Post by Ruth Cannon BL

From his book ‘Foundation of the Hospital of King Charles II, Dublin,’ (1906), an evocative account by Sir Frederick Falkiner, Recorder of Dublin, of the area surrounding the Four Courts as it was in medieval times: “Before the coming of the Normans to Ireland, the Liffey plain to the Meath borders was known as Fingal, the fine or district of the stranger, or perhaps, simply the Finn, or white stranger, many of whose people still in their light hair and impassive mien bear the traces of their Viking lineage. In those days there was only one bridge-head across the river Liffey permitting access to the city of Dublin —the famous Ford of the Hurdles. It was from the city battlements overlooking that bridge that King Sitric Silkenbeard and his Queen, the daughter of the great Brian, watched all day in tremulous tension the fearful drawn battle, surging from Mary’s Abbey to Clontarf, he to see his Ostmen allies driven to her ships or into the sea, she to learn at night of the three generations of her kinsmen in the battle slain. After the coming of the Normans, the Ostmen were not driven from the city, but the walled fortress on the Castle Hill was held and colonized by the victors. As a community, the Ostmen were confined to the north bank of the Liffey. The boundary of Oxmantown mounted the highland near the Island Bridge of Kilmainham and crossed the present Phoenix Park, into the ravine by the Military Hospital, called of old the Gybbet’s Slade from an ancient gallows on Arbour Hill, the site of the following tale from Holinshed told with a humour too quaint to abbreviate: 'In the further end of the Ostman’s Greene is there a hole, commonly called Scaldbrother’s Hole, a labyrinth reaching two large miles under the earth. This was in old time frequented by a notorious thief named Scaldbrother, wherein he would hide all the bag and baggage that he could pilfer. The varlet was so swift on foot, as he has eftsoon outrun the swiftest and lustiest young men of Ostmanstown bearing a pot or pan of theirs on his shoulders in his den.. and so being shrouded within his lodge he reckoned himself secure, none being so hardie as would venture to entangle himself in so intricate a maze. But as the pitcher that goeth often to the water cometh at length home broken, so this lustie youth would not scape from open catching, forcible snatching, and privie polling, till time he was by certain gaping groomes that lay in wait for him intercepted fleeing towards his couch and hanged on that gallows, through which in his youth he jollily was wont to run.' It is said that workmen digging the foundation for houses in Oxmantown often came upon Scaldbrother’s Hole, that in Smithfield it is sometimes made use of as vats by the brewers, and in Queen Street some vaults of the houses are formed from it, and boys playing on the hill have been known to fall up to their necks in it where the ground is thin..." More tales of medieval Oxmantown here: https://lnkd.in/eW2bG-7E