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Usnea and the Commodification of Irish Bodies in 16 th and 17 th Century London

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We only know of this from a story written by Thomas Churchyard. A poet and soldier in the

English army, he served under Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1566-7 in Elizabeth I’s campaign against

Shane O’Neill, a warring chieftain whose quest for power had put him in direct conflict with both

the English monarchy and the surrounding Irish families. The campaign did not last long: on 2 June

1567, O’Neill was murdered in the north-east of Ulster by the Mac Donnells (an act which was

financially rewarded by the English). The body was initially buried, but was quickly exhumed by

the English for the purpose of cutting off O’Neill’s head, preserving it in salt, and transporting it

back to Dublin Castle where it was placed upon a spike. The act intended to strike terror into the

hearts of other Irishmen who had considered raising a hand against the English. After O’Neill’s

death, Gilbert was promoted to Governor of Munster where he became notorious for his brutality in

dealing with the Irish.1 The most famous story of his governorship comes from Churchyard, who

writes that after a day of battle, Gilbert ordered “the heads of all those … which were killed in the

day should be cut off from their bodies, and brought to the place where he encamped at night.”

There, they were “laid on the ground by each side of the way leading into his own tent, so that [no

Irishman] could come into his tent for any cause but commonly he must pass through a lane of …

the heads of [his] dead fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolk, and friends…”2 Like the O’Neill

beheading, Churchyard explains this action as one to “bring great terror to the [Irish] people;” while

recent historiography has generally concluded that Gilbert’s actions were the result of both his

sadistic nature and the English’s dehumanization of the Irish.3 However, if we were to look at the

cultural, economic, and scientific contexts of not only contemporary England but of Eastern Europe

1 Donald Barr Chidsey, Sir Humphrey Gilbert: Elizabeth’s Racketeer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932), p. 44. His governorship was also famous for his bravery in battle, where one story tells of him single-handedly fighting more than twenty mounted Irishmen while his platoon retreated over a ford to safety. Whether or not this story is true is uncertain: Chidsey notes that the only source for it is from two letters written by Captain John Ward in 1569. Ward served under Gilbert; but other than that, as Chidsey notes, there is “no evidence that Ward was a relative or was otherwise interested in Gilbert’s career.” However, just the fact that a story of this nature could be believed tells us much about the type of man Gilbert was.2 Taken from Chidsey, p. 53.; Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (Oxon: Routledge, 2011), p. 103. Churchyard’s story is taken from his book A General Rehearsal of Wars (1579). However, due to Churchyard’s work not being in print for over 400 years, my only access to his work has been second-hand. The two books mentioned above are not the only secondary works to quote from Churchyard, but they are the two which quoted most extensively. It is important to note that, despite drawing from the same source, there are some minor differences in syntax and grammar between the two books. For my essay, I have decided to go with Chidsey’s transcription as he quotes Churchyard’s story in full; although I do realize this does not mean his version is more accurate.3 Robert Rapple ‘Taking Up Office in Elizabethan Connacht: The Case of Sir Richard Bingham’, English Historical Review 123, no. 501 (April 2008), p. 277.311193803

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as well, we can come to understand these beheadings as a part of a strange medical practice

prominent in this period.

Usnea, or ‘true moss of a dead man’s skull’, was the name given to a fungus which grew around the

structure of unburied skulls. This moss was believed to hold medicinal properties, and was favoured

as an “antiepileptic”4 or an anticoagulant for wounds. The moss was able to grow in any

environment which was cold and wet - essentially all of Great Britain; and yet, despite its

widespread availability, there was only one type of skull which English doctors considered to be

appropriate: the Irish. After stories of large-scales massacres and beheadings committed by both

sides of the conflict were fed back to the London public, English doctors and pharmacists came to

look to the land across the Irish Sea as a profitable reservoir of corporeal medicine. As Francis

Bacon wrote, the wars had left “heaps of slain bodies” unburied and ripe for harvesting.5 As these

skulls were being shipped in from Ireland and either being placed in the shop windows of London

pharmacies or sold to the continental markets, Irish corpses became both literal and figurative

commodities in the English eye. On an Irish battlefield, the sight of a decapitated head may have

been seen as a symbol of the horrendous brutality upon the part of the English and Irish soldiers; but

in the window of a storefront, it was a symbol of wealth and power.

Hinging upon the wars between Ireland and England in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the tales of

beheadings which travelled across the Irish Sea into the city of London, this essay will attempt to

answer why it was that Ireland, over other parts of Great Britain and Western Europe, was viewed

as the prime source of usnea. The answer, I believe, lies within the notion of representation: through

an analysis of the discourses surrounding decapitation and corporeal medicine in 16th and 17th

century London, I will argue that the intertwining of these discourses created the market of usnea.

Through the English appropriation of beheadings as a punishment against Irish soldiers, beheadings

not only implied Irish barbarity but English rule and civility as well. The skull figured as a complex

metaphor for man’s relationship with nature – a symbol of man’s intelligence and, hence, his

distance from the animal kingdom; and also an image of the bestial within us all. Alongside these

discourses, I will analyze how corporeal medicine was practiced and represented in London, and

show that the discourses surrounding its practice (e.g. the relationship between man and nature, the

morality of cannibalism) strikingly paralleled the contemporary discourses surrounding beheadings

in the Irish wars. Through various representations of the cultures of corporeal medicine and 4 Charles Alston, Lectures on the Materia Medica: Containing the Natural History of Drugs, Their Virtues and Doses: Also Directions for the Study of the Materia Medica; and an Appendix on the Method of Prescribing (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1770), p. 525.5 Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum: or, a Naturall Historie (London: John Haviland, 1635), p. 265.311193803

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beheadings, the two discourses intertwined and formed an artificial market which commoditized

Irish bodies.

