The Rock of Cashel is a dramatic limestone promontory standing proud above the flat, fertile lands of Co. Tipperary. From time immemorial, it has been a fortified position from which its possessors enjoy an unrivalled view of the countryside all around.
From the start of recorded history, it was the principal fortress of the kings of Munster. For most of the medieval period, the dynasty known as the Eóganachta dominated the province. Their dominance lasted until 976, when the small sub-kingdom of Dal Cais in what is now east Co. Clare suddenly began one of the more improbable adventures in all of Irish history.
It was the story of one remarkable man, Brian mac Cennétig, known ever after as Brian Ború. He succeeded his murdered brother as king of Dal Cais and within two years he had overthrown the Eóganachta kings and installed himself as king of Munster. By 1000, he was the effective ruler of the southern half of Ireland, having partitioned the island by agreement with Mael Seachnaill, king of the southern Uí Néill, who had previously claimed the high kingship of Ireland from his base at Tara in Co. Meath. This claim was as empty as all that had preceded it: the partition arrangement was, if nothing else, proof of that. But for Brian, it had been a stunning progress, from obscure provincial sub-king to effective warlord of half the island in a single lifetime.
Nor was he finished. In 999, he broke the truce and defeated a coalition of Mael Seachnaill and the Dublin Vikings and occupied Dublin for more than a month. In 1001, he launched himself against the southern Uí Néill. Mael Seachnaill found himself abandoned by allies, including the northern branch of his dynasty. His failure to compel his allies, even his own kin, is a stark demonstration of the limitations of kingly power in Gaelic Ireland. If an outstanding figure like Mael Seachnaill could not do it, who could?
Mael Seachnaill acknowledged Brian’s overlordship in 1002. In the following years, Brian pressed ever further north. In 1005, he secured the support of the see of Armagh, a key advance. This was the occasion that first caused him to be called Imperator Scottorum, or emperor of the Irish. The following year, he made a royal tour of Ulster without any opposition, although the stubborn little kingdom of Cenél Conaill in the very west of the province held out on him until 1011. In every year following the submission of Mael Seachnaill in 1002, Brian had felt required to assert himself in Ulster, making his royal progress and taking local hostages as an earnest of the local rulers’ submission to his power.
He was the nearest thing Gaelic Ireland had seen, or was ever to see, to a true high king. But this much abused term obscures as much as it illuminates. Brian was not a king in any common understanding of the word. He did not administer a territory from a secure, permanent capital. His legal writ did not run throughout the territory he claimed. He did not have any central revenue-raising powers. These were all characteristics of early European kingdoms: none were present in Brian Boru’s Ireland. And to be fair, even in Europe, they were for the most part characteristics of future, not present, royal kingdoms in the first decade of the eleventh century.
His hold on power was precarious. In 1011, a coalition of Leinster kingdoms and the Dublin Vikings rose against Brian’s overlordship. The issue was settled in 1014 at the Battle of Clontarf with a victory for Brian, but one that cost him his life as well as that of his fifteen-year-old grandson. His successors — taking the family name O’Brien in honour of his memory — were unable to emulate his achievements. Gaelic Ireland reverted to its previous pattern of local kings and contested boundaries. Brian’s kingdom of Munster did not hold together, breaking into two major units: Desmond and Thomond, respectively the southern and northern halves.
In 1101, the Rock of Cashel had been granted to the church and in due time it became the centre of the southern archdiocesan province, when the ecclesiastical reforms of the twelfth century were put in place. In the meantime, in 1127 one Cormac McCarthy, king of Desmond, commissioned the chapel on the Rock that has ever after borne his name.
It is an example of the Hiberno-Romanesque style then coming into vogue. The common European architectural style known as Romanesque developed from about 1000 and is characteristic of the next two centuries or so before the rise of Gothic. Unlike its successor style, it was characterised by rounded rather than pointed arches and a monumentality that drew in part on imperial Roman models and in part from Byzantium, at that time at the apogee of its cultural prestige.
The Irish variation of this common European theme is interesting for what it lacks as well as for what it contains. Compared to one of the great Romanesque cathedrals on the continent, the Irish versions lacked all monumentality. As before, Irish churches remained small, unassertive structures until the arrival of the Normans. But the mere fact that Romanesque had made its way to Ireland — although the pulse beat weakly — was significant. The kinds of external influences that had brought the Vikings to the island and would soon bring the Normans were not lost on the Gaelic kings.
Cormac MacCarthy wished his chapel to mimic the prevailing architectural fashion on the continent, although the building does contain some features characteristic of more traditional construction techniques. It was therefore, like the style it typifies, a hybrid. It is lavishly decorated, with evidence of continental craftsmen having contributed to it, and appears to have been intended as the king’s private chapel. It was consecrated in 1134.
A more substantial cathedral was later added on the Rock, but it was burned twice: once by Garret Mór Fitzgerald, the effective ruler of Ireland in the late fifteenth century, and then by Lord Inchiquin, the notorious arsonist, during the confused wars of the 1640s. After the first of these depredations, it is told that King Henry VII demanded to know what Garret Mór thought he was doing in burning the cathedral, to which he replied that he was sorry but he had thought that the archbishop was inside!
The apse of Angoulême cathedral in France, an example of exuberant European Romanesque.
