Mummers play
Mummers' plays are folk plays performed by troupes of amateur actors, traditionally all male, known as mummers or guisers. It refers to a play in which a number of characters are called on stage, two of whom engage in a combat, the loser being revived by a doctor character; this play is sometimes found associated with a sword dance though both exist in Britain independently. Mumming spread from the British Isles to a number of former British colonies, it is sometimes performed in the street but more during visits to houses and pubs. It is performed seasonally or annually at Christmas, Easter or on Plough Monday, more on Hallowe'en or All Souls' Day, with a collection of money, in which the practice may be compared with other customs such as those of Halloween, Bonfire Night, pace egging and first-footing at new year. Although the term mummers has been in use since the Middle Ages, no scripts or details survive from that era and the term may have been used loosely to describe performers of several different kinds.
The earliest evidence of mummers' plays as they are known today is from the mid- to late 18th century. Mummers' plays should not be confused with the earlier mystery plays; the word mummer is sometimes explained to derive from Middle English mum or Greek mommo, but is more to be associated with Early New High German mummer and vermummen, which itself is derived from or came to be associated with mummen and mumschanz, these latter words referring to a game or throw of dice. Ingrid Brainard argues that the English word "mummer" is derived from the Greek name Momus, a god of mockery and scoff. Mummers' and guisers' plays were performed throughout much of English-speaking Great Britain and Ireland, spreading to other English-speaking parts of the world including Newfoundland and Saint Kitts and Nevis. There are a few surviving traditional teams of mummers in England and Ireland, but there have been many revivals of mumming associated nowadays with morris and sword dance groups; these performances are comparable in some respects with others throughout Europe.
On 4 November 2017, following a similar announcement from the Lewes Bonfire Council, the Association of Mummers in England and Wales announced that Mummers would cease the practice of "black-facing" or "blacking-up". Broadly comic performances, the most common type features a doctor who has a magic potion able to resuscitate the vanquished character. Early scholars of folk drama, influenced by James Frazer's The Golden Bough, tended to view these plays as desecendants of pre-Christian fertility ritual, but modern researchers have subjected this interpretation to criticism; the characters may be introduced in a series of short speeches or they may introduce themselves in the course of the play's action. The principal characters, presented in a wide variety of manners, are a hero, most Saint George, King George, or Prince George, his chief opponent, named Slasher elsewhere, a quack Doctor who comes to restore the dead man to life. Other characters include: Old Father Christmas, who introduces some plays, the Fool and Beelzebub or Little Devil Doubt.
In Ynysmeudwy near Swansea groups of four boys dressed as Crwmpyn John, Indian Dark, Robin Hood and Doctor Brown took the play from house to house on Bonfire Night and were rewarded with money. Despite the frequent presence of Saint George, the Dragon appears although it is mentioned. A dragon seems to have appeared in the Revesby Ploughboys' Play in 1779, along with a "wild worm", but it had no words. In the few instances where the dragon appears and speaks its words can be traced back to a Cornish script published by William Sandys in 1833. Mumming groups wear face-obscuring hats or other kinds of headgear and masks, some mummers' faces are blackened or painted. In 1418 a law was passed forbidding "mumming, interludes or any other disguisings with any feigned beards, painted visors, deformed or coloured visages in any wise, upon pain of imprisonment". Many mummers and guisers, have no facial disguise at all. Mumming was a way of raising money and the play was taken round the big houses. Most Southern English versions end with the entrance of "Little Johnny Jack his wife and family on his back".
Johnny, traditionally played by the youngest mummer in the group, first asks for food and more urgently for money. Johnny Jack's wife and family were either dolls in sometimes a picture. Mummers and "guisers" can be traced back at least to 1296, when the festivities for the marriage of Edward I's daughter at Christmas included "mummers of the court" along with "fiddlers and minstrels"; these "revels" and "guisings" may have been an early form of masque and the early use of the term "mumming" appears to refer to a performance of dicing with the host for costly jewels, after which the mummers would join the guests for dancing, an event recorded in 1377 when 130 men on horseback went "mumming" to the Prince of Wales Richard II. According to German and Austrian sources dating from the 16th century, during carnival persons wearing masks used to make house-to-house visits offering a mum(e
The Guardian
The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, the Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust; the trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for The Guardian the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to shareholders; the current editor is Katharine Viner: she succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015. Since 2018, the paper's main newsprint sections have been published in tabloid format; as of November that year, its print edition had a daily circulation of 136,834.
