The Irish War-Cry Author(s): David Greene Source: riu, Vol. 22 (1971), pp.

167-173 Published by: Royal Irish Academy Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30007607 Accessed: 02/03/2010 18:45
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THE IRISH WAR-CRY

of the Irish Language, p. 327, is abti or abd, explained as 'an exclamation of terror and defiance'. At the end of the list he gives the further information that

HE firstof the interjections listed by O'Donovan in his Grammar

The war-criesof the ancient Irish, and Anglo-Irish, were made of abW, or ab', andthe name,or crest,of the family,or placeof residence, as Grdsach abi ! Seanaidabu! ! Fionnd6g abil! Cromadh abd This description of abt as an exclamation of both terror and defiance has its counterpart in the entry in O'Reilly's Irish-English Dictionary under abu, abo: 'The war cry of the ancient Irish. Hence Croma boo, Butleireach aboo, &c. Aboi, Heb.' The comparison with Hebrew is, of course, quite unjustified, but it is interesting that the word he has in mind means 'alas!' and is in no sense a war cry. We find the same combination in the OED discussion of the history of the word hubbub, where both ub! ub! ubub 'an interjection of aversion or contempt' and abP 'the war-cry of the ancient Irish' are offered as possible sources. An interjection of the type of ub! ub! ubub! is attested in Irish as far back as the ninth century, for upp glosses ei mihi 'woe is me' at Sg I20b3; admittedly, the vagaries of OIr spelling make it uncertain whether this represents [up] or [ub], but the prevalence of ub in other examples makes this form the more probable.' There is also a Middle Irish example in Aislinge Meic Con Glinne 85.29, where the interjection abb, abb,abbis interpreted by Meyer as being one of defiance; the context, however, suggests rather surprise. In support of this is the use of ob! ob! obobina! in the modern spoken language in a similar sense, cf. d bobi 'interjection of surprise',Dinneen, bh bhde Bhaldraithe, Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge; an deilbhiocht,p. 238. It is true that the boundary between surprise and aversion is often blurred, as de xii 64-6, Bhaldraithe has demonstrated in his study of fubuin, F.igse but interjections of this type seem an unlikely source for a war-cry. The earliest examples of hubbub(see OED s.v), which seem to be most probably of Irish origin, point in the same direction; Irish is attested as early as 1555, but there is no question of a warwhobub but simply of the noise made by a crowd of savages going to here, cry drink. Similarly, Fynes Moryson (quoted in Falkiner's Illustrations of Irish History. p. 312) says of the Irish: 'They are by nature very
1 It is perhaps worth noting that, as Irish as both uch and ub 'alas', so Welsh has och in the same meaning, but also the element ub- in the word ubain 'lamenting'. An original *uk- would have given uch, och in Irish and ub- in Welsh; the doublets could then have arisen from mutual borrowing.

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clamorous, upon every small occasion raising the hobou(that is a doleful outcry), which they take from one another's mouth until they put the whole town in tumult'; a doleful outcry is hardly warlike. Even more cogent is the evidence of John Derrick, who, in his Image of Ireland (1581; facsimile ed. p. 67) makes the Irish cry bobbowe and lullalowe when they are being put to flight, for the latter word is the same as the aleleu 'which the meer Irish women are accustomed to repeat with howlings and clappings at the funerals of their friends' (Harris, Works of Sir James Ware ii 164) and as the aililis of modern Irish, which can indicate either surprise or sorrow. Only in a way which might suggest it was a battle-cry, Spenser uses hubbub most notably in the lines They heard a noyse of many bagpipes shrill and shrieking hububs them approaching nere... (FQ iii X 43) but, to balance that, it should be noted that he uses the word habbub, hububin the same passage as that in which he quotes the war-cries Laundargarbo,Crom-aboand Butler-abo,without suggesting any connection between them, see Spenser's Prose Works, ed. R. Gottfried (1949), p. 103. The evidence that hubbub derives from Irish oh! oh! is very strong, but any connection with abz must be rejected. It will be remembered that O'Reilly, although describing the word absi as 'the war-cry of the ancient Irish', spelled it as a boo, aboo in his examples, for the good reason that it had never appeared in any document in the Irish language before his time. It was no doubt from O'Donovan's Grammar,with its mention of GrdsachabM, that Sheffield Grace, Esq., got the idea of composing the 'ancient feudal war-song entitled Grasagh Aboe (the Cause of the Graces)' which he printed in the 'original Gaelic or Iberno-Celticlanguage' with metrical versions in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Greek and Latin, in a volume published privately in London in 1839; the word abs became popular after the revival period, in such slogans as An Ghaeilge A bi. But it has never penetrated into the speech of the people, where, in most dialects, the formant in partisan cries is English Up!, as in the Up Cuas! quoted by Muiris 0 Siiileabhain in Fiche Blian ag Fds. Another English phrase is used in Connemara: we find High for Blakes and Dalys, agus filedidisfein le chdile d!, Mairtin 0 Cadhain, An tSraith ar Ldr, p. 162, and it has even produced the verbal noun highfordil,id., p. 67. This formant, which also occurs in Carleton's English, is of interest in that it seems to have been remoulded from English hey for which, according to the OED s.v.
hey, has no connection with high. Whether there is any completely native formant seems doubtful; de Bhaldraithe's English-Irish

