Dublin, a huge city‐region which at the end of the 20th century contained a third of the population of the Irish Republic and a fifth of the island's population, has a solid claim to be regarded as the most significant Irish urban place for the whole of the last millennium. However, the pre‐
Viking beginnings of permanent settlement on the southern edges of what was then the Liffey estuary remain controversial: there may have been two ‘proto‐towns’, a secular settlement, Áth Cliath, on the ridge overlooking the main river to the north and its tributary the Poddle to the south, and Dubhlinn lying south‐eastwards on the Poddle's right bank, an enclosed cluster of ecclesiastical foundations. Whether they were in any sense distinctive before the 9th century is unproven. The estuary site lay almost on the border between the kingdoms of Brega and
Laigin and it has been postulated that the long‐distance routeways of the early historic period converged on this frontier, indicating its strategic significance. The evidence on routeways remains inconclusive and the claims of
Tara as a central place, culturally and symbolically, however much they may have been exaggerated in later tradition, still seem more plausible.
The Viking/Norse impact on Dublin is clearcut. For some 60 years after 841 a piratical base was maintained on the river, possibly as far upstream as Kilmainham. The Vikings returned in force in 917 and developed the site of Áth Cliath as a trading town. Archaeological excavation has helped reveal something of the 10th‐century urban environment: the core street system of Castle Street/Christ Church Place, intersected by Fishamble and Werburgh Streets, would seem to date from this time; the early town had perimeter earthen fortifications, and property divisions were already evident; the first churches may have appeared before 1000. Both as plunderers and plundered, Dublin's Vikings had become drawn into the mesh of Irish dynastic politics before then; from that time they were subject to an Irish overking.
In the 11th century the urban site expanded westwards, the enclosed area now including a handful of new streets linked to High Street, and the site was more densely settled. Sophisticated craftsmanship and the mushrooming of ecclesiastical foundations were in their different ways indicators of an increasingly affluent town. In the final century of Hiberno‐Norse Dublin, its wealth and wider importance were more clearly evident: the proliferation of church foundations
outside the urban, was unparalleled in other Hiberno‐Norse sites: by 1172 there were some nine churches inside the town and another nine to the immediate south and east across the Poddle; north of the river were two further foundations, linked by a bridge. The elevation of the Dublin bishopric to archiepiscopal status in 1152 (regardless of the immediate political reasons) is another indication of the town's ecclesiastical pre‐eminence. But whatever its local autonomy under mainly Norse subkings and its control of a coastal appendage, Dublin was essentially a prized chess‐piece in the wider contests for
high kingship, notably in the case of those dynasties whose power base was in Leinster or Munster. However, eventually even the Connacht men needed Dublin; in 1166 Rory
O'Connor (Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair) organized his public inauguration as high king in the town. Tara was now history.
The exceptional archaeological discoveries which have transformed modern knowledge of pre‐Norman Dublin have demonstrated that in commercial terms at least the Normanization of the town was an incremental process, evident in the town's material culture before 1100. At the same period the Normanization of the local church flowed from the close links between the first bishops of Dublin and the archbishops of
Canterbury. Nevertheless the seizure of the city by a Norman‐Irish army in September 1170 (see
anglo‐norman invasion) and the formidable but unsuccessful efforts, first of displaced Norse leaders and then of an Irish army led by O'Connor, to recapture the town the following year mark a sharp disjuncture. The town received its first royal charter several months later and became the seat of the chief of the Norman conquistadors, Hugh
de Lacy.
The confirmation of Dublin as capital of the Norman lordship only came with King
John's decision in 1204 to build
de novo a royal stronghold on the site of the old Norse fortification beside the Poddle. The construction of the great stone fortress of
Dublin Castle as location for an Irish treasury and seat of royal justice was predicated on John's policy that there should continue to be a separate Irish administration. His ally Archbishop Henry, who oversaw its completion, also secured the elevation of one of the extra‐mural churches,
St Patrick's, to cathedral status (
Augustinian canons monopolizing
Christ Church cathedral).