The newspaper has an online edition, TheGuardian.com, as well as two international websites, Guardian Australia and Guardian US. The paper's readership is on the mainstream left of British political opinion, its reputation as a platform for liberal and left-wing editorial has led to the use of the "Guardian reader" and "Guardianista" as often-pejorative epithets for those of left-leaning or "politically correct" tendencies. Frequent typographical errors in the paper led Private Eye magazine to dub it the "Grauniad" in the 1960s, a nickname still used today. In an Ipsos MORI research poll in September 2018 designed to interrogate the public's trust of specific titles online, The Guardian scored highest for digital-content news, with 84% of readers agreeing that they "trust what see in it". A December 2018 report of a poll by the Publishers Audience Measurement Company stated that the paper's print edition was found to be the most trusted in the UK in the period from October 2017 to September 2018.
It was reported to be the most-read of the UK's "quality newsbrands", including digital editions. While The Guardian's print circulation is in decline, the report indicated that news from The Guardian, including that reported online, reaches more than 23 million UK adults each month. Chief among the notable "scoops" obtained by the paper was the 2011 News International phone-hacking scandal—and in particular the hacking of the murdered English teenager Milly Dowler's phone; the investigation led to the closure of the News of the World, the UK's best-selling Sunday newspaper and one of the highest-circulation newspapers in history. In June 2013, The Guardian broke news of the secret collection by the Obama administration of Verizon telephone records, subsequently revealed the existence of the surveillance program PRISM after knowledge of it was leaked to the paper by the whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. In 2016, The Guardian led an investigation into the Panama Papers, exposing then-Prime Minister David Cameron's links to offshore bank accounts.
It has been named "newspaper of the year" four times at the annual British Press Awards: most in 2014, for its reporting on government surveillance. The Manchester Guardian was founded in Manchester in 1821 by cotton merchant John Edward Taylor with backing from the Little Circle, a group of non-conformist businessmen, they launched their paper after the police closure of the more radical Manchester Observer, a paper that had championed the cause of the Peterloo Massacre protesters. Taylor had been hostile to the radical reformers, writing: "They have appealed not to the reason but the passions and the suffering of their abused and credulous fellow-countrymen, from whose ill-requited industry they extort for themselves the means of a plentiful and comfortable existence, they do not toil, neither do they spin, but they live better than those that do." When the government closed down the Manchester Observer, the mill-owners' champions had the upper hand. The influential journalist Jeremiah Garnett joined Taylor during the establishment of the paper, all of the Little Circle wrote articles for the new paper.
The prospectus announcing the new publication proclaimed that it would "zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty warmly advocate the cause of Reform endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of Political Economy and support, without reference to the party from which they emanate, all serviceable measures". In 1825 the paper merged with the British Volunteer and was known as The Manchester Guardian and British Volunteer until 1828; the working-class Manchester and Salford Advertiser called the Manchester Guardian "the foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill-owners". The Manchester Guardian was hostile to labour's claims. Of the 1832 Ten Hours Bill, the paper doubted whether in view of the foreign competition "the passing of a law positively enacting a gradual destruction of the cotton manufacture in this kingdom would be a much less rational procedure." The Manchester Guardian dismissed strikes as the work of outside agitators: " if an accommodation can be effected, the occupation of the agents of the Union is gone.
They live on strife "The Manchester Guardian was critical of US President Abraham Lincoln's conduct during the US Civil War, writing on the news that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated: "Of his rule, we can never speak except as a series of acts abhorrent to every true notion of constitutional right and human liberty " C. P. Scott ma
Celtic Revival
The Celtic Revival was a variety of movements and trends in the 19th and 20th centuries that saw a renewed interest in aspects of Celtic culture. Artists and writers drew on the traditions of Gaelic literature, Welsh-language literature, so-called'Celtic art'—what historians call Insular art. Although the revival was complex and multifaceted, occurring across many fields and in various countries in Northwest Europe, its best known incarnation is the Irish Literary Revival. Here, Irish writers including William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, "AE" Russell, Edward Martyn and Edward Plunkett stimulated a new appreciation of traditional Irish literature and Irish poetry in the late 19th and early 20th century. In many, but not all, facets the revival came to represent a reaction to modernisation; this is true in Ireland, where the relationship between the archaic and the modern was antagonistic, where history was fractured, where, according to Terry Eagleton, "as a whole had not leapt at a bound from tradition to modernity".
