the irish war-cry by d greene

8/13/2019 The Irish War-Cry by D Greene

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The Irish War-CryAuthor(s): David GreeneSource: riu, Vol. 22 (1971), pp. 167-173Published by: Royal Irish AcademyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30007607

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THE IRISH WAR-CRYHE firstof the interjectionsistedby O'DonovannhisGrammarof the Irish Language, p. 327, is abti or abd, explained as 'anexclamation of terror and defiance'. At the end of the list he

gives the further information thatThe war-criesof the ancient Irish,and Anglo-Irish,were made of abW,orab', andthename,orcrest,of the family,or placeof residence, sGrdsachabd Fionnd6gbil Cromadhbi SeanaidabuThis descriptionof abt as an exclamation of both terrorand defiancehas its counterpart in the entry in O'Reilly's Irish-English Dictionaryunder abu, abo: 'The war cry of the ancient Irish. Hence Croma boo,Butleireachaboo, &c. Aboi, Heb.' The comparison with Hebrew is,of course, quite unjustified, but it is interesting that the word he hasin mind means 'alas ' and is in no sense a war cry. We find the samecombination in the OED discussion of the history of the word hubbub,where both ub ub ubub 'an interjection of aversion or contempt' andabP 'the war-cry of the ancient Irish' are offered as possible sources.An interjection of the type of ub ub ubub is attested in Irish asfar back as the ninth century, for upp glosses ei mihi 'woe is me' atSg I20b3; admittedly, the vagaries of OIr spelling make it uncertainwhether this represents [up] or [ub], but the prevalence of ub in otherexamples makes this form the more probable.' Thereis also a MiddleIrish example in Aislinge Meic Con Glinne 85.29, where the inter-jection abb, abb,abb s interpreted by Meyeras being one of defiance;the context, however, suggests rather surprise. In support of this isthe use of ob ob obobina in the modernspoken language in a similarsense, cf. dbobi 'interjectionofsurprise',Dinneen, bh bhdeBhaldraithe,Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge; an deilbhiocht,p. 238. It is true that theboundary between surprise and aversion is often blurred, as deBhaldraithe has demonstrated in his study of fubuin,F.igsexii 64-6,

but interjections of this type seem an unlikely source for a war-cry.The earliest examples of hubbub see OED s.v), which seem to bemost probably of Irish origin, point in the same direction; Irishwhobubs attested as early as 1555, but there is no question of a war-cry here, but simply of the noise made by a crowd of savages going todrink. Similarly, Fynes Moryson (quoted in Falkiner's Illustrationsof Irish History. p. 312) says of the Irish: 'They are by nature very1 It is perhaps worth noting that, as Irish as both uch and ub 'alas', so Welsh hasoch in the same meaning, but also the element ub- in the word ubain 'lamenting'. Anoriginal *uk- would have given uch, och in Irish and ub- in Welsh; the doublets couldthen have arisen from mutual borrowing.


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168 DAVID GREENEclamorous, upon every small occasion raising the hobou that is a dole-ful outcry), which they take from one another's mouth until they putthe whole town in tumult'; a doleful outcry is hardly warlike. Evenmore cogent is the evidence of John Derrick, who, in his Image ofIreland (1581; facsimile ed. p. 67) makes the Irish cry bobbowe ndlullalowewhen they are being put to flight, for the latter word is thesame as the aleleu 'which the meer Irish women are accustomed torepeat with howlings and clappings at the funerals of their friends'(Harris, Works of Sir James Ware ii 164) and as the aililis ofmodern Irish, which can indicate either surprise or sorrow. OnlySpenseruses hubbubn a way which might suggest it was a battle-cry,most notably in the lines

They heard a noyse of many bagpipes shrilland shrieking hububs them approaching nere...(FQ iii X 43)but, to balance that, it should be noted that he uses the word habbub,hubub n the same passage as that in which he quotes the war-criesLaundargarbo,Crom-aboand Butler-abo,without suggesting any con-nection between them, see Spenser's Prose Works, ed. R. Gottfried(1949), p. 103. The evidence that hubbub derives from Irish oh ohis very strong, but any connection with abz must be rejected.It will be remembered that O'Reilly, although describing theword absi as 'the war-cry of the ancient Irish', spelled it as a boo,abooin his examples, for the good reason that it had never appearedin anydocument in the Irish language before his time. It was no doubtfrom O'Donovan's Grammar,with its mention of GrdsachabM,hatSheffield Grace, Esq., got the idea of composing the 'ancient feudalwar-song entitled Grasagh Aboe (the Cause of the Graces)' which heprinted in the 'originalGaelic or Iberno-Celtic anguage' with metricalversions in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Greek andLatin, in a volume published privately in London in 1839; the wordabs became popular after the revival period, in such slogans as AnGhaeilgeA bi. But it has never penetrated into the speech of thepeople, where, in most dialects, the formant in partisan cries isEnglish Up , as in the Up Cuas quoted by Muiris0 Siiileabhain inFiche Blian ag Fds. Another English phrase is used in Connemara:we find High for Blakes and Dalys, agus filedidisfein le chdile d ,Mairtin0 Cadhain,An tSraithar Ldr,p. 162, and it has even producedthe verbal noun highfordil, d., p. 67. This formant, which also occursin Carleton's English, is of interest in that it seems to have beenremoulded from English hey for which, according to the OED s.v.hey, has no connection with high. Whether there is any completelynative formant seems doubtful; de Bhaldraithe's English-Irish


