Liam's Irish Traditional Music - Irelands culture and tradition

The wars that ravaged Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were no worse than others being fought on the European mainland, in all cases the people who suffered the greatest hardship were the peasants. At the death of Elizabeth in 1603, large parts of Ireland lay in devastation, from the north, in Ulster, to Munster in the south, crops and buildings had been burned and destroyed, and farm animals lay slaughtered in the fields. Perhaps as many as 5,000 people lost their lives in Munster alone, during only one campaign. The slaughtered animals fed English soldiers, and thousands of cattle were deliberately burned to starve the Irish to death. Their bones remained bleaching in the. Sun for years afterwards.

And no spectacle was more frequent in the ditches of towns and especially in‑ wasted countries, than to see multitudes of these poor people with their mouths all coloured green by eating nettles, docks and all things they could rend above ground. These and very many lamentable effects followed their rebellion, and no doubt the rebels had been utterly destroyed by famine, had not a general peace shortly followed Tyrone's submission.

(source: an eyewitness account written by John Moryson between 1602 and 1623, quoted in Richard Berleth, The Twilight Lords, Allen Lane, 1978)

This woodcut by Albrecht Durer was made in 1498, for a religious text entitled 'The Apocalypse of St John'. The apocalypse is the name given to the coming of the end of the world, which is described in the New Testament book of St John. Many people in Europe in the fifteenth century had believed that the end of the world might happen in 1500, and Durer had this in mind when he produced this woodcut. He represents the end of the world as four horsemen of war, disease, famine and death. Some people hoped that 1500 would bring changes in the way people lived