At times this romantic view of the past resulted in inaccurate portrayals, such as the promotion of noble savage stereotypes of the Irish people and Scottish Highlanders, as well as a racialized view that referred to the Irish, whether positively or negatively, as a separate race. The most widespread and lasting contribution of the revival was the re-introduction of the High cross as the Celtic cross, which now forms a familiar part of monumental and funerary art over most of the Western world. Though, there has been criticism to the unified concept of Celtic culture. Antiquarian researches into the Gaelic and Brittonic cultures and histories of Britain and Ireland gathered pace from the late 17th century, with people like Owen Jones in Wales and Charles O'Conor in Ireland; the key surviving manuscript sources were located and translated, monuments identified and published, other essential groundwork in recording stories and language done. The Welsh antiquarian and author Iolo Morganwg fed the growing fascination in all things Brittonic by founding the Gorsedd, which would in turn spark the Neo-druidism movement.
Interest in Scottish Gaelic culture increased during the onset of the Romantic period in the late 18th century, with James Macpherson's Ossian achieving international fame, along with the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the poetry and song lyrics of the London-based Irishman Thomas Moore, Byron's friend and executor. Throughout Europe, the Romantic movement inspired a great revival of interest in folklore, folk tales, folk music; as elsewhere, in what was the United Kingdom of the whole archipelago, this encouraged and fed off a rise in nationalism, intense in Ireland. In the mid-19th century the revival continued, with Sir Samuel Ferguson, the Young Ireland movement, others popularising folk tales, dubious works of history, other material in all the nations with a claim to be'Celtic'. At the same time and historical work was beginning to make progress in constructing a better understanding of regional history. Interest in ornamental'Celtic' art developed, and'Celtic' motifs began to be used in all sorts of contexts, including architecture, drawing on works like the Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones.
Imitations of the ornate Insular penannular brooches of the 7–9th centuries were worn by Queen Victoria among others from the late 1840s, many produced in Dublin by West & Son and other makers. In Scotland were John Francis Campbell's works the bilingual Popular Tales of the West Highlands and The Celtic Dragon Myth, published posthumously in 1911; the formation of the Edinburgh Social Union in 1885, which included a number of significant figures in the Arts and Craft and Aesthetic movements, became part of an attempt to facilitate a'Celtic' Revival in Scotland, similar to that taking place in contemporaneous Ireland, drawing on ancient myths and history to produce art in a modern idiom. Key figures were the philosopher, town planner and writer Patrick Geddes, the architect and designer Robert Lorimer and stained-glass artist Douglas Strachan. Geddes established an informal college of tenement flats for artists at Ramsay Garden on Castle Hill in Edinburgh in the 1890s. Among the figures involved with the movement were Anna Traquair, commissioned by the Union to paint murals in the Mortuary Chapel of the Hospital for Sick Children and worked in metal, illustration and book binding.
The most significant exponent of the artistic revival in Scotland was Dundee-born John Duncan. Among his most influential works are his paintings of Celtic subjects Tristan and Iseult and St Bride. Duncan helped to make Dundee a major centre for the Celtic Revival movement along with artists such as Stewart Carmichael and the publisher Malcolm C MacLeod; the Irish Literary Revival encouraged the creation of works written in the spirit of Irish culture, as distinct from English culture. This was, in part, due to the political need for an individual Irish identity; this difference was kept alive by invoking Ireland's historic past, its myths and folklore. There was an attempt to re-vitalize the native music of Irish Gaelic. Figures such as Lady Gregory, WB Yeats, George Russell, J. M. Synge and Seán O'Casey wrote many plays and articles about the political state of Ireland at the time
Shanachie Records
Shanachie Records is a New Jersey-based record label founded in 1975 by Richard Nevins and Dan Collins. The label is named for an Irish storyteller, it was distributed by Entertainment One Distribution. Starting as a label that specialized in fiddle music, they began releasing work by Celtic groups such as Planxty and Clannad. Other genres on the label include Latin American, African music, soul and ska. In 1989 they acquired Yazoo Records from Nick Perls; this allowed them to release vintage blues recordings. Today, they have another Shanachie Jazz. In 1992 Shanachie began releasing CDs by folk singer-songwriters, including Richard Shindell, Dolores Keane, John Stewart, Rod MacDonald, Richard Meyer, Karan Casey, Sue Foley, Four Bitchin' Babes, Kevin Gordon, others. Shanachie Records was a reggae label and releasing music from artists such as Rita Marley and the Epitones, Yabby You, The Mighty Diamonds, Lucky Dube, Max Romeo, John Brown's Body throughout the years. Shanachie was the U. S. liaison for the UK-based reggae label, Greensleeves Records, until about 1987.
