The 19th century saw a new version of Hurling, or hurley as it was referred to, become popular within the upper classes. A defining ten year period for Hurling was before the establishment of the Gaelic Athletic Association in By , there were at least six hurley clubs among the gentry in Dublin, and the Irish Hurley Union was founded in Trinity College.
It was exclusively an upper-class preserve and bore little relation to traditional concepts of the game. During this period, the various forms of the game all metamorphosed into the first nationally codified sport of Hurling, which was in essence, the summer game of Leinster and the South. A clareman named Michael Cusack had realised the need for common regulations and this inspired much of his thinking with regard to the formation of the GAA. Since the foundation of the GAA in and the introduction of a formal set of rules, the game of Hurling has evolved to the game we see today.
The original core concept of man-on man or woman-on-woman contests for the ball within the defined framework of a positional game has been added to and eroded to varying degrees over time. Similarly in the south of the country, hurling was so prevalent, that the Lord Chancellor William Gerrarde was forced to reprimand the English settlers of the Munster Plantation for playing the game in In the post-medieval period hurling continued to prosper, often under the patronage of the Anglo-Irish gentry.
These matches drew large crowds and many colourful accounts of these games survive. King , p. Similarly in , a game at Callan, Co.
The sticks were being brandished like swords. Hurling is a war-like game. The west side won the first match and the east the second. Inter-village and sometimes inter-county hurling matches flourished throughout the 19 th century. Indeed, they were to inspire a new and dynamic sporting organisation. The rest, as they say, is history. Hello, We are hoping that it would be ok to link to the pages on hurling as the Ireland Canada Monument specifically will recognise the contribution of hurling to Ice Hockey in Canada in We hope to link from the Monument website to the Irish Archeological Website and also to include a link in our newsletter for the same.
I enjoyed your article on the history of Hurling but wondered if the reference to the Gallowglass gravestone at Inishowen in Donegal was a little inaccurate?
The stick displayed on the stone is actually the longer, more slender Shinty caman, fom the Scottish form of gaelic field sport, rather than the shorter, broader hurley. The gentleman who the stone commemorates was Manus MacMorisdean from Iona. Thanks for the comment Roddie. Two things please. Secondly, on Easter Monday to quote James Ware — the Bristolins of this Cittie Dublin , and other Englsih inhabitants of the same, had by ancient custome a sport which they called hurleing of balls, and which they exercised upon Festivall Dayes.
These Bristolins challenged another partie of the Cittie to hurle with them on Easter Monday. I remember seeing it when quite a little boy, and I was at service in the now ruined church.
Some long years since, I went and had the stone stripped, and that same day went to the Youngs of Culdaff, as I knew it was over a grave of one of their family, and asked them about it.
They told me a fishing-boat from Culdaff was blown over to one of the Scotch isles in a gale, and on its return the crew, in want of ballast, went into a churchyard in, I think, Iona, and took this stone away, which one of their relatives got possession of and placed where it is. This would account for the golf-stick and ball, which were unknown in Ireland, and quite suit with the title upon the stone.
A stolen headstone? Perhaps it is rather ingenious — not to mention tenuous — for the GAA to trace its codifed games as a continuous line back to ancient Irish myth. To renew a subscription please login first. Why is hurling currently popular in a compact region centred on east Munster and south Leinster, and in isolated pockets in the Glens of Antrim and in the Ards peninsula of County Down? The answer lies in an exploration of the interplay between culture, politics and environment over a long period of time.
Fig 1. The ball could be handled or carried on the hurl, which was flat and round-headed; the ball the sliothar was soft and made of animal hair; the game was played in summer.
Table 1 They picked the teams, arranged the hurling greens and supervised the matches, which were frequently organised as gambling events. The southern hurling zone coincides with the area where, in the late medieval period, the Norman and Gaelic worlds fused to produce a vigorous culture, reflected, for example, in the towerhouse as an architectural innovation. It coincides with well-drained, level terrain, seldom moving too far off the dry sod of limestone areas, which also happen to produce the best material for hurls — ash.
It is closely linked to the distribution of big farms, where the relatively comfortable lifestyle afforded the leisure to pursue the sport. Landlord patronage was essential to the well-being of the southern game; once it was removed, the structures it supported crumbled and the game collapsed into shapeless anarchy.
As one hostile observer put it:. A hurling match is a scene of drunkenness, blasphemy and all kinds and manner of debauchery and faith, for my part, I would liken it to nothing else but to the idea I form of the Stygian regions where the daemonic inhabitants delight in torturing and afflicting each other.
DECLINE By the mid nineteenth century, hurling had declined so steeply that it survived only in three pockets, around Cork city, in south-east Galway and in the area north of Wexford town. Amongst the reasons for decline were the withdrawal of gentry patronage in an age of political turbulence, sabbitudinarianism, modernisation and the dislocating impact of the Famine.
Landlord, priest and magistrate all turned against the game. Politicisation led to a growing anti-landlord feeling, which had been far more subdued in the heyday of gentry-sponsored hurling between the s and s.
The relationship of hurling and the newly established Gaelic Athletic Association in the s shows this third phase with textbook clarity. Cusack and his GAA backers also wished to use the game as a nationalising idiom, a symbolic language of identity filling the void created by the speed of anglicisation.
Thus, from the beginning, the revived game had a nationalist veneer, its rules of association bristling like a porcupine with protective nationalist quills on which its perceived opponents would have to impale themselves. Its principal backers were those already active in the nationalist political culture of the time, classically the I.
Its spread depended on the active support of an increasingly nationalist Catholic middle class — and as in every country concerned with the invention of tradition, its social constituency included especially journalists, publicans, schoolteachers, clerks, artisans and clerics. The GAA was a classic example of the radical conservatism of this region — conservative in its ethos and ideology, radical in its techniques of organisation and mobilisation.
The spread of hurling can be very closely matched to the spread of other radical conservative movements of this period — the diffusion of the indigenous Catholic teaching orders and the spread of co-operative dairying. It would, however, be a mistake to see the spread of hurling under the aegis of the GAA solely in nationalist terms.
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