From Sir Frederick Falkiner, ‘Foundation of the Hospital of King Charles II, Dublin,’ (1906) supplemented by Roland Burke-Savage’s ‘The Story of George’s Hill’ (1940), this evocative account of the Four Courts and  surrounding area of Oxmantown (or Ostmantown) as it was in medieval times:

“Before the coming of the Normans to Ireland, the Liffey plain to the Meath borders, was known as Fingal, the fine or district of the stranger, or perhaps, simply the Finn, or white stranger, many of the people of which still in their light hair and impassive mien bear the traces of their Viking lineage. It was largely owned by the Thorkills, of the family of the King Hasculph Mac Thorkill, whom Strongbow conquered—Thor Gille, Votary of the God of Thunder

In those days there was only one bridge-head across the river Liffey permitting access to the city of Dublin —the famous Ford of the Hurdles, Ath Cliath, near the present Father Mathew (Church Street) Bridge. It was from the city battlements overlooking that bridge that King Sitric Silkenbeard and his Queen, the daughter of the Great Brian, watched all day in tremulous tension the fearful drawn battle, surging from Mary’s Abbey to Clontarf, he to see his Ostmen allies driven to her ships or into the sea, she to learn at night of the three generations of her kinsmen in the battle slain.

After the Battle of Clontarf the Danes were gradually won over to Christianity, and some eighty years later, having expanded beyond the city walls to the north bank of the Liffey, they founded a Church there on the site of the present St. Michan’s Church, which they dedicated to St. Michan, although who he was, history does not tell.  The colony surrounding the church was called Osmanton (Estmantown), the town of the Easterlings or foreigners, which has been corrupted to Oxmantown.

It was in the early years of the twelfth century that monks first came to St. Michan’s Parish. To these monks, originally Benedictine, then Cistercian, we owe St. Mary’s Abbey, which played so big a part in the religious history of pre-Reformation Dublin. The Abbey was richly endowed with lands extending from East Arran Street to the Tolka.

After the coming of the Normans, Henry II. was content with homage of the Irish Chiefs, but the Ostman dominion he appropriated. The city and its suburbs by the sea from Blackrock to Clontarf, he gave to his men of Bristol, and afterwards to his citizens of Dublin, as defined by the charter of Prince John, his son, in 1192, and as perambulated for centuries by the Corporation triennially in festive cavalcade.

The Ostmen were not driven from the city, but the walled fortress on the Castle Hill was held and colonized by the victors. As a community, the Ostmen were confined to the north bank of the Liffey, round the St Michan’s church built by Michan and St. Mary’s Abbey where, just outside the north boundary, they had granted lands to their foundation of the Holy Trinity, Christ Church.

The name ‘Ostmanstown’ in its larger sense covers all the north bank from Kilmainham bridge to the sea within the chartered city bounds, for the city records apply the name to all the north-east space behind and around St Mary’s Abbey and its meadows to the east where the Abbey streets now run, and the whole north bank was the single parish of St. Michan’s, but we may generally confine the term to what lies between the Phoenix Park and the line of Capel and Bolton Streets.

In 1224, the Dominicans came to St. Michan’s Parish and obtained a lease from Mary’s Abbey to found their Priory of St. Saviour on what is now the Four Courts site. Across the river they then established a school of philosophy and theology, building a new bridge to facilitate access, and in return collecting a toll from all who passed across. This bridge survived for many centuries until its replacement by the present Church Street Bridge in the early 19^th century, by which time it had itself become known as ‘the Old Bridge of Dublin.’  When Edward Bruce with his army of Scots bore down on Dublin in 1316, the sorely-pressed citizens at a loss to strengthen their defences, knocked down the Priory Church, and with its much-needed stones made good the breaches in their city walls and extended them from Wormwood Gate towards the Quay. By command of Edward II the Mayor and citizens gladly restored the Church later, and Archbishop Cranley consecrated it in July, 1402.

The boundary of Oxmantown mounted the highland near the Island Bridge of Kilmainham and crossed at an angle of the present Phoenix Park, into the ravine by the Military Hospital, called of old the Gybbet’s Slade from an ancient gallows on Arbour Hill.  The highest ground east of this ravine is called in John’s Charter Knocknagnahoe, the site of a tale by Richard Stanihurst in his Irish contribution to Holinshed’s Chronicle in 1577, and told with a humour too quaint to abbreviate:

“In the further end of the Ostman’s Greene is there a hole, commonly called Scaldbrother’s Hole, a labyrinth reaching two large miles under the earth. This was in old time frequented by a notorious thief named Scaldbrother, wherein he would hide all the bag and baggage that he could pilfer. The varlet was so swift on foot, as he has eftsoon outrun the swiftest and lustiest young men all Ostmantown maulgre their heads bearing a pot or pan of theirs on his shoulders in his den. And now and then in derision of such as pursued him, he would take his course under the gallows which standeth very nigh his cave, a fit sign for such an inne, and so being shrouded within his lodge he reckoned himself secure, none being so hardie as would venture to entangle himself in so intricate a maze. But as the pitcher that goeth often to the water cometh at length home broken, so this lustie youth would not scape from open catching, forcible snatching, and privie polling, till time he was by certain gaping groomes that lay in wait for him intercepted fleeing towards his couch, having on his apprehension no more wrong done him than that he was nor sooner hanged on that gallows, through which in his youth he jollily was wont to run.”