Shanachie issued material for Augustus Pablo under the Message imprint of his company, Rockers International. The Grammy Award-winning Soweto Gospel Choir releases albums on Shanachie Records, as has Grammy nominated Liquid Soul; the Latin acts on the label include Los Jovenes del Barrio. List of record labels Official website
Gaeltacht
Gaeltacht is an Irish-language word for any Irish-speaking region. In Ireland, the term Gaeltacht refers individually to any, or collectively to all, of the districts where the government recognises that the Irish language is the predominant vernacular, or language of the home; the Gaeltacht districts were first recognised during the 1920s in the early years of the Irish Free State, following the Gaelic Revival, as part of a government policy aimed at restoring the Irish language. It is now recognised. Research published in 2015 showed that of the 155 electoral divisions in the Gaeltacht, only 21 are communities where Irish is spoken on a daily basis by two-thirds or more of the population. Two-thirds is regarded by some academics as a tipping point for language survival. In 1926 the official Gaeltacht was designated as a result of the report of the first Gaeltacht Commission Coimisiún na Gaeltachta; the exact boundaries were not defined. The quota at the time for classification as Gaeltacht was 25%+ of the population to be Irish-speaking, although in many cases Gaeltacht status was accorded to areas that were linguistically weaker than this.
The Irish Free State recognised that there were predominately Irish-speaking or semi-Irish-speaking districts in 15 of its 26 counties. In the 1950s another Gaeltacht Commission concluded, it recommended that Gaeltacht status be based on the strength of language use in an area. In the 1950s, Gaeltacht districts were defined and excluded many areas in which the number of Irish speakers had declined. Gaeltacht areas were recognised in seven of the state's 26 counties; the Gaeltacht boundaries have not been altered since apart from minor changes: The inclusion of An Clochán and Cé Bhréanainn in County Kerry in 1974. A study in 2005 by An Chomhairle um Oideachas Gaeltachta agus Gaelscolaíochta said that Gaeltacht schools were facing a crisis, it forecast. This would threaten the future of the Gaeltacht. Parents felt that the educational system did not support their efforts to pass on Irish as a living language to their children; the study added that a significant number of Gaeltacht schools had switched to teaching in English, others were wavering.
In 2002 the third Coimisiún na Gaeltachta stated in its report that the erosion of the use of Irish in the Gaeltacht was now such that it was only a matter of time before the Gaeltacht disappeared. In some areas, Irish had ceased to be a community language. In the strongest Gaeltacht areas, current patterns of bilingualism were leading to the dominance of English. Policies implemented by the State and voluntary groups were having no effect; the report recommended that a new language reinforcement strategy was required, one that had the confidence of the community itself. The Commission recommended, among many other things, that the boundaries of the official Gaeltacht should be redrawn, it recommended a comprehensive linguistic study to assess the vitality of the Irish language in the remaining Gaeltacht districts. The study was undertaken by Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge. On 1 November 2007 Staidéar Cuimsitheach Teangeolaíoch ar Úsáid na Gaeilge sa Ghaeltacht was published. Concerning Gaeltacht boundaries, it suggested creating three linguistic zones within the Gaeltacht region: A – 67%/+ daily Irish speaking – Irish dominant as the community language B – 44%–66% daily Irish speaking – English dominant, with large Irish-speaking minority C – 43%/- daily Irish speaking – English dominant, but with Irish-speaking minority much higher than the national average of Irish speakingThe report suggested that Category A districts should be the State's priority in providing services through Irish and development schemes.
It said that Category C areas that showed a further decline in the use of Irish should lose their Gaeltacht status. The 2006 Census data shows that of the 95,000 people living within the official Gaeltacht 17,000 belonged to Category A areas, 10,000 to Category B, 17,000 to Category C, leaving about 50,000 in Gaeltacht areas that did not meet the minimum criteria. In response to this situation, the government introduced the Gaeltacht Bill 2012, its stated aim was to provide for a new definition of boundaries based on language criteria, but it was criticised for doing the opposite of this. Critics drew attention to Section 7 of the Bill, which stated that all areas "currently within the Gaeltacht" would maintain their current Gaeltacht status, regardless of whether Irish was used; this status could only be revoked. The Bill was criticised for placing all responsibility for the maintenance of Irish on voluntary organisations, with no increase in government resources; the annual report in 2012 by the Language Commissioner for Irish reinforced these criticisms by emphasising the failure of the State to provide Irish-language services to Irish speakers in the Gae
Padraic Colum
Padraic Colum was an Irish poet, dramatist, playwright, children's author and collector of folklore. He was one of the leading figures of the Irish Literary Revival. Colum was born Patrick Columb in a County Longford workhouse, he was the first of eight children born to Susan Columb. When the father lost his job in 1889, he moved to the United States to participate in the Colorado gold rush. Padraic and his mother and siblings remained in Ireland; when the father returned in 1892, the family moved to Glasthule, near Dublin, where his father was employed as Assistant Manager at Sandycove and Glasthule railway station. His son attended the local national school; when Susan Columb died in 1897, the family was temporarily split up. Padraic and one brother remained in Dublin, while their father and remaining children moved back to Longford. Colum finished school the following year and at the age of seventeen, he passed an exam for and was awarded a clerkship in the Irish Railway Clearing House, he stayed in this job until 1903.
