An Irishman's Diary

IN 1521, the German artist Albrecht Dürer – then in Antwerp – made a picture of a group of Irish gallowglasses and peasants, which has since been much reproduced in history books.

It’s clear that the “Leonardo of the North”, as Dürer was known, found his subjects visually exotic. But being something of a scientist as well as artist, like Leonardo, he felt it necessary to assure viewers of his depiction’s authenticity.

Above the heavily-armed gallowglasses, he added a caption: “Thus go the soldiers of Ireland, beyond England” (in the process giving a geography lesson to those who needed it). And over the peasants, he wrote: “Thus go the poor of Ireland.” How he had seen the people depicted – or if he had met them in Antwerp, what they were doing there – has until now been a bit of a mystery. But the answer may at last have emerged in a fascinating study just published by UCC, a study that in turn stems from a visit by a foreign delegation to Ireland, made three years before Dürer’s painting, in 1518.

It was a royal visit, albeit an accidental one. The VIP was Archduke Ferdinand, teenage brother of Charles V, the Flemish-born aristocrat who had recently been crowned king of Spain. Indeed the group were attempting to return from Spain to the archduke’s native Netherlands, when their ships ran into a ferocious, week-long storm in the Bay of Biscay.

Fortunate not to be sunk, they changed tack, heading for England’s Scilly Isles. But the unrelenting winds drove them westward until, hungry and exhausted, they put in to the port of Kinsale. There they spent three very pleasant days, which were recorded in vivid detail by one Laurent Vital, secretary of state in the Burgundian Netherlands, as part of a longer account of Charles V’s first voyage.

Sure enough, Vital’s diary includes detailed descriptions of the local soldiery and peasants. Indeed, he found their dress very strange, to the point that it made him laugh. And yet it was not perhaps the dress of the men that fascinated him most. The women’s was in some respects even more interesting.

If Dürer did have access to Vital’s accounts, he must have been tempted to paint an accompanying picture captioned “Thus go the maidens of Ireland.” Maybe only decorum stopped him. For according to Vital, it was the custom in Kinsale, circa 1518, that all young women wore open shirts, completely exposing their breasts.

Not only that, he wrote, but “it is as common there to see or touch the breast of a girl or woman, as it is to touch her hand”. Clearly enchanted, Vital described at some length the many shapes and sizes of breast he witnessed. And his research may have extended beyond viewing.

Of a particular bosom-type, he enthuses: “. . . in the open hand one would call them firm but yielding”.

Paradoxically or otherwise, he goes on to assure readers of the young women’s virtue, noting that they were “very pleasant and loving” but also that, during his short stay, he had witnessed “only goodness and honour” on their part.

Furthermore, towards the end of the narrative, he mentions the fate of three “bad boys” banished from the fleet after they were accused of “harassing girls and some other rowdiness”. After a hearing on board ship, the miscreants were promptly extradited to face local justice, or as Vital put it, “returned to Kinsale to learn Irish”.

The visitors did not venture much beyond the port, and so had to rely on townspeople for descriptions of Ireland at large. Thus they were assured that the countryside was full of “good land and bad people”, that the native “savages” were much inclined to “do damage to each other”, and that warlords commanded various territories, to travel between which required “passports”.

By contrast, the author also sought and received a description of the Lough Derg pilgrimage – famed on continental Europe – from a woman who had made it. The Donegal venue was described, interestingly, as being in Ireland’s “Scotch quarter”.

But among details he witnessed in person were the peasantry’s habit of smearing their faces with blood. This, he learned, was a sun-screen, to prevent them getting “freckles” in summer.

And in another vignette, Vital also describes seeing what he presumed to be a forced marriage, in which a “savage” dragged his reluctant bride to a church and beat her until she joined him in making the sign of the cross, after which they departed hand-in-hand, and apparently happy.

Beyond court circles – to which Dürer might have had access – Vital’s diary was not published in Belgium until 1881. But it became very well known there then and was also translated into Spanish in the 1950s.

Despite which, it somehow escaped the attention of Irish historians until now, when it has finally been added to the Corpus of Electronic Texts (CELT) at UCC.

Dr Hiram Morgan of UCC’s history department speculates that either the content was too “rude and crude” for the Catholic nationalist Ireland of a century ago or, more likely, that with historians focused on state papers in London, the Belgian publication just remained “hidden in plain sight”.

In any case, the document provides a fascinating glimpse of an Ireland about to be changed forever by the Tudor Conquest. It also depicts an early rendezvous in the Hiberno-Spanish alliance that, 83 years later, would suffer an epochal defeat in the same Cork town. A fuller account of the document is now available on the CELT website ( celt.ucc.ie), and the subject will also be discussed at a seminar in Kinsale, with Dr Morgan and others, on May 18th.