Before I enter the main argument of my essay, it is important to understand just exactly what usnea

was and how it was used and perceived by both the public and medical professionals. As mentioned

above, usnea refers to a type of moss which was believed to be both an anticonvulsant and an

anticoagulant from roughly the medieval ages until the beginning of the 19th century. Typically

grated into a fine powder, it could be applied either directly to the opening of a wound, be eaten, or

dissolved in water and drunk. Some believed that it was enough to simply occupy the same room as

the moss for its healing properties to be felt; while soldiers would place it beneath their helmets as a

good-luck charm.6 The moss was especially plentiful in Great Britain, as its wet and cold climates

produced an abundance of it in both the city and the country.7 However, during the early modern

period, it was only considered to hold medicinal properties if it had grown upon an unburied human

skull; and the more brutal the death, the better.8 The prime candidates, hence, were executed

prisoners and slain soldiers. The logic behind this medical reasoning can be traced back to the

influence of one ancient Roman text and one scientist: the Doctrine of Signatures, written around

the death of Christ, and Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Honheheim (1493-1541),

also known as Paracelsus. Both saw the relationship between man and nature as being reciprocal:

the former stated that herbs which resembled the human body could be used to heal that specific

part of it; while the latter believed the relationship between nature and the body to be analogous to a

mirror, “[im]possible for anyone to say which of them brought its similitude to the other.”9 The

mirror-link between usnea and mankind was facial hair, as the moss was often described in

scientific dictionaries as “growing like a great beard on the oak, cedar, and … other trees.”10 Hence,

when the moss began to grow over the skull, this was perceived as nature's attempt to heal and

rejoin its compatible body part. Following the Paracelsian doctrine of the “intrinsic virtue” of the

6 One story tells of a duel between two brothers which resulted in one being struck in the head with the other’s sword. Beneath the victim's hat lay a small patch of usnea. Depite his hat and hair being cut through, he “escaped without the smallest wound or penetration of the skin.” The writer, the Flemish chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont, concludes his story by stating it is not difficult to guess what “cause the guard of the skin be justly ascribed.” Jan Baptist van Helmont, The Magnetick Cure of Wounds, trans. Walter Charleton (London, 1650). Quote taken from Douglas Jerrold, Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine 7 (Jan. to Jun., 1848), p. 216.7 The moss itself can be found almost anywhere today. To name a few eclectic examples, usnea can survive in “windows, cars, road signs, beetle elytra, and tortoise shells”. P. Modenesi, ‘Skull lichens: A curious chapter in the history of phytotherapy’, Fitoterapia 80, no. 3 (April, 2009), p. 145.8 The German professor Rudolph Goclenius (1547-1628) argued that it was best if “the victim [had] been [hanged because] … in those who were strangled, the vital spirits were forced up into the skull, remaining trapped there for as long as seven years”; but decapitation was often favoured in London markets. Sugg, p. 40.9 Paracelsus, Liber paramirum, trans. Grillot de Givry (Paris, 1913), p. 3.10 Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia: Or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, vol. 2 (W. Innys, et. al.: London, 1743).311193803

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human corpse, it was believed that “the body of a man who … died an unnatural death with a

healthy body and without sickness”11 was likely to still hold the ‘vital spirits’ of the soul. These

spirits would then be carried over to the moss via analogy: through a sympathetic relationship

between man and nature, the moss was perceived to contain healing properties.12

What specific moss usnea was, however, is uncertain: the botanist Paolo Modenesi has noted that

16th and 17th century scientists had great difficulty categorizing lichens and mosses.13 Rather, it is

very likely that usnea did not refer to one specfic genus of moss; rather it referred to the narrative

behind it. It was not uncommon for importers of medicinal body parts to cheat and fabricate the

narrative in order to save on the cost of shipping. With regard to the transportation of mummia

(ancient Egyptian flesh consumed as medicine), John Hill, a Member of the Royal Academy of

Sciences, wrote in his A History of the Materia Medica (1751), that “we are not to imagine, that any