During this period, Colum started to write and met a number of the leading Irish writers of the time, including W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Æ, he joined the Gaelic League and was a member of the first board of the Abbey Theatre. He became a regular user of the National Library of Ireland, where he met James Joyce and the two became lifelong friends. During the riots caused by the Abbey Theatre's production of The Playboy of the Western World, Padraic Colum's father, Patrick Columb, was one of the protestors. Padraic himself was not engaged in the protests, he collected Irish folk songs, sometimes rewrote them in their entirety, including the famous She Moved Through the Fair. Colum based his poem on one surviving line, while his collaborator, the musicologist Herbert Hughes noted the tune, he was awarded a five-year scholarship by Thomas Hughes Kelly. He used it to read and write, he did not attend any other University as a student. He was awarded a prize by Cumann na nGaedheal for his anti-enlistment play, The Saxon Shillin'.
Through his plays he became involved with the National Theatre Society and became involved in the founding of the Abbey Theatre, writing several of its early productions. His first play, Broken Soil was performed by W. G. Fay's Irish National Dramatic Company; the Land, was one of that theatre's first great public successes. He wrote another important play for the Abbey named Thomas Muskerry, his earliest published poems appeared in The United Irishman, a paper edited by Arthur Griffith. His first book, Wild Earth collected many of these poems and was dedicated to Æ, he published several poems in Arthur Griffith's paper, The United Irishman this time, with The Poor Scholar bringing him to the attention of WB Yeats. He became a friend of Lady Gregory. In 1908, he wrote an introduction to the Everyman's Library edition of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination. In 1911, with Mary Gunning Maguire, a student from UCD, David Houston and Thomas MacDonagh, he founded the short-lived literary journal The Irish Review, which published work by Yeats, George Moore, Oliver St John Gogarty, many other leading Revival figures.
In 1912 he married Maguire. Padraic taught at Pádraig Pearse's experimental school, Scoil Éanna in Rathfarnham, County Dublin and Mary Maguire taught at the girls' school, Scoil Íde or St. Ita's, set up in Cullenswood House, Dublin, once Scoil Éanna had moved to Rathfarnham. At first the couple lived in the Dublin suburb of Donnybrook, where they held a regular Tuesday literary salon, they moved to Howth, a small fishing village just to the north of the capital. In 1914, they travelled to the US for what was intended to be a visit of a few months but lasted most the rest of their lives. In America, Colum took up children's writing and published a number of collections of stories for children, beginning with The King of Ireland's Son; this book came about when Colum started translating an Irish folk tale from Gaelic because he did not want to forget the language. After it was published in the New York Tribune, Hungarian Illustrator Willy Pogany suggested the possibility of a book collaboration, so Colum wove the folktale into a long, epic story.
Three of his books for children were awarded retrospective citations for the Newbery Honor. A contract for children's literature with Macmillan Publishers made him financially secure for the rest of his life; some other books he wrote are The Children of Odin. These works are important for bringing classical literature to children. In 1922 he was commissioned to write versions of Hawaiian folklore for young people; this resulted in the publication of three volumes of his versions of tales from the islands. At the suggestion of Dr Pádraic Whyte a first edition of the first volume was presented to US president Barack Obama by Taoiseach Enda Kenny on the occasion of his visit to Dublin, Ireland on 23 May 2011. Colum started writing novels; these include The Flying Swans. The Colums spent the years from 1930 to 1933 living in Paris and Nice, where Padraic renewed his friendship with James Joyce and became involved in the transcription of Finnegans Wake. After their time in France, the couple moved to New York City, where they did some teaching at Columbia University and CCNY.
