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Ireland and the Making
The slaves were purchased in England by
of Britain
dealers from
the degraded fathers and mothers and other more power-
ful relatives of the unfortunates. 1
Much of Ireland's wealth came to her in foreign com-
merce, carried on from the beginning with her kindred
in Gaul. That wealth was well recognized abroad. We
find, among others, Walafrid Strabo writing in the ninth
century of "wealthy
Hibernia." 2
Doncadh, or Donatus, of
Fiesole, goes very much further and gives in Latin
hexameters a glowing description in the same century
of Ireland's exhaustless riches. 3 In the tenth century she
remained "that very wealthy country in which there are
twelve cities and wide bishoprics and a king and that has
its own language and Latin letters." 4
The impression has long prevailed that Ireland had
from the beginning been widely removed from the main
stream of European life and that her fate had been to
move around in a backwater where only the fainter wash
of the larger currents reached, neither giving nor receiving
much from Europe. Her position in the extreme
West has nurtured this view, but the enterprise of her sons,
surpassing the energy of every other nation in the West,
overbore in antiquity as in the medieval era the obstacles
of nature.
i See Appendix A.
In his life of Blaithmac, monk of lona: Blaithmac, genuit quern div
Hibernia mundo (Poetae Lat. A. C, II, 297).
3 Migne and Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini reproduce the poem ; and translations
in Irish and English are given in Flannery, "For the Tongue of th
Gael." See also Ossianic Society, V. p. 75.
< Chronicle of Ademar, Monk of Angoulfime.