bardic schools

bardic schools. Texts concerning the education of pre‐Norman poets, jurists, and historians, such as the brehon law tracts, Middle Irish tracts on versification edited by Thurneysen, and the Auraicept na nÉces or ‘Poets’ Primer', appear to emanate from church schools or clerically educated authors, some recorded in the annals as holding high ecclesiastical office. However these tracts also mention oral bards, who learned by ear to compose in the new Latin‐style syllabic metres, and it is possible that this class had a secular education involving apprenticeship to a master‐poet. Middle Irish (ad 900–1200) glosses on an Old Irish tract concerning poetic inspiration, Coire Goiriath, show glimpses of a system of education and examination administered by the poets themselves, using the term oide or ‘foster‐father’ for the teacher, and calling the pupil felmac, a word also used of the pupil in Latin schools, and of the apprentices of a blacksmith. Similarly a tract on the maintenance owed by a tuath, or petty kingdom, to its local judge included provision for his apprentice lawyers.

Annals in the Middle Irish period increasingly note scholars in Irish history, law, and poetry as well as Latin subjects, perhaps reflecting an increase in laymen holding hereditary church office. Concurrently oral bards gradually merged with literate, church‐trained fili, or learned poets, to produce a unified literate class of fir dhána or ‘men of [poetic] skill’, the court praise‐poets to the later medieval chieftains, who used from c.1200 to the mid‐17th century a new standard literary language (Classical Early Modern Irish).

The new diocesan structures and continental monastic orders of the 12th‐century church reform ended the pursuit of Irish secular studies in church schools. Something of a hiatus is found in the written record of Irish legal, genealogical, and annalistic material during the 13th century, though poetry continued to flourish, perhaps because poets' training was already independent of the church. By the 14th century Irish annals, now compiled by lay historians, unequivocally refer to lay schools, each run by an ollamh or ‘master’ of the relevant branch of Irish learning, such as poetry (dán), customary or ‘brehon’ law (féineachas), traditional history (seanchas), music (ceol), or medicine (leigheas). The relationship between master and pupils was that of fosterage, a contract involving mutual obligations and the payment of a fee. The art of filidheacht, or versification, was taught to students in each of the various disciplines, all of whom used books in their schools as well as oral instruction, and basic doctrine for each profession is found encapsulated in verse compositions, as well as prose tracts. The legal, poetic, and historical schools, while not oblivious to later canon law, or the newer Romance literature, based their teaching on their heritage of pre‐Norman learning, but the medical schools used standard medical texts translated into Irish from contemporary English and continental sources.

Bibliography

Ó Cuív, B. (ed.), Seven Centuries of Irish Learning (1961) Simms, K. , ‘The Brehons of Later Medieval Ireland’, in D. Hogan and W. N. Osborough (eds.), Brehons, Serjeants and Attorneys (1990)

Katharine Simms