Colum was a prolific author and published a total of 61 books. He adopted the f
County Clare
County Clare is a county in Ireland, in the Mid-West Region and the province of Munster, bordered on the West by the Atlantic Ocean. There is debate whether it should be considered a part of Connacht. Clare County Council is the local authority; the county had a population of 118,817 at the 2016 census. The county town and largest settlement is Ennis. Clare is north-west of the River Shannon covering a total area of 3,400 square kilometres. Clare is the 7th largest of Ireland's 32 traditional counties in area and the 19th largest in terms of population, it is bordered by two counties in Munster and one county in Connacht: County Limerick to the south, County Tipperary to the east and County Galway to the north. Clare's nickname is the Banner County; the county is divided into the baronies of Bunratty Lower, Bunratty Upper, Clonderalaw, Ibrickan, Islands, Tulla Lower and Tulla Upper. These in turn are divided into civil parishes; these divisions are cadastral, defining ownership, rather than administrative.
Bodies of water define much of the physical boundaries of Clare. To the south-east is the River Shannon, Ireland's longest river, to the south is the Shannon Estuary; the border to the north-east is defined by Lough Derg, the third largest lake on Ireland. To the west is the Atlantic Ocean, to the north is Galway Bay. County Clare contains a unique karst region, which contains rare flowers and fauna. At the western edge of The Burren, facing the Atlantic Ocean, are the Cliffs of Moher; the highest point in County Clare is Moylussa, 532 m, in the Slieve Bernagh range in the east of the county. The following islands lie off the coast of the county: Aughinish Inishmore Island Inishloe Mutton Island Scattery Island County Clare hosts the oldest known evidence of human activity in Ireland; the patella of a bear, subject to butchering close to the time of death, was found in the Alice and Gwendoline Cave, near Edenvale House, Clarecastle. The bone features a number of linear-cut marks, has been dated to circa 10,500 BC, from the Paleolithic era.
This discovery, publicized in 2017, pushed back Ireland's occupation by 2,500 years - what was regarded as the oldest site of occupation was the Mesolithic site of Mount Sandel, County Londonderry. This bear bone was discovered in 1903 during an archaeological excavation but was not studied until over a century later. There was a Neolithic civilization in the Clare area — the name of the peoples is unknown, but the Prehistoric peoples left evidence behind in the form of ancient dolmen: single-chamber megalithic tombs consisting of three or more upright stones. Clare is one of the richest places in Ireland for these tombs; the most noted. The remains of the people inside the tomb have been excavated and dated to 3800 BC. Ptolemy created a map of Ireland in his Geographia with information dating from 100 AD. Within his map, Ptolemy names the areas in which they resided. Historians have found the tribes on the west of Ireland the most difficult to identify with known peoples. During the Early Middle Ages, the area was part of the Kingdom of Connacht ruled by the Uí Fiachrach Aidhne.
In the mid-10th century, it was annexed to the Kingdom of Munster to be settled by the Dalcassians. It was renamed meaning North Munster. Brian Boru became a leader from here during this period the most noted High King of Ireland. From 1118 onwards the Kingdom of Thomond was in place as its own petty kingdom, ruled by the O'Brien Clan. After the Norman invasion of Ireland, Thomas de Clare established a short-lived Norman lordship of Thomond, extinguished at the Battle of Dysert O'Dea in 1318 during Edward Bruce's invasion. There are two main hypotheses for the origins of the county name "Clare". One is that the name is derived from Thomas de Clare, embroiled in local politics and fighting in the 1270s and 1280s. An alternative hypothesis is that the county name Clare comes from the settlement of Clare, whose Irish name Clár refers to a crossing over the River Fergus. In 1543, during the Tudor conquest of Ireland, Murrough O'Brien, by surrender and regrant to Henry VIII, became Earl of Thomond within Henry's Kingdom of Ireland.
Henry Sidney as Lord Deputy of Ireland responded to the Desmond Rebellion by creating the presidency of Connaught in 1569 and presidency of Munster in 1570. He transferred Thomond from Munster to Connaught. About 1600, Clare was removed from the presidency of Connaught and made a presidency in its own right under the Earl of Thomond; when Henry O'Brien, 5th Earl of Thomond died in 1639, Lord Deputy Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford decreed Clare should return to the presidency of Munster, but the Wars of the Three Kingdoms delayed this until the Restoration of 1660. Clare's county nickname is the Banner County, for which various origins have been suggested: the banners captured by Clare's Dragoons at the Battle of Ramillies.
