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Dysert O'Dea, 1318Sir Charles Oman, the military historian, believed that the Irish did not change their methods of fighting between the time of the Norman invasion and that of the new conquest of Queen Elizabeth I, 400 years later. They used, he said, the same arms and the same 'primitive tactics' in the sixteenth century as they had used in the twelfth. While their enemies progressed they stood still. Other writers have agreed with him.There were undoubtedly many things that did not change, or that changed slowly, in medieval Ireland. Many aspects of warfare remained the same over long periods. The progress of the Normans through the woods of Ossory in II 69 was delayed by MacGillapatrick, who cut trenches across the forest paths and threw up ramparts behind the trenches. He erected stockades of wattles on top of the ramparts, manned them with his fighting men, and fought the advancing Normans from behind these formidable defences. Dermot MacMurrogh prepared the same kind of earthworks in his fastness near Ferns in Wexford when the High King advanced against him in the same year. In order to keep attackers to the paths and to prevent infiltration into the woods, which might outflank him, Dermot 'plashed' the margins of the pathways in the approaches to his barriers; he made, that is, impenetrable hedgerows of the undergrowth on either side by interweaving cut branches amid the growing shrubs and saplings. There must be hundreds of references in late sixteenth-century documents to show that, in Ulster, in Munster, in the midlands, in the wooded foothills of the Leinster mountains-wherever the Irish fought-they still did these things at that date. Trenches, stockades and plashed woods were commonplaces-for aggressors ugly commonplaces-of Queen Elizabeth's Irish wars. That much was the same. Through all these centuries from the twelfth to the sixteenth the Irish terrain did not change. There were at the end, as there had been at the beginning, deep woods, great areas of bog, much rough ground, many mountains. Roads, tracks or paths thus remained few, narrow and difficult. Progress away from these roads was an uncertain matter not ordinarily attempted by marching armies. The result was the abiding danger of the 'pass'. Passes were narrow ways throughtwoods, defiles between hills, causeways over bogs' places, that is, where ambush was always a possibility. Because tracks were constricted at such places march formation had to be changed to negotiate them, which usually meant that the moving column became more vulnerable. Earthworks and plashing strengthened the defences and further increased the dangers of the pass. In Tudor as in Norman times there were marching armies and hostile forces to dispute their progress. It would be inconceivable that, in the intervening period, the 'primitive tactics' of the prepared ambush should have been given up. Indeed there was nothing primitive about them; they were still suggested in Elizabeth's time by an unchanged terrain. But the methods of early times, and those only, did not, in fact, continue in use for centuries. There was progress. What seems to have led historians to think otherwise is the fact that basic methods of fighting, which favoured defence rather than aggression and which took advantage of terrain, were not given up; they were, rather, developed. It is possible to be misled too by the wealth of contemporary descriptions of sixteenth-century fighting in contrast to the paucity of earlier records. It is easier, when similarities are encountered at intervals of centuries, to suppose a complete absence of change than to search among unpromising material for evidence of growth and development. The warfare of the early part of the fourteenth century, the period of the Bruce invasion of Ireland and of the waning of the power of the descendants of the Normans, saw the use by the Irish of methods that were quite different from those that had earned them defeat in Strongbow's time. After that there was a notable addition to the personnell of the fighters and notable developments in arms and tactics, culminating in the extraordinary sixteenth-century changes that produced the great armies of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone and of Hugh O'Donnell. The history of the Battle of Dysert O'Dea, 1318 continues here Taken from Irish Battles by G.A. Hayes-McCoy, published by Appletree Press. Further reading: A Little History of Ireland by Martin Wallace with illustrations by Ian McCullough. Click here for more information on the book. Further instalments of 'the Battle of Dysert O'Dea': Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 |
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