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Dictionary, s.v. hurrah, offers na laetheanta go deo! as an equivalent of 'hurrah for the holidays!', and phrase Firinn go brdch! 'Ireland for ever' may well be a genuine formation. What the relation of these to 'Scotland for ever!' and Cymru am byth! may be, I am unable to say; just as 'up' and 'high' are regular formants in many languages (cf. Hoch der Kaiser! Arriba Espala!), so are phrases like vive le roi! or Japanese banzai! 'ten thousand years!'. It should be noted that the formant suas le, while well established in both literature and common speech, does not really fall into the category we are discussing, for it is imperative in force; thus suas leat, a cheinnbhile chdigh, L. Cl. A Buidhe 132.51, is an exhortation to be up and doing rather than a partisan cry. Tomis de Bhaldraithe points out to me that Brian 0 Nuallhin used the slogan Suas leis na Gaedhil! in the first edition of An Blal Bocht, but changed to Na Gaedhil abd! in the second; both are, of course, entirely compatible with the postrevival Irish of a speaker at the feis in Corca Dhorcha. It is to the records of the English administration' that we must turn for examples of this 'Irish war-cry'; the earliest occur at the beginning of the fourteenth century. In the Calendar of Justiciary Rolls 1308-14, p. 244, there is a record of men being charged with frightening the inhabitants of Hughstown, Co. Kildare, by shouting 'Fennockabo, Fennock-abo, quod est signum de O'Tothils'. There is another entry of the same period in the Annales Hiberniae for 1316 (IAS 1842, p. 72), where it is recorded that the Irish of Imayle (who were, of course, O'Tooles) lost 400 men in a battle at Tullow; the heads of the dead were cut off and brought to Dublin, but the dead bodies rose The and fought again, 'fennacabo signum suum pronuntiantes'. word signum here is probably a translation of English ensign in the meaning 'a rallying or battle-cry, watchword', which the OED describes as obsolete and mainly Scottish. Fennacabo is identical with the Fionndg abs given by O'Donovan, and presumably refers to a 'crest', since fionndg means 'scald-crow'. There is a long gap between these two examples and our next piece of datable evidence, which, however, shows us that the use of the formant abo was by no means confined to the O'Tooles; it is ch. xx of the enactments of Poyning's Parliament of 1495, an act 'abolishing these words Cromabo & Butlerabo', and laying down: That no person ne persons of whatsoever estate condition or degree he or they be of, take part with any lord or gentleman, or uphold any such variances or comparisons in word or deed, as in using words these, Cromabo, Butlerabo, or other words like, or otherwise contrary to the King's lawes, his crown, and dignity, and peace, but to call only on St. George, or the name of his Sovereign Lord the King of England for the time being.
1 I should like to record my thanks to Professor J. F. M. Lydon, F.T.C.D., and to Sr. Benvenuta MacCurtain, U.C.D., for putting their expert knowledge of this material at my disposal.