Thirteenth‐century Dublin became a city. This was reflected in many ways: the scale and architectural quality of its two cathedrals, the appearance of new suburbs around the great monasteries to the north, south‐west, and east of the walled core, and the great expansion of its maritime trade. And although it was only fifth Irish port in terms of exports
c.1300, it was the busiest in the wine import trade, and had the largest number of urban craftsmen. Over 50 occupations were represented in the trade
guilds which together formed the basis of municipal government as established in the town's royal charters. Its prosperity rested on its embryonic functions as capital and on the activity generated by its very well‐endowed monasteries and cathedral chapters.
Municipal government seems to have coped fairly well with the 13th‐century boom, but the city's fate in the following century was markedly different: great fires, famines, and the
Bruce invasion were followed a generation later by the
Black invasion were followed a generation later by the
Black Death. The general contraction of the Anglo‐Norman colony (see
gaelic recovery) hit Dublin particularly hard, dependent as it was on the political strength of the lordship, not just on a well‐defined hinterland. Widely varying estimates exist of Dublin's pre‐crisis population (from 10,000 to 25,000), but all are agreed that after several generations of decline the 15th‐century town was both much emptier and more akin to the other Irish ports, an urban community dominated by its institutional landowners and its big merchants, yet short of labour and fearful of the world beyond its
Pale: in 1454 municipal efforts were made to exclude those ‘of Irish blood’ from any city occupation. The most eloquent evidence of late medieval wealth lies not in the city (where even archaeological evidence for the period is scanty) but in the great castellated warehouses built by Dublin merchants at the deep‐water harbour of Dalkey—at a time when Dublin Castle was itself in decay.
The
dissolution of the Dublin monasteries in and after the 1540s disadvantaged the poor but enriched many of the city's merchant dynasties. This
Old English elite were valued allies of Tudor government in its slow regeneration of English power in Ireland. Dublin's municipal liberties were extended and its financial privileges strengthened; urban capital entered the rural land market. Yet in the second half of Elizabeth's reign relations between the leading citizenry and New English officialdom in the Castle soured and the Dubliners' religious conservatism began to be a source of friction and suspicion. Even the establishment of a university in 1592 on corporation land (see
trinity college) turned out to be something of a Trojan horse for them. The whittling away of privilege, together with the inconveniences of
recusancy, discommoded many of the old families in the following half‐century.
These issues were to an extent obscured by a remarkable burst of urban growth. Internal peace and the consolidation of central authority triggered it; activity in the crown
courts was transformed and
parliament became anchored in Dublin. Prosperity in an enlarged hinterland boosted maritime trade. From a population level of around 10,000 in 1600 the city surpassed its medieval peak well before 1641, and although trade collapsed during the
Confederate War and bubonic plague made a last devastating visit in 1649–51, growth was resumed thereafter at a rate never repeated: by the end of the century its permanent population had reached 50,000–60,000.
In this transformation the Old English were swamped and excluded as effectively as the Norsemen had been over four centuries earlier. Some of course conformed in religion and were absorbed into the multilayered Protestant society which was numerically dominant from the 1640s, thanks to the inflow of migrants, English, French, and Dutch, some of whom were attracted by the open offer of citizenship to Protestant strangers after 1651. Yet despite an almost complete turnover in the families controlling city government there was striking continuity in the form and character of municipal affairs.
Old money and old families were briefly visible in the
Jacobite corporation (1685–90), but until far into the 18th century control of the city was a tussle between different elements of the new Protestant order, mercantile, professional, and landed. From 1672, when the government assumed more direct powers to regulate the affairs of Irish corporations, Dublin aldermen were sucked into parliamentary and national politics. But the existence of the Castle ensured another stratum of citizens—peers, gentry, and office holders—who between them created a counterweight to the civic elite in both the development and governance of the city in the 17th and 18th centuries. This was evident even in some of the earliest development initiatives in
Restoration Dublin, the rival projects of the wealthy merchant Humphrey Jervis on the north bank and that of the functionary Francis Aungier active south‐east of the Castle.
