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Y302: The Viking Age c.790–1066

Depth study: The Vikings in Ireland — Clontarf and the impact on the Irish economy and Church

  • 3 things to know
  • Unit group 3

Overview

Recall questions on the Vikings in Irish politics, Clontarf and its reinterpretation, the economic effects, money and trade, excavation in Dublin, the Irish Church, cultural traces and the views of Ó Corráin.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Your recallNot started
Who and when

How did the Vikings become part of Irish politics?

Key term

Why do interpretations of the Vikings in Ireland differ so widely?

Key term

What happened at Clontarf in 1014?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    How did the Vikings become part of Irish politics?

    Model answer

    Irish kings hired and allied with Viking fleets against their rivals and married into Norse dynasties, while Norse rulers took sides in Irish dynastic wars, so by the tenth century the Vikings were one competing power among many rather than an external enemy.

  2. 2

    What happened at Clontarf in 1014?

    Model answer

    Brian Boru's forces defeated an alliance of Leinster and Dublin supported by Norse contingents from overseas, but Brian himself was killed in the battle.

  3. 3

    How has the interpretation of Clontarf changed?

    Model answer

    A twelfth-century account written for Brian's descendants presented it as a national struggle that expelled foreign heathens, and that reading persisted for centuries, but historians now treat it as principally a conflict between Irish dynasties in which Norsemen fought on both sides.

  4. 4

    Why did Clontarf acquire such symbolic importance?

    Model answer

    Because it fitted a later narrative of a united Ireland liberating itself from foreign invaders, which suited both medieval dynastic propaganda and modern nationalist history, so the battle's meaning owes as much to how it was later used as to what happened.

  5. 5

    What was the most important economic effect of the Vikings on Ireland?

    Model answer

    They founded Ireland's first true towns, at Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, Cork and Limerick, giving the island permanent centres of manufacture, market exchange and overseas trade for the first time.

  6. 6

    How did the Vikings change money and trade in Ireland?

    Model answer

    They brought Ireland into a silver economy of weighed bullion, arm-rings and hacksilver, connected it to Atlantic and Baltic trade routes, and struck the first coins ever minted in Ireland at Dublin in the 990s.

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