The past few years have seen several important works published on Irish kingship. For example, Seán Ó Hoireabhárd’s The medieval Irish kings and the English invasion (Reference Ó Hoireabhárd2024) and Ronan Mulhaire’s Irish kingship in the eleventh and twelfth centuries: approaches to the study of power (Reference Mulhaire2025) focused on the much-neglected period between the Battle of Clontarf (1014) and the Anglo-Norman Invasion (1169 and following years). Patrick Gleeson, however, an archaeologist based in Queens University Belfast, takes us back to the emergence of early historic Ireland, between the Roman Iron Age and the eighth and ninth centuries when most of our surviving textual evidence found its present form. With the title Landscapes of kingship, one might have expected a fairly traditional work of landscape archaeology, pointing out what kind of topographic features were utilised or framed royal inauguration sites and assembly sites and where ‘centres of power’ were located.
This approach is discussed and critiqued in Chapter 1, ‘Framing royal landscapes’, which has, as is the convention, an extensive literature review and a discussion of theoretical perspectives. In some way this is itself part of the performative ritual of writing archaeology and has much in common with the subject of the second chapter, ‘Assembling kings and kingdoms’. Here, Gleeson argues that previous scholarship has blurred the distinction between royal inauguration and other forms of public assembly used for juridical and governmental purposes. The ritual of kingmaking and its varied symbolisms loom large in early Irish literature, and this has, it is argued, distracted scholars from the more functional, perhaps mundane, but vital activities of other kinds of assemblies. Assemblies occurred at every level of social organisation from townland to overkingdom. While only 71 assembly sites are specifically named in the surviving textual record, Gleeson argues that the total number may have approached 2000 (p.40). Such a total would come to more than 62 in each modern county or one for every 42 sq km. On one level this seems extraordinary, but it is likely that this pattern of management organisation was mirrored across Britain and northern Europe in the period before local customary law was replaced by top-down royal officialdom.
The next part of the book changes tack somewhat and presents two major case studies dealing with ‘provincial kingdoms’. Chapters 3 to 6 deal with the provincial overkingship of Munster (comprising south-central and south-west Ireland), while Chapters 7 and 8 deal with Brega (the fertile East Midlands lying north and west of Dublin) and Tara, a major royal site within Brega that has Ireland-wide significance. Somewhat surprisingly, coming from an archaeologist with such a strong record of fieldwork and scientific applications within archaeology, these sections engage in great detail with a corpus of literary and documentary material relating to the dynasties that dominated these provinces. The legendary material has long located the origin of the Éoganachta cluster of dynasties that dominate Munster before the late tenth century in the ‘finding’ of the Rock of Cashel by the dynastic founder Conall Corc in the fifth century. The Rock of Cashel is one of the most iconic historical sites in Ireland today, surmounted by Cormac’s chapel, from the early twelfth century, and a cathedral from a couple of generations later. Indeed, it graces the cover and the frontispiece of Gleeson’s book. In Chapters 3 and 4, however, Gleeson excavates the layers of the legendary material and compares them to the contemporary annalistic record of the activities of kings in Munster. Here he makes a compelling case that Cashel and its environs were not really significant until the later eighth century at the earliest and that at least two unrelated overkingships: one based around Cahir, in the south of County Tipperary, and represented archaeologically by sites at Kedrah and Knockgraffan; and another at and around Knockainey, and plausibly linked to the pre-eminent episcopal site at Emly, dominated the region up until the late seventh century at least. Cashel lay in the border land between these two regions and was promoted, Gleeson argues, only after these two territories came together in the eighth century. What surprised me about this section of the book was the depth of textual criticism that went into these chapters, often following the lead of Thomas Charles-Edwards (Reference Charles-Edwards2000), but not blindly so. Had I been shown these chapters anonymised, without the preceding two, I would never have guessed that they came from a book about archaeology by an archaeologist. I have some slight caveats about this section though. Overall, I find Gleeson’s argument compelling, but it was difficult to follow because I constantly had to flick back a few pages or refer to the index to be sure I knew which group each warring dynast belonged to and where Gleeson placed them geographically. I usually easily recall this kind of detail so if this was giving me difficulty, I wonder how accessible it would be to undergraduates, particularly in archaeology. If there is a second edition, I encourage the publisher to add a few more tables and maps that relate to the narrative element (the maps locating archaeological sites are good but linking a map full of dots labelled either as churches or forts to a list of kings with similar names killing each other is not the easiest of tasks).
The latter part of the book, on Brega and Tara, takes a broadly similar approach but pursues it in less depth and is thus easier to follow; and, finally, Chapter 9 pulls back and brings in some comparative analysis, particularly with pre-Norman England. This section, along with Chapter 6, on Cashel itself, also deals with the problem of the ninth to twelfth centuries when textual evidence is largely literary fiction about the deep past and the most easily identified secular settlement types seem to disappear from the landscape. King and church moved closer together, the former often hidden materially within the structures of the latter. This is an important book but not always an easy read. It cannot, however, be ignored.