Body breaks up the real Ægyptian Mummies to sell to the Druggists, as they may make so much

better a Market of them in Europe whole, when they can contrive to get them. What our Druggists

are supply’d with is the Flesh of executed Criminals…”14 If the specific type of moss was

constantly changing with each shipment, then - as you may have already guessed - there was no

inherent quality within the moss which gave it “antiepilectic Virtues”;15 instead, these properties

were projected upon them through a complex set of beliefs and discourses. Michel Foucault has

argued that this projection of human qualities upon nature played a “constructive role in the

knowledge of Western culture” up until the end of the sixteenth century: “It was resemblance that

largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organzied the play of

symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of

11 Louise Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 20.12 This practice of extracting moss from human skulls was not an oddity amongst contemporary medical society: since the medieval ages, medicinal cannibalism had been fairly common throughout Europe. The most common would perhaps have been mummia: the preserved flesh of human bodies transported from Egypt to many parts of Europe. We can also find records of human fat and blood being stored by druggists for public use; as well as a process called lemery which involved distilling “a Spirit, Oil, and volatile Salt, from a fresh human Head with a Brain in it”. John Hill, A History of the Materia Medica: containing descriptions of all the substances used in medicine; their Origin, their Characters when in Perfection, the Signs of their Decay, their Chymical Analysis, and an Account of their Virtues, and of the several Preparations from them now used in the Shops, (London: T. Longman, C. Hitch and L. Hawes, 1751), p. 876.13 Modenesi looks at Robert James’s A Medical Dictionary (1743-5), who wrote that usnea was a “kind of moss … composed of a great number of long and thin whitish fibres, slightly stiff and rough, hanging from tree branches…” This would suggest that usnea was not a moss, but in fact a part of the lichens family - a type of fungus. And in his description of Byron, James “states that the white kind is fragrant and more valuable than the black one,” leading Modenesi to believe he is actually referring to the mosses Evernia and Pseudevernia. Modenesi, p. 145.14 Hill, pp. 875-6. Louise Nobel, in her study Medicinal Cannibalism, noted of an execution of three men in York on 27 June 1574 whose bodies were “were given to the surgeons of the city to be dissected and anatomised.” From there, their flesh would have been stripped, embalmed with Myrhh and spices, shipped to London, and sold as ancient Egyptian flesh to any interested customers. Noble, pp. 3-4.15 Hill, p. 876.311193803

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representing them.”16 This notion of resemblance as knowledge, however, goes beyond just

aesthetic similarities: intangible notions such as discourses, cultures, and ideas too were subject to

these metrics of knowing. This notion of resemblance, I believe, is key to understanding how the

discourses surrounding corporeal medicine came to be intertwined with the wars in Ireland.

The largest difficulty to consumers of usnea was its supply: where was one to find a large deposit of

unburied skulls covered in moss? Francis Bacon writes that, amongst the various forms of corporeal

medicine, the “hardest to come by, are the moss upon the skull of a dead man, unburied.”17 The

initial answer to this question was good old-fashioned grave-digging. Some pharmacists hired

gravediggers to collect skulls from pauper graves; while others, like the general practitioner Dr. R.

Toope who worked in Marlborough in the late 17th century, studied archaeological reports of

ancient burial sites in order to plan nightly raids.18 The oddity and amorality of these grave-digging

doctors was not lost on contemporaries. The poet Richard Savage playfully pointed out in his poem

“The Progress of a Divine” the gap between the hippocratic oath and medical practice: “Poor folks

he’ll shun, but pray by rich if ill, / And watch and watch - to slide into their will; … And strip with

sacrilegious hands the dead; / To tear off rings ere yet the finger rots, / To part them, for the vesture-

shroud cast lots; / Had made dead skulls for coin the chymist’s share…”19 Savage saw the

plundering of poor corpses as an extension of a capitalist society; and to a certain extent it was:

when your patient walks into your office, so illiterate he cannot sign his name; so poor that he will

have to spend all his money to the repair his body; we could perhaps understand it if doctors began

to see their poorer patients as nameless personifications of cash.20 Yet money was not the

determining factor in the targeting of grave sites; it was identity. Lower-class bodies were chosen

not because rich doctors were eager to exploit the poor; they were chosen because their lots were

unnamed and anonymous. It was necessary for the object to be othered, as to exploit and consume

the body of an individual - a person who was just like the consumer - was not a “noble medicine”;21

16 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 19.17 Bacon, p. 265.18 Sugg, pp. 93-4. Toope became such a nuisance for archaeologists that he became a common character in their reports, with one report stating that “Dr Toope was lately at the Golgotha again to supply a defect of medicine he had from hence”. Taken from a note written by Jack Abury about a letter written to him by Toope (1 Dec., 1685). William Long, ‘Abury’, The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vol. 4 (London: Bell & Daldy, 1858), p. 327.19 Richard Savage, ‘The Progress of a Divine: A Satire’, The Poetical Works of Richard Savage, vol. 2 (Edinburg: Apollo Press, 1780), pp 100-1.20 Often to get money for medical treatment, lower-class Londoners pled for kindness from members of the middle- and upper-classes. There were many tactics used by the poor in appealing to the petioned: sometimes they would evoke the necessity of their role in the family; other times they would plead allegiance to the monarchy; and sometimes they made threats of violence. Brodie Waddell, God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660-1720 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012), pp. 129-32.21 Toope’s words. Sugg, p. 93.311193803

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it was cannibalism, plain and simple. Toope himself never dug up marked graves – he sought out

the ones in which the effects of time, culture, and language had obscured the demarcations of

identity and individuality. As the bodies were laid to rest and the period of the Saxons came to a

conclusion, the stories of people who came before became the stories of a people. As histories came

to be constructed, favouring the macro view over the micro, the stories of their ancestors were

homogeneized into one flowing narrative of progress. The Saxons were robbed of their individuality

- their humanity - so that when Toope dug up those graves and lifted the skulls from their burial

mounds, he was not holding human bones - at least not in his mind.

