Peeps at Many Lands by Katharine Tynan

Galway is so synonymous with racy Irish life that a peep at Ireland must be incomplete unless it includes a peep at Galway. It is full of the strangest monuments of the past. It was once a town of the Irishry, in the O'Flaherty country. But with the Norman Conquest there came in that group of Anglo-Norman families known as the Tribes, who in course of time went the way of all their compeers, becoming more Irish than the Irish. "Lord! " said Edmund Spenser, "how quickly doth that country alter men's natures! " The Tribes were, and are -- for happily there are still the Tribes of Galway -- thirteen, viz.: Athy, Blake, Bodkin, Browne, D'Arcy, Font, French, Joyce, Kirwan, Lynch, Martin, Morris, and Skerrett. These Tribes became responsible in time for so much of the wild and picturesque life of the Irish gentry of the eighteenth century -- the duelling, the drinking, the racing, the gambling, the general devil-may-care life -- that Galway looms more largely, perhaps, than any town in the social history of Ireland. Galway drew up a code for duellists known as the Galway Code; and in the irresponsible life of the eighteenth century, such as you find in Miss Edgeworth's "Castle Rackrent" and in Lever's novels, the life which the Encumbered Estates Act put a period to, the names of the Tribes figure oftener than more Celtic names. For the picturesque wildness of Irish life was the wildness of the settlers rather than the wildness of the native Irish.

However, in the great days of Galway's trade with Spain and other continental ports, traces of which are scattered all over the old ruined city, which is as much Spanish as it is Irish, the Tribes were just merchant princes, not anticipating the time when, _more Hibernico_, they should fling trade to the winds and become the maddest crew of dare-devils known in the social life of any country. And here I find, in the record of the duelling and drinking days, traces and indications of the English descent of the roysterers. For certainly there was a lack of humour in the actors, though none for the spectator; there was a solemnity -- not always a drunken solemnity -- in the way their pranks were performed that was not Celtic; for the Celt has a terrible sense of the ridiculous. Doubtless it was from his Anglo-Irish betters that the Celt derived the habit of "trailing his coat" through a fair when he was spoiling for a fight, though, to do him justice, he practised it only when he was drunk. The Anglo-Irish duellists inaugurated the custom. When on no pretext could they find a friend or neighbour to kill or be killed by, they went out and "trailed the coat," like the gentleman who rode on a tailless horse, with his face to the crupper, and, seeing an unwary stranger smile, immediately challenged him, and rode home in huge delight to look to his pistols. They were extremely solemn over their pranks. One wonders how often the Celtic servants had a smile behind their hand at such strange goings-on of their masters, which would not have been possible to the self-conscious Celt.