Although saints’ lives and other monastic sources have occasional references to ships and trade and certain of the larger monasteries such as Armagh and Kildare may have functioned as proto-towns, it was the Vikings who established the first towns and ports in Ireland. Beginning in the ninth century with their longphoirt, "fortified enclosures protecting their ships," in County Louth and at Dublin, they expanded to become permanent settlements and centres of trade in the tenth century. Carrickfergus, Carlingford, Drogheda, Dublin, Wicklow, Arklow, and Wexford were ideally placed along the east coast of the Irish Sea to benefit from the traffic on the trade route from Scandinavia and the northern isles to England and the continent. The excavations of Viking Dublin show a thriving city of merchants and craftsmen in wood, metal, bone, and cloth who manufactured goods which they traded locally and abroad. Evidence of finds also suggests that food supplies in particular came from the local Irish, but perhaps the smaller Viking settlements to the north and south also shipped food and fuel supplies to Dublin.
When the Anglo-Normans came in the twelfth century they immediately recognized the importance of the Viking settlements, and these were quickly taken over, with Dublin and the larger ports coming under the king’s direct control. In other places local magnates founded a port as a gateway to trade with their lands. John de Courcy tried to develop Down Patrick, a long-established religious and dynastic center, as a port as well as the main town of his lands. He chose Carrickfergus as a strategic site and constructed a strong keep there possibly as early as 1178. A settlement grew up beside the castle, which had a parish church by 1205 and was described as a "vill" in 1226. After the earldom of Ulster reverted to the king in 1333 the port in the shadow of the castle functioned as a government outpost useful for trade with the Gaelic hinterland in a region beyond the jurisdiction of the crown throughout the later Middle Ages. However, archaeological finds of imported pottery indicate that the citizens maintained foreign contacts as well.
Bertram de Verdon may be regarded as the founder of Dundalk after he was granted most of north County Louth by the future King John. The early settlement was close to the motte and bailey at Cas-tletown, but the town was to develop a little over a mile downstream close to the estuary and to take advantage of the Irish Sea trade in the early thirteenth century. Indications are that the port was operational before the official customs were established in the late 1270s, and Dundalk was reckoned as one of the "ports of Ulster." Such references to the trade of the port as survive indicate the usual commodities: wine, salt, iron, and cloth imported and corn, fish, and hides exported, but compared with Drogheda and Dublin, Dundalk remained a minor port in the Middle Ages.
Hugh de Lacy fortified the site of Drogheda on the river Boyne five miles from the open sea. The earliest surviving charter of the town was granted in 1194 by Walter de Lacy. To attract citizens from England it offered attractive privileges to the burgesses, large plots within the town, three acres in the countryside close by and free access to the river Boyne. The walls enclosed 113 acres (45 hectares), making it comparable in size to Bristol, Oxford, New Ross, Kilkenny, and Dublin. It had at least four gates and seven towers, and the barbican of St Laurence’s gate is the finest surviving in Ireland. A series of at least thirteen murage grants, levying tolls on goods coming into the town for the construction and maintenance of the walls, are extant between 1234 and 1424.
Drogheda flourished as a port despite difficulties with silting and sandbars, a problem it shared with Dublin. The port records of Chester and Bristol suggest that the bulk of its trade was across the Irish Sea, but Drogheda merchants such as the Symcocks and the Prestons did venture to France, particularly to Bordeaux, for wine, and in the fifteenth century there was traffic with Brittany, the Baltic, and Iceland. In the early years there was a significant export trade in corn and victuals as supplies to the royal armies campaigning in Scotland and Wales. For most of the later Middle Ages the archbishops of Armagh resided in the manor of Termonfechin close by, and this added to the town’s status and prosperity. Occasionally the archbishops provided the townsmen with safe conducts to travel and trade with the Ulster Irish.
Wicklow and Arklow declined in importance in the later Middle Ages due largely to their hinterland being dominated by the O’Byrnes and O’ Tooles who had little interest in trade. Dalkey, however, functioned as the deepwater port of Dublin. Due to the shallowness of the Liffey estuary, large ships could not berth at Dublin’s quays, and wine ships in particular had to anchor at Dalkey and unload on to lighters which carried the wine tuns up the Liffey. Remains of tower houses and castles suggest that the little port profited from its deep anchorage.