By then the timber‐framed and densely packed old town was being left aside: a brick‐fronted Dublin was far outgrowing its medieval core. New patterns of segregation were visible: to the south, the old monastic lands of Donore and St Thomas, now the privately owned Meath liberties, were assuming a strongly industrial character; to the east the first signs of speculative upper‐class residential development; north of the river the market zone. Around the edges of the city large‐scale institutional developments placed markers for the future: the college downstream on the south bank, the corporation commons to the south‐east which were privatized in 89 lots for development in the 1660s, the great Royal hospital for army veterans to the west erected in the 1680s, the royal Phoenix deerpark to the north‐west, lying beyond the huge site marked out for the royal barracks in 1705. To the north‐east, private enterprise, led by the
Gardiner family, shaped the future: in the 1720s and for nearly a century after a huge wedge of land, some reclaimed, some elevated, was developed, primarily for high‐amenity residence. The controversial relocation of the city
custom house to the north‐east riverfront (1791) was the Gardiner group's
coup de grâce. Similar schemes to the south‐east of the old city first imitated and then eventually triumphed over the Gardiner quarter—once the development potential of the crucially located Fitzwilliam estate was exploited in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Dublin's second cycle of rapid growth from the 1590s to the 1820s (by which time its population approached 250,000) had rested on a conjunction of factors: its role as leading port and from the 1630s unchallenged national centre of distribution (of goods and printed information); its pivotal position in the provision of financial services during the long commercialization of Irish agriculture; its monopoly of certain professional services—higher education and the higher courts of law; the (intermittent) presence of a viceregal court and a national legislature; and the social imperative that brought the landed classes to Dublin in winter time to live, play, and consume to excess. Their presence, coupled with the city's role as national warehouse, sustained the huge variety of artisanal occupations for men and women, from the most sophisticated stuccadores to the jobbing printers; in employment terms textile trades outnumbered the rest.
The ambiguous aspirations of the 18th‐century Irish political establishment (see
patriotism) left a profound mark on the city, both in terms of the set‐piece public buildings (
Parliament House,
Four Courts, College, and Castle) and in the refashioning of the central thoroughfares by means of the enlightened despotism of the wide streets commissioners. Thanks to parliament's largesse two trunk canal systems radiating out from the capital were also built. Nearly all the great
palazzi, from Cork and Chichester Houses in the early 17th century to Ely and Aldborough Houses in the late 18th, were built by active politicians.
Nineteenth‐century Dublin has tended to be interpreted by reference primarily to the Act of
Union: this distorts reality. Many changes—the reduced interest of the gentry in winter residence, the declining demand for a commercial and financial centre as Anglo‐Irish economic integration intensified, the undercutting of urban artisanal handicrafts by new factory technologies, the flight from an overpopulated countryside—were operating independent of the Union. But nevertheless, given the highly politicized character of the city since the 1740s, which was accentuated in the political cauldron of the 1790s, the symbolism of the loss of parliament rested heavily on the city.
The professions, notably law and medicine, dominated the cultural and political life of a city that more than ever was polarized, vertically by religion, horizontally by class, income, and education. They helped to fund the abundance of new and often spectacular churches, Catholic and Protestant, across the city. Some dominated the corporation, which for 50 years remained the outspoken defender of conservative causes. Others led the political organizations seeking emancipation and reform locally and nationally. The city had actually had a Catholic majority since the mid‐18th century but this was translated into political victories only in the parliamentary elections of the 1830s. Municipal reform in 1840 (see
urban government) brought fuller power to the Catholic professional and business classes of the city, not however with any very startling results: aside from more effective market management and a high‐pressure water supply in 1868, the new corporation only very gradually made an impact on the city.