Grave-digging continued in England on a large-scale until the early 19th century, yet it did not last

long as a source of usnea. Trade began to blossom in the 16th century from a new population of

others: Irish skulls were being collected from the wars and shipped into London. Sold between eight

and eleven shillings, and with a one shilling duty tax levied upon it in 1725, cranium humanum

became a regular item on apothecaries’s shelves and store windows. The price would have made it a

luxury out of the reach of any lower-class worker, whose average daily wage was ten shillings. As

the skulls came to symbolize wealth and upper-class status, they inevitably came to be used as gifts

amongst the wealthy. We find one example of upper-class Londoners trading usnea skulls as

prestigious presents in the writings of the chemist Robert Boyle. A sufferer of severe nosebleeds for

most of his life, he saw his sister’s “true moss of a dead man’s skull”, which she had received from

“a great person, for a present out of Ireland [where it was] less rare and more esteemed than

elsewhere”, as both a curious experiment and a last-ditch effort to cure him of his “haemorrhage”.22

It is Boyle’s brief comment - “out of Ireland [where it is] less rare and more esteemed” - that I wish

to now focus upon in this essay. Before doing so, it is perhaps important to recap the main points

that have come so far. We have seen a complicated relationship between man and nature,

obfuscating the boundary between the two. Not only do we find a scientific community which has

difficulty in defining fauna, but we find an ideology which views man’s relationship with nature as

reciprocal. The mirror becomes the metaphor favoured for explaining this link, envisaging man to

22 Robert Boyle, Some Considerations about the Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion (London: T.N., 1675). Boyle found it to work wonders: not only did it stop his nosebleed, but it worked before he applied it to his nose. Here is, for those interested, a fuller version of the quote: “… falling once unexpectedly into a fit, whose violence somewhat alarmed me, I resolved to try an unusual remedy: and having easily obtained of my sister, in whose house this accident happened, some true moss of a dead man’s skull, which had been sent [to] her, by a great person, for a present out of Ireland, in which country, I found it less rare and more esteemed than elsewhere: I was going to employ it after the usual manner, which is to put it up into the patient’s nostrils, but before I did it, I had the curiosity to try, notwithstanding the briskness of my haemorrhage, whether the medicine would produce its effect by being only held in my hand, and therefore covering a piece of the moss with my fist, that the warmth might a little actuate the medicine, I found, to the wonder of the by-standers, that the blood speedily stopped, nor thanks be to God have I been troubled with a haemorrhage for some years from that very time.”311193803

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be the product of its environment and vice versa. Nature is seen as being in constant conversation

with man’s body: scientists find examples of nature mirroring the appearance of man; and in death,

they see the growth of moss over an unburied skull as a symbiotic relationship. This understanding

of the body produces a gap between it and the mind/soul: man acknowledges this relationship with

nature, even though s/he cannot comprehend or explain it in any convincing manner. In London, we

find man’s body to be othered in different ways: in the cemetery, it was seen as a distant creature

whose identity and link to the present had been obfuscated not only by the decaying effect of time,

but by the anonymity of poverty as well; and in the doctor’s office, the body became a commodity,

with its owner’s life seen as the barrier to unlocking its economic potential. The usnea skulls too

became economic symbols: taxed and sold with a large price-tag in pharmacies, these body parts

transcended their corporeal limits and came to be seen as symbols of wealth and status by

customers. Questions of morality acted as counter-discourses to these amoral practices: poets

criticized doctors for economically taking advantage of their patients; gravediggers asked where the

line was between cannibalism and the ‘noble medicine’. For the second-half of my essay, I am

going to switch my focus to the Irish wars in the 16th and 17th centuries and analyze the discourses

of decapitation. By doing so, I will highlight how the discussions and representations surrounding

these wars paralleled the discourses of usnea and corporeal medicine.

For any discussion of discourse in 16th- and 17th-century England, it seems almost mandatory to

begin with a contemporary of Shakespeare. In his tale of backstabbing Italian nobility, John

Webster begins the fourth act of his play The White Devil (1612) with a soliloquy from its

protagonist, Francisco. Seeking revenge upon Brachiano, Francisco concludes his soliloquy by

describing the anger and rage he feels towards his enemy: “Like the wild Irish I’ll ne’er think thee

dead / Till I can play at football with thy head” (iv.i.137-8).23 The inspiration for this simile comes

from a well-known story of the Irish wars: in November 1597, Sir John Chichester arranged a

parlay with James McSorley Mac Donnell. Chichester intended to ambush McSorley, but the latter

got the upper-hand in the battle and Chichester was killed. McSorely ordered his men to decapitate

the Englishman’s body and take his head to Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, where it was “made a

football by the rude galloglass [mercenary soldier] of the army.”24 Or at least this was how the

rumour went. These stories existed almost exclusively as gossip, passed on between sailor, soldier,

and seller. Some of them are recorded in reports by the government (this is how we know about the

Chichester story), but most existed exclusively as ephemeral stories to entertain, frighten, or inform

23 John Webster, The White Devil, ed. John Russell Brown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 102.24 Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Ireland 1598-99, ed. E. G. Atkinson (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1893), p. 444311193803

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their audience. This method of storytelling inevitability lent itself to distortion: like a game of

Chinese Whispers, it is impossible to count the detours the football story must have taken between

McSorely and Webster. Yet its veracity is not as important as its existence and prevalence is as a

dialogue crossing the Irish Sea. If Webster used the football story as a reference for his character’s

emotions then we can assume that he felt the story was well known amongst the public; and we can

also assume that the Irish were seen as an image of pure aggression and violence in their minds. Just

how this story managed to get from Ireland to England - from the mouths of Irish soldiers to the

ears of English theatre-goers - is hard to tell, and any attempt at specificity would be little more than

guesswork.