Wexford (Veigsfjorthr) was an important Viking settlement by the end of the ninth century as archaeological excavations have shown. It had trading connections with Bristol, and the links continued after the town came under the control of Diarmait mac Mael-na-mBo in the mid-eleventh century. In 1169 it was the first town to be taken by Diarmait mac Murchada and his Anglo Norman allies. It was walled in the fourteenth century, but little is recorded of its ships or trade before the seventeenth century.
Around 1210 William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, established New Ross, which was to become the chief port of the lordship of Leinster, but despite its powerful lord it never managed to break the monopoly of the royal port of Waterford. Throughout the later Middle Ages all ships entering Waterford Harbour were by law obliged to disembark first at Waterford and, having paid customs there, were free to proceed to New Ross.
Ports of the South and West Coast
On the south coast, the mouth of the river Blackwater where Youghal now stands appears to have been settled by Vikings in the ninth century. The town’s founder may have been Maurice fitz Gerald in the early thirteenth century. Youghal was walled after 1275 and remained under Geraldine influence throughout the medieval period. At the other end of their huge earldom was the port of Dingle, which appears to have been walled during the medieval period, but a murage grant and decree of incorporation was only issued in 1585. The town was an embarkation point for the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, but the citizens and the fitz Geralds benefited most from the revival of the herring fisheries in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The port of Kinsale, County Cork developed from a Viking trading post to being settled by the Anglo-Normans around 1200. Its first charter dates to 1333, and there is a murage grant of 1348. In the fifteenth century it grew to be a prosperous port, and its ships are recorded as trading with Bristol and with France. However, its relatively isolated position and excellent harbor made it attractive to pirates and freebooters in the later Middle Ages.
The town of Galway grew around a castle built by Richard de Burgh in the thirteenth century. The prosperity of the families who controlled the town, later known as the "tribes of Galway" (Athy, Blake, Bodkin, Browne, D’Arcy, Deane, Flont, Joyce, Kirwin, Lynch, Martin, Morris, and Skerret), is evident in the building of St Nicholas’s church in 1320. Galway’s loyalty to the language and traditions of England made it increasingly isolated as the influence of the Crown waned in the west of Ireland. By 1396 it attained the status of a royal borough, relatively free from the control of the de Burghs. In the same year St Nicholas’s church was granted collegiate status, separating it from the local Irish bishop of Annaghadown and empowering the citizens to elect a warden responsible for ecclesiastical affairs in the city. Galway was destroyed by fire in 1473 and again in 1500, but continuing prosperity enabled rebuilding in stone, and pictorial maps of the early seventeenth century show a city of elegant buildings of unified style.
The medieval port had links not only with England, from where Bristol merchants leased the Corrib salmon and eel fisheries, but also with Flanders, France, Spain, and Portugal importing wine in exchange for cattle hides and fish procured from local magnates in exchange for salt and luxury goods. Wills of members of the Blake family dated 1420 and 1468 indicate that a barter system was in operation with numbers of hides being owed for wine, cloth, and salt. This contrasts with Limerick where surviving wills of the Arthur merchants record money transactions with the local Irish. The opening up of the Atlantic seaways in the fifteenth century benefited Galway. Henry the Navigator had an agent in the city, and according to a letter in the Portuguese Archives dated 1447, he promised to send a lion on board his next ship to Galway as he thought the people of that city had never seen a lion! Some of the more adventurous merchants such as Germanus Lynch (fl. 1441-1483) sailed frequently to England, Spain and, like an enterprising consortium from Drogheda at the end of the fifteenth century, made the hazardous trip to Iceland to service the developing fishery there.
Merchants from Bristol also sailed as far as Sligo having secured permits to bring wine, salt, and cloth to trade with the king’s lieges there for salmon. Sligo, like Galway, had come to prominence during the de Burgh invasion of Connacht in the thirteenth century. It was originally granted to Maurice fitz Gerald, ancestor of the earls of Kildare, who built a castle there in 1245 and founded a Dominican friary close by in 1253. Richard de Burgh built a new castle and laid out a town in 1310, but the town passed into the control of the O’Conors of Sligo and remained in Irish hands until the end of the sixteenth century.
