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Updated: June 2, 2025
There appeared before them, in each county they visited, the chief lords and Irish gentlemen, the heads of creaghts, and the common people, the Brehons and Shanachies, who knew all the septs and families, and took upon themselves to tell what quantity of land every man ought to have. They thus ascertained and booked their several lands, and the Lord-Deputy promised them estates in them.
There is no land so full of fairy-lore and half-forgotten legends as Ireland. Princes in their painted halls and slaves in their mud cabins listened to the shanachies or wandering story-tellers, with wonder, terror and delight.
I wrote down a couple of Charlie's lyrics which had evidently a local origin; but what I sought was one of the Shanachies who carried in his memory the classic literature of Ireland, the epics or ballads of an older day. Charlie was familiar, of course, with the matter of this "Ossianic" literature, as we all are, for example, with the story of Ulysses.
The shanachies were also bound to prove for themselves the moral qualifications of the ollamhs.1 Many of these details and the following are chiefly derived from Prof. A shanachy of any degree, who did not preserve these "purities," lost half his income and dignity, according to law, and was subject to heavy penalties besides.
Around chief and clansmen circled a large number of brehons, shanachies, poets, bards, and harpers poetry, music, and war strangely blended together.
Her sons, though deprived of all exterior help, would still feed for centuries on their own literary treasures. All the way down to the Stuart dynasty, the nation preserved, not only her clans, her princes, and her brehon laws, but also her shanachies, her books, her ancient literature and traditions.
And then the Statutes go on to enact we cull from various chapters: "The English cannot any more make peace or war with the Irish without special warrant; it is made penal to the English to permit the Irish to send their cattle to graze upon their land; the Irish could not be presented by the English to any ecclesiastical benefice; they the Irish could not be received into any monasteries or religious houses; the English could not entertain any of their bards, or poets, or shanachies, " etc.
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