In a little book published anonymously in 1845, it is said that workmen digging the foundation for houses in Oxmantown often came upon Scaldbrother’s Hole, that in Smithfield it is sometimes made use of as vats by the brewers, and in Queen Street some vaults of the houses are formed from it, and boys playing on the hill have been known to fall up to their necks in it where the ground is thin.

From Arbour Hill the Ostman bounds crossed Stonybatter. This, centuries before the Ostman came, had been part of one of the five main roads—Slighe—of Erin, that which reached from royal Tara to saintly Glendalough; it crossed the old Ford of Ath Cliath, passing into Fercullen and the Dublin and Wicklow hills. It entered Dublin by Cabra, and thus Boher-na-claghan—the stony road—Stonybatter, is one of the oldest streets of Europe.

From Stonybatter the boundary went on to the granaries of Christ Church, these granaries, or barns, were large and long lived, and seem to have trespassed over the line, for one of them contained within its walls a stone marking the boundary of Osmantown.  Riding the bounds in Henry VII.’s time, the Mayor of Dublin and his brothers compelled the Prior to admit them and the macebearer by a ladder and a window into this barn whence they went on east through the orchard and so into Ostmantown Green.

Behind the granaries stretched the sylvan land of the mythical figure, Gormo, known in medieval times as Grangegorman in Sylvis, and the Wood of Saluict, which reached from Ostmantown Green to the hamlet of Phibsborough, called from the Anglo-Norman Phipoes or Phipos, vast grabbers of Ostman lands. There is a fine tradition of these woods, that from these came the oak of the glorious roof of Westminster Hall, invincible by time or worm, or as Hammer says: “No English spider weaveth or breedeth to this day.”

Very old records speak of the orchards of Grangegorman; and until recently there remained between the Royal Barracks and North Circular Road an open space containing more than twenty acres, which in the spring were rosy and radiant with apple-blossoms, a paradise in this obscure corner of the city, many of the fruit trees being a growth of many centuries. The workmen’s homes currently being erected on this site by the Artisans’ Dwellings Company, will prove a blessing, but it is a pity the red brick or gray monotony should not be relieved by a few of these old trees, who renewed their youth each recurrent spring, and kept venerable memories green.

Osmantown had but one street, Church Street, also known as St Michan’s or Ostmanstown Street, running from the Old Bridge north to the hamlet of Glasnevin and the Broadstone,  Beyond St Michan’s church, and west of the street, rises in the old records a tower, Young’s Castle, like a lighthouse over a vague sea, perhaps named from Younge, Abbot of S. Mary’s in 1467. East, west, and north of this urban edge, spread, as we have said, fields and meadows, pastures and orchards.

North of St. Michan’s, and west of the street, was an immemorial swamp, Loughboy, the Yellow Lake. It was caused by the rivulet Bradogue, which entering the suburbs, as now where Grangegorman Lane joins the North Circular Road, it coursed by the lane and under the site of the future prison, thence to the Broadstone, where it probably accounts for the glas, or watery ground, of Glasnevin. Thence it spread deviously down the slopes toward the river, forming a marsh, which drained into the Liffey, a narrow estuary, long marked by Pill Lane, now Chancery Street.

But the pride of the place was Ostmantown Green, the great lung of the old city within the walls, all to it that the Phoenix Park is to Dublin to-day, which reached from Church Street to the Parkgate, and was bounded on the south by the river and on the north by Montpelier Hill, Arbour Hill and Channel Row (now North Brunswick Street). Besides being the scene of the great cattle fairs, it also served as the Champ de Mars, the muster ground of the civic and royal regiments for parade, for pageant and for war, and that part of it which remains open today is known as Smithfield.

A lane passed through it by the river from St. Michan’s to the Gallows by the Slade, known in the Middle Ages as Honkeman’s, Hongman’s, Hangman’s Lane, still cryptogrammed in Hammond’s Lane to-day. In Henry VIII.’s time a law was passed that the market of all cattle shall be only in the green; this meant live bovines, for sheep and poultry were sold in the city market, and pigs were ever favourites in Dublin streets

South of the Green was the river, which here strayed westward in a wide reach, mudbanks on each side with a double channel embracing a great island, lizard shaped, six acres in extent, which ran from the old bridge at Ath Cliath to opposite the site of the royal barracks. This was Usher’s Island, which was afterwards merged in the southern quays. The Ushers were city magnates in Plantagenet times. The male line of this family failed, but from their ladies descend the great Duke of Wellington, and the Dukes of Leinster.

On the dissolution of the Monasteries the lands of St Mary’s Abbey were appropriated, and the old monastery of St. Saviour’s leased to the Benchers of the Inns of Court to become “the Innes,” not, however, to be used as tribunals till one hundred and thirty five years later, when the Four Courts were thither removed from Christ Church, much to the disgust of the city houseowners, to erect the temple of British Justice in the centre of the homes of the Danes…”