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THE IRISH WAR-CRY 169Dictionary, s.v. hurrah, offers na laetheanta go deo as an equivalentof 'hurrah for the holidays ', and phrase Firinn go brdch 'Irelandfor ever' may well be a genuine formation. What the relationof these to 'Scotland for ever ' and Cymru am byth may be, I amunable to say; just as 'up' and 'high' are regular formants in manylanguages (cf. Hoch der Kaiser Arriba Espala ), so are phrases likevive le roi or Japanese banzai 'ten thousand years '. It should benoted that the formant suas le, while well established in both litera-ture and common speech, does not really fall into the category weare discussing, for it is imperative in force; thus suas leat, a cheinn-bhile chdigh, L. Cl. A Buidhe 132.51, is an exhortation to be up anddoing rather than a partisan cry. Tomis de Bhaldraithe points outto me that Brian 0 Nuallhin used the slogan Suas leis na Gaedhilin the first edition of An Blal Bocht, but changed to Na Gaedhil abdin the second; both are, of course, entirely compatible with the post-revival Irish of a speaker at the feis in Corca Dhorcha.It is to the records of the English administration' that we must turnfor examples of this 'Irish war-cry'; the earliest occur at the begin-ning of the fourteenth century. In the Calendar of Justiciary Rolls1308-14, p. 244, there is a record of men being charged with frighten-ing the inhabitants of Hughstown, Co. Kildare, by shouting 'Fennock-abo, Fennock-abo, quod est signum de O'Tothils'. There is anotherentry of the same period in the Annales Hiberniae for 1316 (IAS 1842,p. 72), where it is recorded that the Irish of Imayle (who were, ofcourse, O'Tooles) lost 400 men in a battle at Tullow; the heads of thedead were cut off and brought to Dublin, but the dead bodies roseand fought again, 'fennacabo signum suum pronuntiantes'. Theword signum here is probably a translation of English ensign in themeaning 'a rallying or battle-cry, watchword', which the OEDdescribes as obsolete and mainly Scottish. Fennacabo is identicalwith the Fionndg abs given by O'Donovan, and presumably refers to a'crest', since fionndg means 'scald-crow'. There is a long gap betweenthese two examples and our next piece of datable evidence, which,however, shows us that the use of the formant abo was by no meansconfined to the O'Tooles; it is ch. xx of the enactments of Poyning'sParliament of 1495, an act 'abolishing these words Cromabo &Butlerabo', and laying down:

That no person ne persons of whatsoever estate condition or degree heor they be of, take part with any lord or gentleman, or uphold any suchvariances or comparisonsin word or deed, as in using words these, Cromabo,Butlerabo,or other words like, or otherwise contrary to the King's lawes,his crown,and dignity, and peace, but to call only on St. George,or the nameof his Sovereign Lord the King of England for the time being.

1 I should like to record my thanks to Professor J. F. M. Lydon, F.T.C.D., and toSr. Benvenuta MacCurtain, U.C.D., for putting their expert knowledge of this materialat my disposal.


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170 DAVID GREENEThe enactment was not conspicuously successful; a pavementtile from Bective Abbey, now in the museum of the Irish Genealogical

Office, bears the arms of Gerald Fitzgerald, 8th Earl of Kildare, whodied in 1513, and the inscription Si Dieu plet Crom abo. During theDesmond Rebellion of 1579-80, the rebels coined the war-cry Papeaboo and, noting this, Burghley, the Lord Treasurer, wrote to theEarl of Ormond that he would have to reply with Butleraboo, theprohibited Ormond slogan (CSPI 1574-85 p. 206). This was, ofcourse, a mild joke, but the fact that the rebels had utilised abdin their war-cry shows how common these slogans must have beenat the time; a document preserved in CSPI 16o01-3, p. 683, lists morethan twenty, and it may well be incomplete. Spenser (loc. cit.) takesit that the custom was Irish in origin: that the Irish cry Laundergabo'that is the bloddie hand, which is Oneales badge' and that 'to theireensample the olde Englishe allsoe which theare remayneth havegotten vp theire cryes Scithyan-like as Crom-abo and Butler-abo'.'Scythian' is Spenser's way of saying 'Irish', and, as we have seen,the oldest examples of this kind of war-cry is that of the O'Tooles,who were as 'Scythian' as possible. The native word cosmart,caismeart had acquired the meaning 'battle-cry' in pre-Normantranslation literature, cf. LL 32505, and it was no doubt used todescribe slogans such as that of the O'Tooles. It is attested, thoughsparsely, in Early Modern classical verse, cf. IGT Decl. ex. 1227.Nowhere in that verse, however, is the word abA found. Theconnection with hubbub did not occur to any of the English in closetouch with Ireland, and Sir James Ware had a quite differentexplanation:

After Ages produced many other shouts and out-cries as signals beforeengagements which were used in Compliment to the leaders and Heads ofseveral families and intended as incentives to sedition. They chiefly ter-minated in the word aboe,which seems to come from an obsolete Irish wordAba, signifying Cause or Business...(Harris, Worksof Sir James Ware i 163)

It would be interesting to know where Ware got hold of the wordaba (see RIA Contribb. A, s.v. I apa), which was indeed obsolete byhis time, but his explanation, though ingenious, is quite untenable,for the word never means 'cause' in the political sense, and the final-A is unaccounted for. However, it was good enough for SheffieldGrace, who, as we have seen, rendered Grdsach ab6 as 'the Cause ofthe Graces'. The armorial bearings of the late Eoin O'Mahony, KM,show an 'etymologising' form in Lassair romhuinn go buadh, apparentlya translation of Victoria in flammis. This explanation of abd as gobuaidh 'to victory' is no doubt older than the first edition of Dinneen'sdictionary (1907), but is quite untenable, since the preposition go


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172 DAVID GREENEnot offered in the standard works. I am indebted to Dr. HansOskamp for the following translation of the relevant item from the8th edition (1961) of Van Dale's Groot Woordenboek,.v. Oranje II:

... neut. noun,the colourmentioned ub i:... Oranje oven xclama-tion perhapsdating from the strugglewith the Dunkirkprivateers,whoused to turnthe flagof a seized vesselupsidedown;later commoncry toexpressthe attachment o the House of Orange.Dr. Oskamp explains that the flag was originally orange-white-light blue; the theory, then, is that the privateers turned it upsidedown when they took a Dutch ship, that the Dutch restored thecorrect alignment when the ship was re-captured, shouting Oranjeboven 'Orange above, on top', and that this became the loyal cry.It would be impertinent for one who has no knowledge of Dutch tosuggest a different solution of the problem, yet, remembering that,in Irish terms, Butler aboois considerably older than such a fleetingslogan as The Green above the Red, I confess to a suspicion thatOranje boven may refer to the supremacy of the House of Orangerather than to the positioning of a stripe on a flag; the identity ofthe name of the dynasty and that of the colour admittedly compli-cates the matter considerably.For aboo as a formant in Irish war-cries, Pelham's explanationremains by far the most probable. If the word is in fact English,we must assume that the native O'Tooles had borrowed the customfrom their Anglo-Norman neighbours, and we may hazard the guessthat Cromabo was the pattern which they were following. MauriceFitzgerald obtained a grant of Croomin 1216; as O'Rahilly pointedout, Eriu xiii 176, the Irish form of this place-name was Cromadh,and there can be little doubt that the final dental spirant had by thistime been dropped in popular speech at least, so that Croma abowould regularly become Crom abo. The extension from places of

residence to family names as the first element is easily understood.The introduction of 'badges' ox crests is also in line with Normanusage, though it is surprising to find that the O'Tooles had adoptedthis custom so early; the 'bloddie hand' of the O'Neills seems to beconsiderably later. The absence of references to these innovations inthe praise poetry composed both for native and Anglo-Normanlords is presumably to be explained in the same way as the absenceof reference to innovations in armaments or military technique ingeneral; the language of this poetry was highly traditional-Eochaidho He6ghusa's great poem on Aodh M4g Uidhir's winter campaign,for example, contains only one concept (mir, csirt 'castle)' whichwould serve to show what period it belongs to, and the only weaponreferred to is the archaic ceis 'spear'. We may take it that the Pdpa


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THE IRISH WAR-CRY 173abd of the Desmond rebellion was the last spontaneous coinage touse this formant, and perhaps also the nearest approachto its becom-ing a genuine Irish word. The final Elizabethan settlement broughtabout what Poyning's parliament had aimed at more than a hundredyears before, the end of any 'variances or comparisons' which wouldexalt any individual to the detriment of the English crown, and sothe word abo, abi disappeared from both English and Irish.

DAVID GREENE.Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.

the irish war-cry by d greene

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