Beyond the rose-tinted veil: meet the real women of medieval Ireland

Listen in for stories about soldiers for dowries, women running taverns under Christ Church Cathedral, the first woman to build a castle in Ireland before throwing her architect lover out the window, the life and times of Gráinne O’Malley, and the most detailed and engaging account of what the Brehon Laws really meant for women in medieval Ireland.

Tip: If you want to take this conversation out for a walk with you and just listen to it, open in the Substack App, and select ‘audio only’ above the video

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I’ve always been drawn to medieval Irish history. I mean, it is the most epic. Very “Game of Thrones,” as Gillian said, with all sorts of political intrigue and great betrayals, battles, and larger-than-life-personalities, and made all the better by the healthy dose of embellishment the professional poet-class—the spin doctors of their day—used to record such shenanigans to memory and vellum. I mean, some of the stuff they wrote is what I imagine would happen if Terry Pratchett teamed up with George R.R. Martin to write a film script, and then had it produced by the Monty Python lads. It’s surreal and brutal and brilliant.

I also think the very landscape of Ireland has something to do with my early childhood fascination with that past. Despite it being one of the most ‘far-away’ epochs in Ireland’s history, I would argue that medieval life left the most notable fingerprint. You can’t turn a corner on a back road in Ireland without suddenly being met with a Norman tower house, nor are you ever too far from some medieval monk’s cell, or church or monastery. Even the place-names in Ireland owe much of their origins to those times, with Kill or Cill, meaning ‘Church’ (from medieval Irish cell, from the Latin cella) being one of the most common Irish toponym elements. And then there’s the estimated 45,000 Raths—the homes of medieval nobles and ‘strong farmers’—that pattern the aerial view of Ireland in majestic whorls and swirls that are, literally, the stuff of legend.

A bit like that urban myth, “you’re never more than 6ft away from a rat,” I (unqualifiably) say, “you’re never more than 6 miles away from medieval history” in Ireland.

But, like any history, we are often only peering at it through a prism, hoping to catch a glimpse of precious, illuminating light. And when it comes to the lives of medieval women in Ireland, that prism has definitely been rose-tinted.

I’m not quite sure where the story came from, or how I picked it up, but I grew up firm in the belief that the ‘Old-Gaelic’ world of medieval Ireland was an absolutely great time for women. That it was, to use the words of Peter Berresford-Ellis, the time of “the emancipated female.”

As I often say, “We are the stories we tell ourselves,” and the story that Ireland was once a place where women were held in high status, enjoying greater freedoms and legal protections than many women experience today, has long been part of Ireland’s cultural narrative. Especially for women. And especially for women like me.

I don’t believe any story is inherently ‘wrong.’ I think stories come to move things, to change and shape things, in the world. And the story of the ancient, emancipated Irish female was very important to the women involved in the interrelated influences of the 19th-century Gaelic Revival, Irish nationalism and suffragette movement.

While the men of the Gaelic Revival were rediscovering medieval manuscripts and, quite literally, fist-pumping in delight at the discovery of ‘manly men’ like Brian Boru, Niall of the Nine Hostages and, of course, Cú Chulainn—men who proved that Irish men were not weak and effeminate like the English said—the women of the same movement were also delighting in the discovery of powerful females like Queen Maeve and St. Brigid. And then there was the excitement of the Brehon Laws and the wide-ranging recourse it gave a woman to divorce a husband, or maintain control of her goods when she entered a marriage.

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Such discoveries tied in nicely with the feminist and nationalist aims of these women: Ireland before the English screwed things up had, they believed, been a place where women were equal to men, and once Ireland got its freedom and kicked the English out, it could return to that ‘native state.’

Politician, Irish nationalist, and suffragette, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington clearly expressed such a belief when, on learning that the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic (read out by Patrick Pearse on the steps of the GPO during the Easter Rising) had granted equal citizenship to men and women, wrote:

“Equal citizenship with men was given women by the Irish Republic when it was proclaimed on April 24, 1916 — the first instance of any Republic’s doing so…. The Irish state in this was making no break with tradition, for from pre-Christian times in Ireland women enjoyed a fuller freedom than they do in even the most advanced countries today, and they were admitted to all professions. In ancient Ireland women reigned as queens in their own right; they were warriors, priests, teachers, lawyers, doctors. As the future lies in the lap of the past, so in the Ireland of the future woman will readily regain any rights once given her.”

This is the rose-tinted prism we have been viewing the past with ever since. Or, certainly, was the veil through which I viewed pre-Norman Ireland for much of my teenage and early-adult years.

So, you can imagine my surprise (and shock) when, several years ago, I went to the literature—to the work of historians, linguists, and archaeologists—and learned Ireland wasn’t at all the female utopia I might have believed.

Yes, there was divorce and yes, there were laws which said women, in certain kinds of marriages, could maintain control of the goods they brought to the marriage, but women were still under the cosh of male control.

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This is why I wanted to speak with Dr. Gillian Kenny. Firstly, because she is just great craic, and her sense of humour animates this history in a way that is so funny and memorable. But, above all, I knew this would be a rich conversation because her work has been invaluable in bringing the women of medieval and early modern Ireland from out of the shadows of rhetoric and fantasy. She reveals the complexities of their lives and the realities of the social system and restrictions they, as women, had to navigate.

I think one of the most revelatory moments, for me, was when Gillian explained how the law tracts on fosterage (a central part of Gaelic Irish society, where children were fostered to other families to be raised and cement bonds between otherwise rival families) recognised that raising a girl-child would be more ‘expensive’ because she was at greater risk of harm. As then as today, simply navigating through life is statistically more dangerous in a female body.

Learning that old-Gaelic society and medieval Ireland were not a glorious golden age, and certainly not a golden age for women’s rights, doesn’t make it any less interesting or inspiring. If anything, as Gillian so brilliantly brought to life in our chat, it makes it more interesting and the women more relatable. Life was just as messy, difficult and fraught, and women, no matter the age, have always found the gaps.

Enjoy!

Belinda xx

P.S. I highly, highly recommend following Gillian on Unruly Ireland for the most relatable takes and insights on Irish history and folklore, from figures like the Banshee to Diarmait Mac Murchada, and to the man who died because of a law he helped create. In our chat, Gillian also mentions the formidable Abbess Elicia Butler, her full story is here

P.P.S if you’re near Dublin, Gillian is giving a talk in the Sugar Club on witches, fairies and witch-hunts on the 26th July.