One thing than we can glean from Webster’s simile, however, is what stories were not told on a

large-scale in London. In response to the football event, the English residents of Limerick

“assaulted the Constable of the castle … and cut off his head … and played at football with it.”25

And in Ulster, the English Captain Humphrey Willis ordered his soldiers “to cut off the head of the

son of Edmund MacHugh McGuire and hurled it from place to place as a football.”26 Webster’s

simile implies that this form of sadistic violence was perceived by the London public to be uniquely

Irish. What we find, instead, is a violent call-and-response of beheadings between the two sides. A

second set of tales - tales of England’s own brutality in the wars - existed as a counter-discourse,

making it even harder to trace than the Irish tales. For the sake of my argument, let us assume that,

on the grounds of probability, some audience members of The White Devil were aware of the irony

undermining the football simile’s imagery. How would they have reacted to this simile in Webster’s

play? I believe that this reaction is important to the main question of my essay, as we find the

London attitude to both medicinal cannibalism and violence bouncing between approval and

condemnation. But first, it is important to trace the Irish narrative of beheading.

The earliest recorded example of this beheading narrative I can find comes from the historian

Gerald of Wales, whose Topographia Hibernica (c. 1187) and Expugnatio Hibernica (c. 1189)

were the first books written about Ireland by a foreigner.27 In the latter, Gerald noted the difference

25 CSPI 1600-1, p. 13.26 Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts 1589-1600, eds. J. S. Brewer and William Bullen (London: Longmans and Green, 1867-71), p. 156. Many of these tales of English brutality were removed from mainstream discourses: for example, Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Irelande was censored because “reveal[ed] that decapitation, destruction, and constant surveillance [were] the facts upon which the language [of England’s power in Ireland] rest[ed].” Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, and Donne and their Contemporaries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 9.27 Much of this cultural interaction and exchange between the two islands was influenced by migration, so it might be beneficial to provide a tiny bit of context. From the 12th century, there was a large-scale migration between the two islands: the Normans invaded on 1 May 1169, while in the centuries following Catholics began to leave Protestant England to seek asylum in Ireland. By the opening decades of the 16th century, however, England began to desire 311193803

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between the Normans’s and the Irish’s attitude towards prisoners of war as being that “there knights

are taken prisoner, here they are beheaded”.28 The geographical figuring of Gerald’s statement

(“there … here”) is a common motif in these beheading narratives. As foreigners began to

document the geography of Ireland, their understanding of its towns, roads, rivers, valleys, and

plains were flavoured by their understanding of its people, culture, and, in the case of the Irish, its

violence. In 1575 Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland, described the lands of Laois and

Offaly as having been “spoiled and wasted, by the race of offspring of the old native inhabitors.”29

Thirty years later, Sir John Davies, the Attorney General for Ireland, linked the civilizing mission of

the English with the land by arguing that “when plough and breeding of cattle shall cease, then will

the rebellion end.”30 In longer works of prose, we find this relationship revealing itself within the

structure of the sentences themselves. Jonathan Swift, ghostwriting the memoirs of Capt. John

Creichton, dives head-first into this relationship between Irish bodies and nature in his description

of a violent skirmish: “… as one of the villains was coming hastily up to me his foot slipped [on the

moss], and before he could recover himself I struck my sword into his skull … the sword ran up to

the hilt in the moss…”31 As Creichton attacks the “villain”, his sword strikes the skull and the moss

simultaneously, thus amalgamating them. The sword becomes submerged in the histories of both

the villain (i.e. the individual) and the moss (the land and its people). What is most skilful about

Swift’s prose is how he reveals his knowledge: like Paracelsus’s mirror, Swift’s descriptions of both

the land and the rebels are entirely dependent upon each other. The statements “his foot slipped [on

the moss] and the sword ran “up to the hilt in the moss” frame the event as a dialectic, so that it is

Ireland be brought “within the ambit of English control.” (a) In addition to religious migrants, English colonizers began to establish their own towns of the east coast of the island. For those coastal settlers, their reactions to the Gaels had not differed much since the “culture shock” (b) of Gerald’s books: Spenser described the Irish as having been, without the guidance of English rule, “left unto themselves and their inordinate life and manners”; (c) while Barnaby Rich wrote that the Irish “live[d] like beasts[:] voide of lawe and all good order [and] more uncivill, more uncleanly, more barbarous and more brutish in their customs and demeanures then in any other part of the world”. (d)a: Andrew Murphy, But The Irish Sea Betwixt Us (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999), p. 62.b: Nicholas P. Canny, ‘The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America’, The William and Mary Quarterly 30, no. 4 (Oct. 1973), p. 583.c: Edmund Spenser, ‘A View of the Present State of Irelande’, The Works of Spenser, vol. 6 (London: J. and R, Tonson and S. Draper, 1750), p. 60.d: Quoted in Canny, p. 588.28 Patricia Palmer, The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation and Violence in Early Modern Ireland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 15. Original Latin: “ibi capiunter milites, hic decapitantir”.29 Quoted in Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World: American Culture, The Formative Years (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 168. Sidney to the Lords of Council, 1575.30 Sir John Davies, A Discoverie of the True Causes Why Ireland was never entirely Subdued, nor brought under Obedience of the Crowne of England, Untill the Beginning Of His Maiesties happie Raigne (London: John Laggard, 1612), p. 172.31 Jonathan Swift, ‘Memoirs of Capt. John Creichton’, The Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., vol. 10 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1814), pp. 148-9.311193803

