Clare Island Survey — Place-Names and Family Names. 3 9 



conquered by the language of the conquerors has sometimes created in a later 

 age the illusion of a displacement of population. The Anglo-Saxon conquest 

 of England is a case in point. Conversely, popular history ignores the Norse 

 occupation of the Hebrides and the Norse dominion there for more than four 

 centuries, and takes the modern Hebrideans for an extremely Celtic people, 

 because in the long run the Gaelic language displaced the Norse language in 

 that region. 1 In like manner, the population of southern Scotland is often 

 supposed to be Anglo-Saxon, for no better reason than that an Anglian 

 dialect has, in quite modern times, become exclusively the popular speech. 

 Anglian colonization, as a matter of historical fact, did not extend beyond 

 the eastern maritime region. Buchanan, writing in 1589, says that Gaelic 

 was then "magna ex parte" the language of Galloway, it was also, magna 

 ex parte, the language of the Scottish Lowland settlers in the north of Antrim 

 as late as the first half of the eighteenth century. 



Displacement, however, took place in other ways after conquest. The 

 dominant class in a country is often the least prolific. It was otherwise with 

 the Celts in Ireland. The rapid increase of the Gaelic nobility can be seen as 

 clearly in the annals as in the genealogies, and stands in strong contrast to 

 the very frequent extinction of the male line in the pedigrees and histories of 

 the Norsemen and Franco-Norsemen. 2 Some have supposed that the Irish 

 surnames in " " and "Mac" are not ordinarily evidence of descent from the 

 ancestors in whom they originated ; that the subjects of an Irish chief were 

 accustomed to assume his surname. I have never found any evidence of such 

 a custom, even during the period when the privilege of the " five bloods " 

 might have made it acceptable. Dubhaltach Mac Fir Bhisigh, the last of our 

 hereditary genealogists, did not believe that the custom existed. He seems 

 to have been challenged about it, perhaps by his friend Sir James "Ware, and 

 his answer is emphatic. He is discussing the question whether racial origin 

 may be traced by means of physical characteristics, and he says of this 

 criterion : — 



" Though it may not be found true in all cases, there is nothing incon- 

 sistent with reason in it. And further, it is an argument against the people 

 who say [ironically] that there is no family in this country which the 

 genealogists do not trace up to the sons of Mil. And notwithstanding this, 



1 The Hebrides remained closely attached in intercourse and politically subject to Norway until 

 1263 ; but the Norse conquest was not merely a political conquest like that of England or of parts of 

 Ireland by the Normans. That there was a very complete Norse colonization with a prevalence of 

 the Norse language is proved by the fact that a large proportion of place-names in the Hebrides, 

 amounting in some of the islands, it is said, to two-thirds or three-fourths, are of Noise origin. 



3 See the Noise pedigrees supplied by Yigfusson, Icelandic Sagas, vols, i and ii, and compare the 

 descent of the Norman dynasty in England, and of the lordship of Leinster and the earldom of 

 Ulster after Strongbow and De Courcy. 



B.I.A. PBOC, VOL. XXXI. B 3 



