Ireland. A History. A Nation Once Again? Part I. Иностранный язык. Фомина И.В - 9 стр.

                                           9

                                         Unit Five.

   I.    Read and translate the text

    Suddenly, one day in AD 795, this Irish world experienced a new great shock. The
first of thousands of long, beautifully-curving high-prowed open boats filled with
fierce and terrible strange warriors from beyond the sea beached on Lambay Island
off the Dublin coast. It was the beginning of the Norsemen’s invasion of Ireland...
Known as ‘Danes’ in Irish popular history, they came mainly from Norway. They
came slaughtering, burning and ransacking their way into Irish history, terrorizing
and looting Gaelic homestead and monastery alike.
    There no organized national resistance to the invasions. It is true that in 1014 a
king from County Clare named Brian Boru, who had managed to fight his way
against other Irishmen up to the High Kingship, defeated, at Clontarf, a great army
consisting partly of the Norsemen of Dublin. But the other part of the army that he
defeated consisted of the Irishmen of Leinster, and other great kings of Ireland stood
aloof on the sidelines to see what picking there might be when the battle was over.
    Round towers, which can still be in many parts of Ireland, were built as combined
belfries and refuges for the monasteries which the Norsemen continually sacked. The
entrance to them was set high above the ground and, at the sound of the alarm from
the belfry above, those seeking safety would mount rapidly, pulling their ladder up
after them. Appalling scenes of brutality and terror must have been enacted below –
not once but many times in what are now such peaceful places.
    The Norsemen, the Vikings, became in time part of Ireland, building on the coasts
the first Irish towns such as Arklow and Wexford, settling into the Gaelic pattern of
warring kings, above all intermarrying with the Gaelic Irish and becoming Irish
themselves. As new Irish, they were to experience Ireland’s next great shock to come.
    It was at Baginbun on the south-western tip of County Wexford that a small party
of Normans, who had sailed across the sea from Wales, landed on 1 May 1170, and
built across the promontory there a vast rampart which, overgrown as it is with gorse
and bramble, is still impressive today after eight centuries of Irish wind and weather.
The rampart sealed off the neck of the promontory which the Normans were then able
to prove. Eight centuries of conflict were to flow from it – a conflict that is still not
over.
    These Norman invaders were soldiers not of the king of England but of one of his
barons, the earl of Pembroke, known as Strongbow. They had been invited over by
the Irish king of Leinster, Dermot Macmurrough, to help him in a fight he was having
with his own High King. Macmurrough wanted the amazingly superior Norman
military technology – equipment unknown in Ireland: knights in armour, and archers
(the Irish were only using slings and stones at the home). Strongbow hoped for
something in return. He came with more knights and arches, and within a year had
not only captured Dublin for Macmurrough but married his daughter and, when
Macmurrough died, became king of Leinster himself.