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their unwilling hosts among the Old English with ‘impunity’. 8 As ‘viceregal clients’, some well-connected English officers made use of their often significant autonomy and powers to establish themselves as land-holders in competition with displaced Gaelic-Irish septs. 9 Commissions of martial law were used by officers in this colonial environment as an attractive means of improving their pay and of extending their property, as those who executed the law ‘were entitled to one-third of the possessions of the dead “rebels
backwardness and British superiority. How else to explain the uncritical use of the scatological third woodcut in Irish schools to teach children about the customs of their forebears? Or the way in which the library of the University of Edinburgh captions its digitized edition, which identifies Rory Og O’More, a Gaelic Irish leader connected to the Earl of Ormond, as ‘a wild kerne’? 9 The library is ventriloquizing Derricke’s own message. These and a host of similar examples might be explained, or explained away, by the
nobles were planned under Henry, Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, so there was no reluctance in principle to including them as part of the Irish nobility. Despite these ennoblements and St Leger and Cusack’s efforts at inclusion, there was no attempt to treat England and Ireland as equal in a union of crowns, and Derricke’s Image shows the Gaelic Irish as rebellious, uncouth and uncivilised: potential, if not actual, traitors and far from equal subjects. The Gaelic Irish were a ‘reprobate nation’. 17 Tudor state
) Indeed, taken all together, the three Mirror- like Rory Og and O’Neill poems represent a polarised illustration of the only two courses of action available to the Gaelic Irish lords: respectively, persecution and inevitable execution, or humble submission. The opposition between humans and beasts is another significant binary for Derricke and this informs the dominant conceit of the entire Image – that of the essentially bestial nature of the Gaelic Irish kern and the society he inhabits and infects – for
themselves and their posterities’. 130 The reference points here are to the New English (‘English of birth’), the Old English (‘English of blood’), Ulster-based English and Scots (‘the new British colony’) and the Gaelic Irish (‘the old Irish natives’). This is a remarkable instance of an ethnic or racial classification of Ireland’s native and non-native inhabitants, for it is grounded in notions of blood and birthplace as well as a coming together of distinct national identities – English and Scottish, not Irish. ‘Ireland’, writes Linda Colley (although in reference to
11 crop fruite Land 12 land soyle Gaelic Appendix III: Summary data for animal references in the poem Animal Group Animal Sub-group Gaelic English Non-Gaelic Irish Land Catholic
establishment of a new social practice that would have hitherto been unknown in Gaelic Ireland. 28 The most prominent house on the street is a three-storey house with a high gable-end facing the viewer. The sides of the gable-end are decorated with crow-stepping, a form of architectural embellishment very much associated with Scottish building design in the period, which can be seen in a number of buildings in Ulster and even in the midlands. 29 In the drawing, the ground floor level of the house appears to have been
disturbers of the common wealthe’. 30 His letter to the ‘well disposed reader’ outlines the topic of his poem (the woodkern, or ‘the vipers of the saide land’) but praises the virtue of his ‘loving Countriemen of Englande’. 31 His sentiments and his named audiences illustrate the intricacy of his textual task. As Knapp notes, the complex responses of the situation in Ireland ‘reveal a tender affection for the island, while at the same time calling for a brutal response to the Gaelic-Irish powers’. 32 These
with the fact that the two ‘vipers’ Derricke singles out as examples are from different regions (not to mention members of well-educated Gaelic Irish elites rather than savage bog-dwellers), and at odds with the contents of the poem itself. In ‘The Image of Irelande’ the supposed majority of faithful Irish subjects do not figure at all, and several passages appear to suggest that the speaker is in fact referring to the Irish in general. The poem begins with ‘the aucthour’ taking a panoramic view of ‘all corners
Historical Studies 31:123 (May, 1999), pp. 305–27. 19 Greer Ramsey, ‘A Breath of Fresh Air: Rectal Music in Gaelic Ireland’, Archaeology Ireland 16:1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 22–3; Ann Buckley, ‘Representations of Musicians in John Derricke’s ‘The Image of Irelande’ (1581)’, in Vjera Katalinić and Zdravko Blažeković (ed.), Glazba, Riječi i Slike: Svečani Zbornik za Koraljku Kos/Music, Words, and Images: Essays in Honour of Koraljka Kos (Zagreb: Croatian Musicological Society, 1999