What was the Middle Ages like in Ireland?

Answer 1

The Celts arrived in Britain and Ireland around 500 BC and within a few hundred years, Ireland's Bronze Age culture had all but disappeared, and Celtic Iron Age culture was in place across the entire island. The Celts had discovered iron, which had been introduced to them in Europe around 1000 to 700 BC, giving them the technological advantage to spread as they did. Iron was a far superior metal to bronze, being stronger and more durable. On the other hand, it required much hotter fires to extract it from its ore and so it took a fair degree of skill to use iron.

Answer 2

In the early part of the Middle Ages, Ireland was tribal. St. Patrick had brought Christianity before the Middle Ages began, so there were a lot of Christians, and the Druids were very much in decline from the start. The histories of the time say there were no towns or cities at all, and claim there were not even villages. (It is hard to imagine what this meant, but since the English defined a village as a group of buildings that included a church, they might have been saying that the Irish had their churches outside their hamlets, so there were no villages like those in England. But note, this is a guess on my part, and not derived from any source I can cite).

After about 800 AD, Vikings invaded and set up towns and cities, including Dublin. This only had the effect of producing another new enemy to replace those they Vikings drove out, for most of the Irish, who had been used to fighting each other and raiding in a way much like the Vikings did.

The decline of the Vikings brought English instead, who were not much different, as far as the Irish were concerned.

For much of the Early Middle Ages, Ireland was a place of great literacy, compared to much of the rest of Western Europe. This was the country that produced the Book of Kells, and was an important inspiration for the Roman lower case alphabet.

Ireland was never successfully unified for more than a very short period. It remained mostly tribal, with the government being done by a number of small kingdoms, or, more accurately, chiefdoms. It remained rural, with the cities controlled by the English.

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