B

BARDIC SCHOOLS, LEARNED

FAMILIES

Before the Twelfth-Century Church
Reform

Although Julius Caesar mentions large schools run by
druids for the youth of Celtic Gaul in the first century
B.C.E., we know little or nothing about the education
of poets and other men of learning in early Ireland
before the eighth century C.E. Around this period, Liam
Breatnach has argued, higher grades of poet, the filid,
became differentiated from the oral “bards” by their
literacy. They used written Old Irish texts to pursue
studies of grammar, versification, genealogy and his-
tory that were closely modeled on the Latin curriculum
of the church schools in early medieval Ireland. Almost
every scholar of native learning recorded in the annals
before 1200, whether poet (fili), expert in Irish tradi-
tional history (senchae), or judge of customary law
(brethem), is identifiable as a cleric, or a teacher in a
church school. However from the late tenth to the
twelfth centuries, the annals also notice a few learned
court poets, some of whose verses in praise of Irish
kings still survive. A number of their surnames, Ua
Cuill (Quill), Ua Sléibín (Slevin), and Mág Raith
(Magrath) recur in the later Middle Ages, showing
their descendants continued to practice the same hered-
itary art. During this transitional “Middle Irish” period,
the distinction between literate filidand oral bards was
lost. The best of the bards became literate, while filid
lost their connection to the church schools after the
twelfth-century reform of ecclesiastical organization
in Ireland. New orders of Augustinian canons and
Cistercian monks ran schools for their novices, which
had no place for the study of Irish genealogies or
customary law.

Secular Schools of the High Middle Ages

At the end of the twelfth century, Irish bardic verse

developed a new standardized language based on con-

temporary Early Modern Irish speech, together with

sets of elaborate metrical rules that presuppose a for-

mal training for the new generation of court poets.

They were dominated at this time by the Ua Dálaig

(O’Daly) family, recorded in the twelfth century not

only as local chieftains of Corkaree in modern County

Westmeath, but also as gifted poets. Individual mem-

bers were celebrated as “the best poet in Ireland” and

even “chief poet of Ireland and Scotland.” Two were

court poets to the Mac Carthaig kings of south Munster

in the mid-twelfth century, and two more, the famous

Muiredach of Lissadell (fl. 1213) and the religious poet

Donnchad Mór Ua Dálaig (d. 1244) are found in early-

thirteenth-century Connacht. In a poem by Muiredach,

he refers to himself as “Ua Dálaig of Meath,” the head

of his family, traveling with a little band of three com-

panions, whose “master,” or teacher, he is.

In the fourteenth century, we have evidence for fixed

schools, each located at the home of a chief poet, using

books in their studies. The first surviving Early Mod-

ern Irish textbook for poets, a tract on Metrical Faults,

is preserved in a mid-fourteenth-century manuscript,

National Library of Ireland G 2–3 (the “Ó Cianáin

Miscellany”). Gofraid Finn Ua Dálaig (d. 1387), the

most famous of the Munster branch of his family, is

credited with two long poems which instruct students

on meters and rhyme. He himself was trained in the

school of the Mág Raith poets of north Munster. His

works, and those of his fellow-pupil, Maelmuire Mág

Raith, contain references to reading a book together

with their teacher, or “fosterer.” They use the Irish word

for pupils, daltae, which means also “fosterchildren,”

and they make mention of the darkened beds on which

student poets lay while composing their poems, and a