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The enactment was not conspicuously successful; a pavement tile from Bective Abbey, now in the museum of the Irish Genealogical Office, bears the arms of Gerald Fitzgerald, 8th Earl of Kildare, who died in 1513, and the inscription Si Dieu plet Crom abo. During the Desmond Rebellion of 1579-80, the rebels coined the war-cry Pape aboo and, noting this, Burghley, the Lord Treasurer, wrote to the Earl of Ormond that he would have to reply with Butleraboo, the prohibited Ormond slogan (CSPI 1574-85 p. 206). This was, of course, a mild joke, but the fact that the rebels had utilised abd in their war-cry shows how common these slogans must have been at the time; a document preserved in CSPI 16o01-3, p. 683, lists more than twenty, and it may well be incomplete. Spenser (loc. cit.) takes it that the custom was Irish in origin: that the Irish cry Laundergabo 'that is the bloddie hand, which is Oneales badge' and that 'to theire ensample the olde Englishe allsoe which theare remayneth have gotten vp theire cryes Scithyan-like as Crom-abo and Butler-abo'. 'Scythian' is Spenser's way of saying 'Irish', and, as we have seen, the oldest examples of this kind of war-cry is that of the O'Tooles, who were as 'Scythian' as possible. The native word cosmart, caismeart had acquired the meaning 'battle-cry' in pre-Norman translation literature, cf. LL 32505, and it was no doubt used to describe slogans such as that of the O'Tooles. It is attested, though sparsely, in Early Modern classical verse, cf. IGT Decl. ex. 1227. The Nowhere in that verse, however, is the word abA found. connection with hubbub did not occur to any of the English in close touch with Ireland, and Sir James Ware had a quite different explanation: After Ages produced many other shouts and out-cries as signals before engagements which were used in Compliment to the leaders and Heads of several families and intended as incentives to sedition. They chiefly terminated in the word aboe, which seems to come from an obsolete Irish word Aba, signifying Cause or Business... (Harris, Worksof Sir James Wareii 163) It would be interesting to know where Ware got hold of the word aba (see RIA Contribb. A, s.v. I apa), which was indeed obsolete by his time, but his explanation, though ingenious, is quite untenable, for the word never means 'cause' in the political sense, and the final -A is unaccounted for. However, it was good enough for Sheffield Grace, who, as we have seen, rendered Grdsach ab6 as 'the Cause of the Graces'. The armorial bearings of the late Eoin O'Mahony, KM, show an 'etymologising' form in Lassair romhuinn go buadh, apparently a translation of Victoria in flammis. This explanation of abd as go buaidh 'to victory' is no doubt older than the first edition of Dinneen's dictionary (1907), but is quite untenable, since the preposition go

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never loses its initial consonant in anglicised forms, cf. Erin go bragh for the Eirinn go brdch already mentioned; that such a reduction could have taken place by the fourteenth century is completely impossible. I have failed to find in print a theory which appears to be known to a number of people, that ab4 derives from French rather than Irish, so that Butler abd would stand for 'Butler to the end'. This has the attraction that it would be a construction of the same type as Eirinn go brdchor Cymruam byth,but there is no record of the phrase a bout be;ng used in such a way in French, and the verb aboutersuggests a rather different semantic range. There is the further difficulty that final -t in French loanwords is preserved as -d in Irish, e.g. the ending -et normally appears as -dad; it will be remembered that we have a Norman French motto from the sixteenth century, Si Dieu plet Cromabo, where the final -t of plet is preserved, but there is no trace of a final -t in abo. The remaining possibility is English, and I believe that the true explanation of abu was given nearly four hundred years ago by Lord Justice Pelham in a letter which he wrote to Elizabeth I on Dec. 28, 1597, defending his action in outlawing the Earl of Desmond who, 'in all his skirmishes and outrages since the proclamation crieth Papa abo, which is the Pope above, even above you and your Imperial crown', Cal. CarewMSS. 1578-9. p. 191. As a formant, abovewould belong to the same category as up, high, hoch, etc., and its use with a noun is regular in such locutions as the sky above. In modern English, above is merely an adverb of location and does not convey any idea of political or military superiority, but there is an obsolete usage recorded in the OED s.v. above5: 'fig. (From the idea of two wrestlers or combatants.) In superiority; having the upper hand in a struggle;
victorious'.

