Was Your Irish Surname Really Gaelic to Begin With?

Céad Míle Fáilte, and you are very welcome to this week’s Letter from Ireland. The last week of August has that turn in it here in County Cork. The blackberries are ripening in the ditches, and the school traffic is back on the roads. It’s lovely to see all the young chidren in their outsized uniforms being dropped off by relieved parents after a long and unusually hot summer here in Ireland. How are things in your part of the world today?

I have a cup of Lyons tea beside me as I write, and I hope you’ll join me with a cup of whatever you fancy yourself. Today I want to take some surnames that may appear in your Irish family tree, and trace their origins – including a few origins that may surprise you.

Irish Surnames You May Never Question

When Robert Matheson compiled his report in 1909 on the most numerous surnames in Ireland, working from the birth registrations of 1890, the most numerous surnames appear exactly as you would expect:

Murphy, Kelly, Sullivan. And then, fourth in the whole country, Walsh.

Keep going down the same hundred names and another pattern begins to appear:

Burke, at twenty-nine, Fitzgerald, at thirty-six, Power, at fifty-four, Barry, at seventy-one.

Although I have just listed five of the hundred most numerous surnames in Ireland, not one of them was an old Gaelic Irish surname. In fact, they came into Ireland, or took shape here, in the centuries following the Anglo-Norman arrival.

Indeed, if we widen it beyond the top hundred the list gets longer again. You will also find:

Roche, Costello, Dillon, Nugent, Barrett, Cusack, Prendergast, Joyce, Dalton, Tobin, Purcell, Butler, Condon, Redmond, Sinnott, Devereux, Keating, Wall, Cantwell, Comerford, Bermingham, Nangle, Fitzgibbon, Fitzmaurice, Plunkett, Hussey, Tyrrell, Lacy, Darcy, de Courcy, Cogan, Eustace, Fitzsimons, Fleming, Jordan, Staunton, Talbot, Savage, Rochford, White/Whyte and a few more.

We tend to bundle these together as the Norman surnames of Ireland. But who exactly were these Normans?

The Normans Began With Vikings

We’ll start with a part that might surprise most people: the Normans began with Vikings. During the ninth and early tenth centuries, Norse raiders had been working their way up the rivers of France in much the same way that they had worked their way around the coasts and rivers of Ireland.

Eventually the Frankish rulers tried a different approach to dealing with these troublesome invaders. In 911, Charles the Simple came to an arrangement with one of the Viking leaders called Rollo. Rollo and his men were given territory around the lower Seine (the part towards the sea) on the understanding that he would defend it against further attacks from his own kind. The Northmen had been given land, and that land eventually took their name, becoming known as Normandy.

Over a few generations, Rollo’s descendants and the other Scandinavian settlers had largely stopped speaking Norse and were speaking French, became Christians, married into local families and adopted local institutions to become part of the political world around them. So, a hundred years after Rollo, his descendants were French-speaking Christian princes.

What Made the Normans Formidable

The Normans were very good at some of the things we now associate most strongly with the medieval world, many of which we have seen in movies down through the years:

• Castles were planted across conquered territory.
• Mounted, heavily armed warriors.
• Powerful lordships with feudal hierarchies beneath them.
• Sponsored monasteries and churches.
• And an increasingly sophisticated political machinery for holding land and governing it.

But the castles and horses are not really the most interesting part. What really made the Normans successful was how good they were at adapting to whatever world they had just entered. They imposed their rule, certainly, but they also absorbed a great deal from the societies around them.

For example, Norse settlers in Normandy became French, while their descendants in England gradually became English. In Sicily, Norman kings ruled a population that included Latin Christians, Greeks, Muslims and Jews, employing Greek and Arabic officials and craftsmen along the way. So, remember this idea when we later get to Ireland.

1066, and the eventual taking of Ireland

In 1066, William, who was Duke of Normandy, crossed the English Channel, defeated Harold at Hastings and made himself king of England. William was a direct descendant of Rollo.

But it is what happened after 1066 that matters most to us in Ireland. Having taken England, Norman lords pushed westwards into Wales where they built castles, established lordships and settled families as was their way. Those families did exactly what Norman families had already done elsewhere, their sons and daughters married into the local population and adapted to local custom.

So, when trouble brewed in nearby Ireland in the late 1160s – and the exiled king of Leinster looked for help from these Norman lords to regain his throne – the men who sailed for Ireland in 1169 were not sailing from Normandy at all, they were sailing from Wales. Indeed, some of their families had already been in Wales for generations.

Let’s take the example of Maurice FitzGerald, one of the most important early leaders of the invasion. His father was Gerald of Windsor, who was a Norman lord, while his mother was Nest, daughter of a Welsh king. So even before the Fitzgeralds arrived in Ireland, the family was already Norman and Welsh, and now they were about to become Irish.

The Fourth Most Common Surname in Ireland

Which brings me back to the surname Walsh. Walsh is closely associated with the Irish word Breatnach (pronounced roughly “Brah-nukh”) meaning a Welshman. There were plenty of Welshmen among the people who came across to Ireland with the Anglo-Norman lords including soldiers, archers and then later craftspeople, farmers and administrators.

At the time, many newcomers were simply named after where they had come from. In this case, “the Welshman”, which over time became a surname. There were probably several different routes by which Walsh, Welsh and Breatnach developed, which is why Walsh should never be thought of as one single family, as there were many unrelated lines.

Becoming More Irish Than the Irish Themselves

Within a few generations, many descendants of these original settlers were speaking Irish and marrying into Gaelic families, employing Irish poets and settling disputes according to Brehon law.

So, many descendants of the original Anglo-Norman settlers had become thoroughly entangled with Gaelic Ireland. Some of the great families that arrived as outsiders would eventually be described as “more Irish than the Irish themselves”.

Next year, the French region of Normandy is leading a trans-European Year of the Normans, with the organisers marking what they regard as the millennium of the birth of William the Conqueror. Ireland is among the partners, alongside the UK, the Channel Islands, Flanders, southern Italy, Norway and Denmark. There will be a fair bit of activity focused on County Wexford, where the first substantial Anglo-Norman forces landed in 1169, and on the Norman Way. So we are going to be hearing quite a bit about the Normans over the next year and a half and I thought we might get in ahead of it!

So, a question for you this week. Do you have a Norman surname in your Irish family tree? Many of us do – Carina’s grandmother was a Barry, while I have quite a few further back.

Is it one of the names above, or one I haven’t listed? Do leave your names, comments and questions below.

Thank you for reading and sharing this Letter.

Slán for now,

Mike