This was partly because of the progressive flight to the suburbs of a substantial section of Dublin's wealthier households: their relocation beyond the fiscal boundary held back the city's capacity to address public health and housing problems until after 1900. New transport systems (
railways and tramways) allowed middle‐class commuting from a swathe of ten independent townships which, in political terms, distanced themselves from the city. Despite this exodus, population density within the city remained high; 49 per cent of city families were in one‐roomed accommodation in 1851, 33 per cent in 1911. High‐quality housing stock was colonized as tenements and indeed this represented an improvement for the poorest city‐dwellers. Dublin's notoriously high mortality rates in the late 19th century were blamed on its slums, but both phenomena in fact reflected the low income and casual employment prevalent in what was a ‘warehouse’ economy. Despite the international renown of its industrialized distilleries, breweries, and biscuit making, and the strength of its transport sectors, the city could do little for its reserve army of the underemployed,
quondam dockers, carters, and servants.
Both state and local government intervened more in health and housing by the early 20th century, but the most significant agents of change were charitable—the Iveagh Trust and the Artisans Dwellings Company (which built some 3,300 houses in four decades after 1876 in the inner city). Despite much talk Dublin corporation made only a modest contribution to rebuilding in the 50 years after its first scheme in Benburb Street (1887).
In 1914 the world of petit bourgeois Catholic Dublin was captured in print in Joyce's
Dubliners, at a time when the city was demonstrably ill at ease with itself. Outshone now by
Belfast in size and self‐confidence, it was shaken by the scars of the
Dublin lockout and divided along religious lines as to the consequences of
home rule. Most of the city's banking and business dynasties were Protestant and mainly unionist in sympathy. A return of Irish sovereignty they did not expect.
Dublin's third cycle of growth commenced in the ashes of the
rising of 1916 (an event far more physically destructive for the city than the attempted insurrections in 1798, 1803, or 1848 but one which probably commanded less popular support at the time than any of the others). The rebuilding of the Gardiner‐inspired boulevard of O'Connell Street and parts adjacent in the 1920s came when greater Dublin's population stood at about half a million. It had barely doubled in 100 years. The
Irish Free State, with its strong centralist administration, engaged from the beginning in a series of initiatives which indirectly assisted the growth of the city. In the following 60 years the site of the built‐up area quadrupled and population doubled, a turnout considerably beyond the projections of the city' planners.
From the 1940s population within the canals fell to early 18th‐century levels as a much delayed public housing programme ended or at least banished the slums. New low‐density suburbs were created at Crumlin and Cabra, then Ballyfermot and Artane (in the 1950s), Finglas, Ballymun, and Coolock (in the 1960s), and finally the new satellite towns of Tallaght, Clondalkin, and Blanchardstown (in the 1970s). The absence of a single strong metropolitan authority during this period of unprecedented site expansion cost the new suburbs dear in terms of amenities and infrastructure. Only gradually did employment and retail services gravitate westwards in line with the markedly changed distribution of Dublin's population. To the east the port survived as a major terminal, but the communities dependent on employment there were among the many victims of modern technical change.
Such a bursting out of the city was possible thanks to the rise of inter‐war bus services, and then to the eightfold growth in private cars between 1930 and the mid‐1960s. The early 21st‐century city has thus inherited low site densities and a central business district almost completely without high‐rise development; even the symbol of the 1980s, the Financial Services Centre, is architecturally restrained. Two‐thirds of its citizens had become owner‐occupiers by the 1990s as public authorities retreated almost as quickly as they had intervened in housing provision. The enduring importance of private property, private enterprise, and social inequality, timidly mediated by reactive planning, are a somewhat problematical legacy.
Bibliography
Aalen, F. H. A., and Whelan, K. (eds.), Dublin City and County: From Prehistory to Present (1992)
Cosgrove, Art (ed.), Dublin through the Ages (1988)
Craig, M. J. , Dublin 1660–1860: A Social and Architectural History (1952)
Daly, Mary , Dublin: The Deposed Capital 1860–1914 (1984)
David Dickson