the earliest demonstrates the meaning precisely: Ofte heofuhten, ofte heo weren buenne (bofe, v.1.) and ofte bi-neoden,Layamon 3746, where buenne, bofe 'above' means 'victorious' and bi-neoden'beneath' means 'defeated'. Formally, there is no great difficulty; an apocopated *abofrom abofe is quite possible, and it would have regularly become aboo in the soundshift from Middle to Modern English. Better still, the latter form is actually noted by Poole as the form of aboveused in the archaic English dialect of the baronies of Forth and Bargy as late as the end of the eighteenth century. All that is lacking is an example of aboveas the formant of a slogan, and it is tempting to offer a parallel from Dutch, where the loyal cry is Oranjeboven,the second element being etymologically identical with above, so that it could be transposed into *Orangeaboo. Since
boven, however, is not used as a formant in partisan cries in modern Dutch, any more than above in modern English, this interpretation is

The examples quoted cover the period 1205-1611, and

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not offered in the standard works. I am indebted to Dr. Hans Oskamp for the following translation of the relevant item from the 8th edition (1961) of Van Dale's Groot Woordenboek, s.v. Oranje II: boven! exclamaOranje ... neut. noun, the colourmentionedsub i:... tion perhapsdating from the struggle with the Dunkirk privateers,who used to turn the flag of a seized vessel upside down; later commoncry to expressthe attachmentto the House of Orange. Dr. Oskamp explains that the flag was originally orange-whitelight blue; the theory, then, is that the privateers turned it upside down when they took a Dutch ship, that the Dutch restored the correct alignment when the ship was re-captured, shouting Oranje boven! 'Orange above, on top', and that this became the loyal cry. It would be impertinent for one who has no knowledge of Dutch to suggest a different solution of the problem, yet, remembering that, in Irish terms, Butler aboo is considerably older than such a fleeting slogan as The Green above the Red, I confess to a suspicion that Oranje boven may refer to the supremacy of the House of Orange rather than to the positioning of a stripe on a flag; the identity of the name of the dynasty and that of the colour admittedly complicates the matter considerably. For aboo as a formant in Irish war-cries, Pelham's explanation remains by far the most probable. If the word is in fact English, we must assume that the native O'Tooles had borrowed the custom from their Anglo-Norman neighbours, and we may hazard the guess that Crom abo was the pattern which they were following. Maurice Fitzgerald obtained a grant of Croom in 1216; as O'Rahilly pointed out, Eriu xiii 176, the Irish form of this place-name was Cromadh, and there can be little doubt that the final dental spirant had by this time been dropped in popular speech at least, so that Croma abo would regularly become Crom abo. The extension from places of residence to family names as the first element is easily understood. The introduction of 'badges' ox crests is also in line with Norman usage, though it is surprising to find that the O'Tooles had adopted this custom so early; the 'bloddie hand' of the O'Neills seems to be considerably later. The absence of references to these innovations in the praise poetry composed both for native and Anglo-Norman lords is presumably to be explained in the same way as the absence of reference to innovations in armaments or military technique in general; the language of this poetry was highly traditional-Eochaidh He6ghusa's great poem on Aodh M4g Uidhir's winter campaign, for example, contains only one concept (mir, csirt 'castle)' which

would serve to show what period it belongs to, and the only weapon referred to is the archaic ceis 'spear'. We may take it that the Pdpa

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abd of the Desmond rebellion was the last spontaneous coinage to use this formant, and perhaps also the nearest approach to its becoming a genuine Irish word. The final Elizabethan settlement brought about what Poyning's parliament had aimed at more than a hundred years before, the end of any 'variances or comparisons' which would exalt any individual to the detriment of the English crown, and so the word abo, abi disappeared from both English and Irish. DAVID GREENE. Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.