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only through the interplay of man and nature that the reader is able to grasp the scene. When we

read about the moss, hence, we are in fact reading about the man; and vice versa.32

Cartography became the purest representation of this Irish land/body relationship. John Thomas’s

map of Enniskillen Castle (Appendix A)33, made in 1593, plots out the coordinates of not only

memorable beheadings, but also “the circuits of violence within which they operated.”34 Drawn

from an English perspective, the map is a retelling of Captain John Dowdall’s besiegement of Hugh

Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh: while English soldiers fire their muskets at the castle from cover in

the East, men at the North wall scale the outer structure with ladders. The map crystalizes a moment

in time: the second before the English scale the walls and take the castle, resulting in the violent

deaths of the castles’s men, women, and children. If we look away from the castle, in the south-west

we can see Dowdall’s camp where inside there are three heads placed upon spikes. You cannot tell

from the copy in the appendix but the hue of the beards is red, implying that they are Irish heads.35

The inclusion of these elements into contemporary maps tells us much about the English’s view of

the land and its people. The aim of any cartographer is to simplify his/her perspective by removing

the temporal elements from the landscape. Hills, cities, populations remain; while the individuals

and the “conditions of [the map's] production” are erased for the sake of the “epistemology of

clarity and transparency … [and] the metonymic logic of abstraction.”36 This abstraction and clarity

produces an eternal element to its production. By simplifying the land down to its basic features, the

cartographer depicts only those elements which remain the same over time. What we find in these

maps, hence, is an attitude similar to Gerald’s assertion that in Ireland “they are beheaded”. Gerald

states that ‘here’ - in this “inhospitable land”37 where the “calamities of the late wars”38 created

32 The image of the skull consumed by the land was one which would remain up until the 19th century, where the writer Caesar Otway in his travel diary of Connaught describes the thrill of finding a “moss-bewigged skull” outside Ross Reilly Abbey. Much like Toope two centuries before him, Otway “secreted” the skull home so he could display it for his “phrenological friends”. Less explicitly than the maps above, Otway’s literary cartography of Ireland is defined by its history of violence. Otway does not ask how the skull got there: When did this man die? Did the skull come from the war? If so, in whose side did he fight? How did his skull get here? Instead the skull becomes a part of the landscape, wedged in between descriptions of the rivers, bridges, and moss. Caesar Otway, A Tour in Connaught (Dublin: William Curry, Jun. and Company, 1839), p. 198.33 All images taken from Patricia Palmer, The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation and Violence in Early Modern Ireland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).34 Palmer, p. 28.35 Eight years later and we find another geographical rendering of beheadings. John Speed, in his map of the wars between Ireland and England (Appendix B), plots out the towns and landmarks of Ireland’s geography. In the north-east corner of the island, Speed positions the beheading of Shane O’Neill as a part of the land. 36 Jeffrey N. Peters, Mapping Discord: Allegorical Cartography in Early Modern French Writing (Cranbury: Associated University Press, 2004), p. 53.37 William A. Dumbleton, Ireland: Life and Land in Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), p. 17.38 William Hebert, ‘A Description of Munster (1588)’, in eds. Andrew Hadfield and John McVeagh, Strangers to that Land: British Perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine (Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe Limited, 1994), p. 48.311193803

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more “Quagmires, Bogs, and Marishes, in this Countrey, then in all Christendome”;39 where “in

every village there is a castle, and a church, but bothe are in ruyne”;40 and where the horses become

trapped in “floting Laborinth[s]41 and “veins of various kinds of metals [are] ramifying in the

bowels of the earth”42 - this was a land which produced beheadings. If man was a mirror of nature,

then this violent, barbaric, godless land inevitably birthed violent, barbaric, godless men. By

aligning its cartographical representation to one moment of violence, Thomas’s map restricts the

viewer’s understanding of Ireland and its land to the framework of war: muskets, soldiers, and

beheadings become locked into placed with the rivers, hills, and plains; and the plotting of attacks,

sieges, and dispossession suggest that this land will never be rid of these cycles of violence.

