History of Hurling before the G.A.A.
First heard on KCLR Radio, June 2021
Hurling is an ancient game stretching back into pre-history. The earliest recorded reference to the game is the Battle of Moytura, Cong, Co. Mayo. The Tuatha de Danaan arrived in Ireland and took on the Firbolgs looking for half of Ireland. A four-day battle started on June 11, 1272 AD. At some stage the sides took time out for a game of hurling.The Firbolgs won the game but lost the battle. We have little knowledge as to what kind of game it was except we are told that three times nine Firbolgs took on the same number of Tuatha de Danaan.
Later in mythology we learn that Cúchulainn hurled the ball to shorten the journey to his uncle, Conor Mac Nessa, in Eamain Macha. He came across a crowd of youth hurling and joined in the game, beat the lot of them and scored a goal by carrying the ball through a loop. It appears the goal was a looped stick with the ends stuck in the ground and the goal was scored by running through the loop. Other than that we don’t know how large the field was, how many players were a-side, what kind of a ball was used.
Our next stop is the eighteenth century, which is known as the Golden Age of Hurling, when the game reached an almost professional level. The landlords became the patrons of the game and organised teams from among their tenants to play other landlord teams for substantial wagers.
One of the most extraordinary of these hurlers was Dudley Cosby of Stradbally, Co. Laois. How many attending the Electric Picnic there will realise that an ancestor of the owner in the seventeenth century was described thus:
He danced on the ropes as well as any rope dancer that ever was. He was a fine tennis and five player, a most extraordinary fine hurler and very fond of all these things, and practised them very much when he was young and able.
Lord John Cuffe of Dysart, Co. Kilkenny kept an excellent hurling team, colourfully turned out and took an active part in the ‘great hurlings’ of the mid-18th century. He and other landlords and gentry in Kilkenny and Tipperary, notably Butlers, Smiths, Williams, Campions, Longs and Purcells, patronised the game.
Baron Purcell of Loughmore, Thurles had a team of hurlers. His castle can be seen from the train near Templemore as one travels towards Dublin . There is a field near the castle where games of hurling are reputed to have been played. On one side there is an artificial mound that is believed to have been built to facilitate viewing of the game.
It is difficult to imagine the game that was played at the time. The sides had 21 players, divided into three groups of seven, the culbaire that protected the goal, the phalanx of heavier men, who moved the ball forward, and the whips & flies that gathered the ball and soloed through the goal. It was in many ways similar to the modern game of rugby.
There was no goalkeeper and a goal was scored by carrying the ball through the loop that formed the goal. There was no ground hurling as we know it and no rising of the ball. It could be caught in the hand from the air.. The team that scored the first goal won the game. Often the match was decided by the team that won two of three games.
The Golden Age of Hurling assumes a favourable relationship between landlords and tenants, far removed from the stories we learned at school of life under the penal Laws during the same period. This good relationship came to an end at the end of the 18th century.
There were a number of reasons for the dramatic change. One of these was the European phenomenon of the abandonment of popular culture by the nobility. One authority gives a vivid account of this development:
The nobles were adopting more ‘polished’ manners, a new and more self-conscious style of behaviour, modelled on the courtesy books . . . Noblemen were learning to exercise self-control, to behave with a studied nonchalance, to cultivate a sense of style and to move in a dignified manner as if engaging in a formal dance. . . Noblemen stopped eating in great halls with their retainers and withdrew into separate dining-rooms . . . They stopped wrestling with their peasants, as they used to do in Lombardy, and they stopped killing bulls in public as they used to do in Spain. The noblemen learned to speak and write ‘correctly’ according to formal rules and to avoid technical terms and the dialect words used by craftsmen and peasants.
One can imagine the change in Ireland – a Cosby or a Purcell coming to the conclusion that they were superior persons, and their need to avoid contamination from the ‘people’. Mixing with retainers in a game of hurling was no longer possible. Even riding up and down the field wielding a whip during a game and keeping the yokels in check was no longer the done thing. Placing wagers and sharing the barrell of ale after the game would be completely detrimental to the new image.
Another reason for the change was that such gatherings for hurlings, as advertised in the newspapers, might be suspected of seditious undertones in the changing political climate of the last years of the century. This had come about as a result of Whiteboy activity and later the United Irishmen and the Rising of 1798. The developments in Wexford and the south-east destroyed the political relationship between landlord and tenant. Another aspect of the events was the great slaughter of thousands of men of hurling age in the south-east. The Act of Union and the Napoleonic wars altered the way of life of many landlords, turning them into absentees and bringing to an end the great days of barony hurling and landlord patronage.
All of these changes and developments left the game of hurling without the leadership and patronage it required. The spread of Sunday Observance was another damper on the game. Gradually the Catholic Church adopted the Sabbatarianism of the Protestant churches and began to frown on games on Sunday as something frivolous and a waste of time. As a result the clergy, who might have taken up the leadership abandoned by the landlords, left the people to fend for themselves.
The Great Famine was another disaster for the national pastimes. The drop in national morale and the destruction of a rural society in many areas, caused a dramatic decline in traditional pastimes. The Kilkenny Young Irelander, J. T. Campion, deplored the passing of the old sports in 1857. Twenty years later A. M. Sullivan, the Home Rule M.P., recalling the effect of the Famine on the ordinary people, wrote:
Their ancient sports and pastimes everywhere disappeared and in many parts . . . have never returned. The outdoor games, the hurling match are seen no more.
Michael Doheny offers other reasons for the decline of the game: ‘first, the introduction of the dance drew down on the hurling the opposition of the priest. In some instances, too, of late, family and faction fights are renewed in hurling, which still more imperatively called for the reprobation of the clergy. And finally, . . . the disinclination of the farmers to allow the hurling on their grazing lands.’
And finally P. F. O’Brien wrote this on the eve of 1884: ‘The most of the hurlers are now beyond the Atlantic wave and the remainder go whistling vacantly around the roads at home. Our schoolboys have permanently settled down to cricket, but our farmers sons no longer interest themselves in the rounding of the boss or the feel of a hockey.’
We have to thank Michael Cusack for recognising the perilous state of the game in the early 1880s and the need to do something about reviving it. It wasn’t by any means extinct and there were places where is continued to be played. The Killimor Rules are testament of its strength in some places. But overall it was declining and unless it was organised and regulated it was in danger of disappearing altogether.