in Vallancey’s volume, done in 1837.

I put the question to Dr Griffin Murray, author of the superb book on St Manchan’s Shrine and he told me that this one was known as the Beard Puller, that is was from Co Roscommon and was in the Trinity College Museum, but is now lost. It could definitely be from St Manchan’s the shrine, he says, although equally it could be from another one. Why is this little guy meaningful to me? Well, I subscribed to the publication of the book, and a reproduction of the 11th figure was my reward!

This section contains important illustrations of prehistoric objects – important because this was the first publication to bring them to the notice of the general public. I will use some of these to illustrate the rest of this post, so look out – they will not all relate to the text around them..

However, I am going to skip down now to a section called Proposals for collecting materials for publishing the ancient and present state of the several counties of Ireland. This is an significant section in that it lays out the need for actual knowledge of the country of Ireland, including its natural assets – air, water, geology, animals – and man-made such as buildings, charities, manufactures, and antiquities.

Vallancey lays out the questions to be answered. It all seems so elementary, doesn’t it – and that’s what is so staggering, that there could have been so little in-depth knowledge of the actual country at that time.  You might remember that we read about one of these county surveys for Westmeath in Vol 1. What a wealth of detail we might now have of life in 18th century Ireland if only this had been accomplished as Vallancey described it. My friend Amanda, of Holy Wells fame, would be particularly grateful!

The rest of this volume is taken up with A Vindication of the Antient History of Ireland, with lots of Vallancey’s pet theories on display. It contains a really excellent plan and section of Newgrange – a truly outstanding piece of mapping, given the fanciful nature of most drawing of prehistoric monuments of the time. His conclusion about Newgrange, that it was a Mithratic Fire Cave, turned out be in fact not so far-fetched as some of his other notions, given what we now know about the winter solstice at Newgrange. 

There is also some fascinating stuff about Irish paganism and Irish saints. The sequence is based on the mythological original story for Irish history called the Leabhar Gabhala. It’s a pity to give it such short shrift, but I am determined to press on and so I now pass to Volume 5, which is the last volume in the set. There is a Volume 6, and I can access that online only, so have decided to finish with the last volume I have been able to examine in person.

As you can see from the Table of Contents (which, by the way, never seems to be quite the same as the frontispiece that lays out What This Volume Contains), there is a certain amount of repetition here from previous sections on The Scythians, Ogham, the Chaldeans, and the Brehon Laws. So, I am going to confine myself to the part about the Irish Feudal System of Government, as it so well represents what it’s like to read Vallancey. 

After a preamble of many, many pages in which are mentioned the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, Aristotle, the Belgae, gold from Wicklow, Alexander the Great, Mr Wilkins (I’m not making this up), Aboul-Hassan-Aly, Armenians, the Empress of Russia (honestly), Father Georgius (who resided long with the Tibetans but who wrote in Latin, quoted at length here), the Huns (we might actually be Indo-Scythian-Huns, apparently), the Japanese, the Peruvians, the Great Mogul, Vallancey, perhaps not surprisingly informs us that the feudal system in Ireland was based on all of the above, except for two things.

The Tuarasdal, wages or subsidies paid annually by the sovereign to his feudatory chiefs, for which he received from them a certain supply of military forces, or some other state contributions tending to the common interest.

The Tribute for Protection. It is called in the Irish laws. . .  eneclann, (i. e. protection of the clann). . . It does not appear that these vassals were originally obliged to furnish troops for their chiefs, but to pay a certain impost or tax for their protection.

He’s particularly fond of the oriental influences here and to hammer home his point he provided a dictionary of topographical terms all of which he assures us come from Oriental Languages. Some examples, including their Arabian, Hebrew, Chinese, origins, etc:

My head hurts, so this is a good place to stop. How do I sum up this amazing man and his colossal and controversial achievements? The marvellous site Ricorso has a whole section on him which brilliantly sums up the person (although by one authority in here he has acquired 27 children!) and is worth reading in its entirety. The following quotes all come from there. It gives me the new information that Vallancey, despite all claims to the contrary, never actually learned Irish, although he owned a grammatical dictionary compiled by a school-teacher named Crab. One commentator, James Hardiman, confirms this, stating

 
It is well known, that the late General Vallancey obtained much literary celebrity, both at home and abroad, and, in fact, first acquired the reputation of an Irish scholar, by the collation of Hanno, the Carthaginian’s speech in Plautus. . . but it is not so well known that that speech had been collated many years before, by Teige O’Neachtain, an excellent Irish poet, and author of the extempore epigram, Vol. ii. p. 120, of this collection. Vallancey had this collation in O’Neachtan’s hand-writing, in his possession; and I am obliged (with regret) to add, that he never acknowledged the fact, but assumed the entire credit of the discovery to himself.

Thomas Davis says:

His “Collectanea”, and his discourses in the Royal Irish Academy, of which he was an original member, spread far and wide his oriental theories. He was an amiable and plausible man, but of little learning, little industry [not fair, I think], great boldness, and no scruples [nor this]; and while he certainly stimulated men’s feelings towards Irish antiquities, he has left us a reproducing swarm of falsehood, of which Mr. Petrie has happily begun the destruction. Perhaps nothing gave Vallancey’s follies more popularity than the opposition of the Rev. Edward Ledwich, whose Antiquities of Ireland is a mass of falsehoods, disparaging to the people and the country.

Here’s a good summation, from Joseph Leerssen


The successor of the Select Committee was the Hibernian Antiquarian Society, 1779-83, which in turn set in motion the creation of RIA in 1782, with Vallancey as one of its founding members. Vallancey was the son of a Huguenot émigré, Army officer; derided by many as a charlatan or at best a naive nitwit, Vallancey contributed few ideas of any value to the study of Gaelic antiquity, but much badly-needed enthusiasm, energy and social/religious respectability. He had founded his periodical Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis as a forum for antiquarianism. Further, it was the additional merit of Vallancey to open this world [of Ascendancy] enthusiasm for Irish antiquity] to his friend and mentor Charles O’Conor, in whose wake younger Gaelic, Catholic scholars like O’Halloran and Theophilus Flanagan could begin to function in close collaboration with Ascendancy Protestants.


So what have I concluded after lo these many weeks of sitting with Vallancey? The first is that it was a wonderful experience to be able to read the five volumes ‘in the flesh.’ The second was the whole things gave me a unique insight into the origins of my own discipline of Irish archaeology – how it was born out of a cauldron of claim and counter-claim, hubris and argument, ideology and fieldwork, nationalism and orientalism. None of that can be understood and appreciated without the towering, if ultimately misguided, figure of Charles Vallancey. Thank you, Holger of Inanna Rare Books, for this opportunity. 

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.