The mirroring of the Irish land and the rebels who populated it informed the English’s attitudes

towards their enemy. Since the savagery within them was as inherent as the landscape of violence

which produced them, the English decided to frame their response in the only language they

believed their enemy understood: beheadings. In a contemporary pamphlet titled “Over-throw of an

Irish rebel”, the author writers that the “mortall plague of Rebellion … is a sicknesse not to bee

cured but by letting bloud … and it is most fit that they who lift up their arme against Gods

annoynted, shold haue their Traitorous and Rebellious heads layd bleeding at their soueraignes

feete.”43 Lord Deputy Sussex’s introduction of martial law in 1556 was as much a response to the

chaos of the Irishmen as it was a legal and moral justification of English brutality. By allowing

English soldiers to punish Irishmen before a crime had been committed, it refigured atrocity as

justice upon the pretence that when the Irish killed out of pure savagery, the English killed in order

to reform.44 As the Archbishop Adam Loftus wrote, “[t]he sword alone without the word is not

sufficient, but unless they be forced they will not once come to hear the word preached.”45 Despite

this acceptance of decapitation as a tool of reform, we still find accounts of Englishmen

condemning the Irish for their barbarity. In his description of the Flight of the Earls, the travel

writer Fynes Moryson condemned the Irish “not only [for] mangling the bodyes of their dead

39 William Lithgow, ‘The Total Discourse of his Rare Adventures’, ibid, p. 59.40 Luke Gernon, ‘A Discourse of Ireland (c. 1620)’, ibid, p. 66.41 Lithgow, ibid.42 Gerald of Wales, ‘The Topography of Ireland (1188)’, ibid, p. 28.43 Palmer, p. 24.44 “[B]y martial lawe,” the English were allowed to preemptively punish any rebel “by death [or] by loss of members [and] limbs”. It was also lawful for “shameful offenders” (i.e. “tax offenders” and “displaced wandering poor and unemployed”) to be executed without a trial. This was the first time in English history that martial law had been instated against a population considered not to be guilty of terrorism. David Edwards, ‘Beyond Reform: Martial Law and the Tudor Reconquest of Ireland’, History Ireland 5, no. 2 (1997), p. 20.45 Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008), p. 207.311193803

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Enemyes, but neuer beleeuing them to be fully dead til they haue cutt off their heads.”46 Alongside

this condemnation, Moryson praised English soldiers for the same act, triumphantly celebrating

them for “cutting Irish heads from mangled Irish bodies.”47 The hypocrisy of this attitude might

suggest a supreme lack of awareness on behalf of the English; and yet, I believe what we find in this

appropriation of beheading is the exact opposite. It was not so much the nature of England’s

motives (be they colonial, military, religious, or moral) that allowed them to both criticize Ireland’s

brutality while also participating in and mimicking it at the same time; it was the fact that England

had a motive at all. When the English looked at the remnants of Ireland’s brutality, they did not see

order: they saw chaos, unmitigated by any resemblance of humanity. The English were able to

respond in kind because, like the theatre-goer watching The White Devil, they were aware of their

awkward position between condemnation and participation; and it was this awareness itself, they

reasoned, that would allow them to use deplorable methods for admirable ends. They reasoned with

themselves, be it in histories, maps, books, wood-carvings, letters, or speeches, that if they were to

enter the brutality of Ireland, they would know how to exit it.

The appropriation of the severed heads by the English became an avenue of control as it took away

the symbolic power of the Irish beheadings. In John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande (1581) the

use of severed Irish heads becomes a part of the ritual of state order in Ireland. In plate 6 (Appendix

C), Lord Deputy Sidney and his entourage exit Dublin Castle, trotting on horseback two-by-two;

above him, three Irish heads look down upon the English procession. The heads, formerly of Irish

lords like Shane O’Neill, are refigured into symbols of Irish submission and English power. Like

the St. George cross on the back of the soldiers’ shields and the Royal Coat of Arms of England on

the outer wall of the castle, the heads become another state symbol of the English army. As David J.

Baker has noted, “[w]ithin the premises of Irish savagery and the absolute rightness of enforced

civilization, severed heads were not incontrovertible evidence of official depravity, but yet another

means of articulating the ‘official language’ of terror.”48 The effect of this appropriation was not

lost upon the enemy, as Hugh O’Neill, the son of Shane, described the English use of beheadings as

being as an effort “to rob [us] of [our] own patrimony.”49 He may have been speaking literally, as

the English did behead his father, but the use of the word patrimony connotes property, language,

46 Fynes Moryson, The Irish sections of Fynes Moryson's Unpublished Itinerary, ed. Graham Kew (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1998), p. 70.47 Palmer, p. 20.48 David J. Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 68.49 Palmer, p. 19.311193803

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and heritage. With every appropriation, the English ascribed their ‘language’ - their discourse,

hegemony - upon the Irish.

Intertwined with these moralizing motives, martial law was also alluring for Sussex because it was

cheap: instead of a large, expensive army, all that an English officer needed was a gang of followers

“willing to go forth into the Irish interior to cow the native lords into submission.” These followers

would not have to be paid, as they were legally entitled to one-third of the “movable goods and

possessions” of any traitor they killed. For these gangs, martial law had created an “incentive to

slaughter”; and the Irish body, like the skull in the store window, became a symbol of wealth.50 As

the language of beheadings and the commodization of Irish corpses intertwined under martial law, a

market emerged amongst the English camps: officers began to financially reward soldiers for

bringing back heads. The prices varied depending upon the status of the head: Thomas Ball

managed to get £15 for returning with seventeen unidentified “rebel” heads; while a butcher called

Kelly received £93.6s.8d “hedd monie” for securing the top of the Earl of Desmond. Much like the

moss of usnea, it seems that the more violent and theatrical the presentation of the head, the more it

was worth: Captain Thomas Cheston earned £120 for bringing a head upon the point of his sword.

