Pageantry and Ritual in Dublin from 1450 -1700.

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Pageantry and Ritual in Dublin from 1450 -1700.

The period 1450-1700 was a period of change and uncertainty in Dublin. It showed the change in Dublin from town to beginnings of a city. There was also a lot of both political and social change to which pageantry and ritual played their part.

To understand this change and the involvement that pageantry and ritual had you must first go back and trace the roots of Dublin and how the seed of a city was planted. The origins of Dublin as a town are closely linked to the activities of the first settlers: the Vikings. They came to Ireland as raiders, mainly from the Norwegian fjords, in the ninth century and sailed up Irish rivers to plunder wealthy monasteries and capture prisoners whom they sold as slaves to Iceland and on the continent. It was only in the middle of the tenth century that the former raiders began to be transformed into merchants and craftsmen and their strongholds became coastal trading settlements. In spite of the over lordship by Gaelic families, particularly during the eleventh century, these settlements survived as distinct places until the Anglo-Normans conquered their towns in the late twelfth century. Some historians refer to the time when the Vikings plundered rich monasteries and withdrew again in their ships as the ‘hit and run’ period. It lasted from 795 to 836. In 841, according to Annals of Ulster, the Vikings set up a permanent camp at the mouth of the Liffey. It was described in Irish sources as Longport. This was the beginning of the Longport phase which lasted from 841 to 902.

At the end of the ninth century Irish resistance to the Longport increased and in 902 the Irish managed to defeat the ruling Dublin Norse and to expel them. The elite of the Viking families and their followers sailed across the Irish Sea to the Isle of Man, England and to Southern Scotland. But ffifteen years later they came back from the exile and re-established their settlement at Dublin. This event effectively marks the second major phase of Viking settlement in Dublin and constitutes the dun phase (917-1014). When the Vikings returned in the early tenth century they brought with them a well-developed urban concept resembling the Anglo-Saxon towns which they would have seen during their enforced stay in England. In this view the Vikings were catalysts through which urbanisation was transferred from England to Ireland. The move from raiding into trading, with intermittent emphasis on one or the other, would probably have been common all over the Viking world of the time. This short outline confirms that towns were not an innovation that the Vikings brought fully- fledged from Scandinavia to Ireland. On the contrary, a place like Dublin, located at a pivotal site in the expanding Viking age trading network, was the product of the Viking age itself.

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 Early Medieval Dublin was a vibrant place and indeed this vibrancy lasted through to our period and manifested itself through the pageants and ritual that existed at that time. Many of the pageants and rituals were indeed centred on what were called the guilds. These were a type of organisation that people of a certain trade belonged to. These guilds helped to build the bonds of community and bridge gaps. Apart from this they also had many other functions such as economic, civic order and discipline and they provided a basis of civic government. The economic function was how ...

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