The Redshanks: Highland Swords in the Service of Gaelic Ireland - Paperback
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The Redshanks: Highland Swords in the Service of Gaelic Ireland
They called them Redshanks for the weathered skin left bare by a life spent in wool plaids and Irish bogs, and for a century they were among the most feared soldiers in the British Isles. Drawn from the collapsed Lordship of the Isles and a Highland economy that could no longer support its own sons, these Hebridean mercenaries crossed the North Channel each, and in doing so held back the Tudor conquest of Ireland for a hundred years after the rest of the island had fallen.
This is their story: the wages and dead pays that made a captain rich, the arquebus and broadsword tactics that broke two English armies in a single year, and the extraordinary women, Agnes Campbell, Iníon Dubh, who turned marriage and kinship into instruments of war. It follows the Redshanks from the succession crisis that forged Red Hugh O'Donnell to the catastrophe at Kinsale, the legislation that finally silenced the trade, and its last, doomed revival outside the walls of Derry.
A vanished century, rebuilt in full, for readers of Simon Schama and Anthony Beevor who want their history to hit like a charge.
Harris McMahon is an Irish historian and writer based in the west of Ireland, whose fascination with the Gaelic world spanning Scotland and Ulster grew out of long walks through Donegal's own Redshank-settled parishes, where Scottish surnames still crowd the local graveyards. He has spent years tracing the sixteenth-century military and dynastic history of Gaelic Ireland through Tudor state papers, Highland genealogical record, and the surviving architecture of the Ulster borderlands, with a particular interest in how marriage, kinship, and mercenary economics shaped the fate of nations. The Redshanks is his fullest account yet of the century-long alliance between Highland Scotland and Gaelic Ulster, and of the remarkable men and women who built and broke it.
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