The market was wholly artificial and its existence relied more upon the discourses of power, status,

and race than supply and demand. As seen in the lower-left corner of Thomas’s map, the heads

were placed upon spikes within the English camps; like Gilbert’s lane, they intended to scare any

Irishman who came to negotiate or spy upon the camp; and like Sidney’s heads, they were a symbol

of state power. What was unique about this market was its justification: where other times English

savagery had been justified as a mirror to the Irish, here we cannot find any record of a similar

market amongst the rebels. And yet, despite the absence of an image to be copied, the English still

justified this market upon the basis of an eye for an eye. What we have in this market is the copying

of a false image: the English projected their representations of Ireland upon their enemy, believing

their own stories to be true. What we can see in this market, where false images are echoed by their

creators, are the roots of the usnea market in London.

Conclusion

In 1606, the scholar Edward Hayes published a strange poem called “Trayterous Percyes and

Catesbyes Prosopopeia”. The poem told the story of a nightmare, where the floating heads of the

Gunpowder Plotters Thomas Percy and Robert Catesby, described as being similar to the Irish,

haunt Hayes, chasing him through the night. The poem ends with the execution of the two men,

50 Edwards, p. 19.311193803

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bent over as the executioner lifts his axe: “An helly-day in hell let Fiends proclayme, / To greet two

Monsters sculls, that tumbling come / From Theater of their ambitious ayme … / Two foote-balls to

make the Deuils sport.”51 The image of the heads turning into footballs springs Hayes out of his

slumber, but before he does he looks upon the head of Catesby and describes it as a “gazing

mirrour”. The image itself is knowingly ambiguous, as the two components of the mirror - the gazer

and the reflector - are released from their boundaries. Here we have a mirror which is able to look

right back at you and, perhaps, see his own reflection.

By separating into two halves, I have wished to show how the discourses of usnea in London and

beheadings in Ireland reflected and paralleled each other. In London, customers outside pharmacies

gazed at the Irish skulls, seeing them as symbols of potential status. A marker of class and civility,

only the wealthy and the powerful could have access to this medicine. The acquisition and

consumption of the skull simultaneously closed and widened the gap between English order and

Irish chaos: as the consumer took the skull in his hand and scraped its moss from its exterior, grated

it into a fine powder, and applied it to his wound, this civil, yet violent, act demarcated him from

the barbarity of the wild Irish. The discourses produced by the wars did not create this belief in

usnea as a medicinal moss, as we find evidence of its use in other parts of the continent. What the

wars did was influence the nature of its consumption: instead of moss coming from the skull of any

convict or soldier, it had to come from the skull of an Irishman. The gaze of the London shopper

was an extension of the martial law bandits’s gaze who viewed Irish bodies as personifications of

wealth. During the wars of the 16th and early 17th centuries, we find a dialogue of violence and

savagery between the English and the Irish. As one side committed a terrible act, the other

responded in kind. They justified their actions, saying that it was a necessary step in their role as

colonizer and civilizer. And yet, like Hayes looking at the skull of Catesby, they were uncertain if

they could tell when their violence transcended reflection and became an entity itself.

In books, letters, speeches, maps, plays, and stories, we find many examples of Englishmen

struggling with this question: can violence be justified by a moral code? or is this moral code just a

fiction which allows us to indulge in barbarity? This is the question that Hayes is asking when he

looks upon the mirror of the skull; when Derricke places the skulls above Sidney’s horse; when

Thomas plots out the cartography of violence; when Webster calls the Irish “wild” and places the

English in silence. This is the question being asked when the residents of Limerick mimic the

savagery of McSorley; when Gilbert creates a lane of heads as a welcome to any Irish visitor. This

was a reflection of the question Toope was asking over the line between cannibalism and the noble

51 Palmer, p.33.311193803

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medicine. From the English perspective, what differentiated their violence from the Irish’s was the

fact that they were asking these questions. They understood that their actions were hypocritical, and

they understood that it was easy to slip over into the barbarity of mindless violence.

What underlined their justification was the notion of mirroring: it was deemed reasonable to

respond to the violence of the Irish with an eye for an eye. They restrained their actions to the limits

of their enemy’s actions, believing that if they never extended their violence, it was morally

acceptable for them to indulge in decapitation. And yet, once the English began to create a market

of Irish corpses - to incentivize the killing and decapitation of Irish men, women, and children - this

mimicking ceased as we cannot find any record of the Irish creating a market of their own. The

English were no longer mimicking the Irish, but rather were mimicking their representations of their

enemy. The English had created a false image of their enemy through the stories they told amongst

themselves: they had been told of the evil of the land, that nothing born here could ever become

good. In London, we see this confusion over the reflection in the usnea market, where men who

condemned cannibalism were fine with purchasing and consuming Irish skulls. They still believed

they were in the middle position, embracing savagery temporally, still holding a link with

civilization. But by the time they had purchased and brought home a skull from the pharmacy, and

had begun to scrape off the moss from its exterior, this link had become an ephemeral projection of

Ireland, echoing off books, maps, drawings, and stories.

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Appendix A

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Appendix B

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Appendix C

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