Age of Darkness: Invasion, Unification, and Expansion
510 AD, one hundred years since Rome’s withdrawal from Hibernia and Britannia. The patchwork of small kingdoms across the Isles consists of two Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (Northumbria and East Anglia) pushed up against the East Coast, the Caledonian and Pictish kingdoms in the North, the Romano-British petty kingdoms dotted across Britannia (Londonium and Cumbria are the leaders) and in Ireland, the Ui Niell rule the North, Hibernicum holds control over the South East, and the Eoganachta control much of the South West. Many other petty kingdoms and tribes survive, mostly in the North West and Center of the Island. It has been over forty years since the last Gaelic-involved war to fight off the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.
But recently the Angles have been getting a little more rambunctious. They have begun to push further inland again, and Angle raiding parties abound. A Londonian scout confirmed that Angles were arriving by ship en masse onto the island. Word was that their homeland back in Scandinavia was sinking.
But no one was more surprised than the Irish kings when a fleet of Angle ships landed on the North East coast of Ireland. The Angle invasion of Ireland had begun. War was imminent.
The Ui Niell fell first. At the Battle of Down, June 7th, 512 AD, the Ulster Irish Army was slaughtered.
The fact is that the other Irish Kingdoms likely would not have given one rat’s ass if the Ui Niell in Ulster were destroyed so long as the Angles settled and stayed there. But they didn’t. The Angle war machine continued to march southward, raiding and pillaging through both Eoganachta and Hibernian territory.
The united Irish Army, made up of most (but not all) the Irish Kingdoms, and led by King Eachaid of Corc (Eoganachta King) and Fearghus Magnessus of Hibernicum. They met the Angles in battle outside of a small village called Ros Cre on March 29th, 513. The way the Angle army worked was they interlocked shields into a shield wall, like a primitive phalanx. They would charge, and in this wall be almost unbreakable. Almost. There was only one real way without completely enveloping the Angles to break the wall. The Gaels had fought Angles before, only some forty years ago, the Irish helped the British push them back. The Irish met the Angle shield wall in a wedge formation. The front line of the wedge was cut down almost instantaneously, but the wall was cracked in half, and like the soft fruit inside the hard shell of a nut, the Angles were all for the picking. The Irish cavalry then rode in and flanked the Angles. The Irish routed their enemy and managed to push them back north with the help of some Ulster rebels. The retreating enemy ran North, and then suddenly swung East towards the coast. The Angles dug in outside modern day Belfast for their last stand.
But on the morning of May 9th, the Irish found an enemy much larger than the one they saw the night before. So it turned out, the Angles had led the Irish Army here for a reason. Reinforcements came, and just at the worst possible time for the Irish.
Fearghus threatened to leave, but King Eochaid promised his daughter to the Hibernian King if he stayed and fought. Fearghus obliged (because men will do just about anything to get laid), and his army remained. The Battle of Belfast was the bloodiest battle yet on Irish soil. Both armies suffered heavy casualties. King Eochaid himself was shot through the chest by Angle arrows, and the wound proved mortal. But at the end of the day, once the Angles were finally pushed back to their ships and retreated home, victory belonged to the Irish.
Fearghus claimed dominion over the whole of the island, and said that because of the binding of the houses of Eoganachta and Hibernicum, he was now the first King of Eire. Of course, there were many uprisings, and tribes and petty kingdoms at first unwilling to swear fealty to Hibernicum, but by 516 AD, Fearghus Magnessus became King Fearghus I of Eire.
Then in 536, the crops failed. Scientists today noticed a trend that began with the sinking of Old Anglia, and continued on through the 6th century. The climate was changing. Irish annals show that the grain stopped growing as well as it had before, and people began to starve. IOTL this caused the Gaelic migration into Caledonia, which started what we know today the Kingdom of Scotland. Irish pirates had been raiding the Hebrides and the coasts of Pictland and Caledonia for centuries, and small villages and populations of Irish dotted the shoreline of Northwestern Britannia. Facing the destruction of his new kingdom, Fearghus I had only one real option. Expansion.
Under the leadership of a tribal leader named Arturi (OTL’s actual leader of Gaelic Invasion of Pictish lands), the Irish Kingdom invaded and conquered the Hebrides as well as a stretch of coastline along Western Caledonia. One Irish military leader also sent a small army and settled in the very tip of the northern peninsula of OTL Wales, and swore fealty to the Hibernian Crown.
Irish farmers and settlers swelled into the newly claimed lands, and began cultivating them. They imported much needed grain to Ireland, and saved the Kingdom from crumbling. Though many still died of starvation (deaths were in the thousands), with new lands to farm, and new neighbors to steel from, Eire became a rich, and stable nation in an otherwise unstable time.