The history of Limerick, stretches back to its establishment by the Vikings as a walled city on King's Island (an island in the River Shannon) in 812, and its charter in 1197.
A great castle was built on the orders of King John in 1200. It was besieged three times in the 17th century, resulting in the famous Treaty of Limerick and the flight of the defeated Catholic leaders abroad. Much of the city was built during the following Georgian prosperity, which ended abruptly with the Act of Union in 1800. The depression was to last nearly two centuries, through the Great Irish Famine (1845-1849), Irish War of Independence, and neutrality emergency of the second world war, until the economic boom from the 1990s until 2008. Today the city has a growing multicultural population.
Read more about History Of Limerick: Name, Early History, Viking Origins, Siege and Treaty, Georgian Limerick and Newtown Pery, Great Irish Famine, Pogrom, Struggle For Independence, Free State, The Emergency, Post War, Celtic Tiger, Annalistic References
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history and/or limerick:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Galway is a blackguard place,
To Cork I give my curse,
Tralee is bad enough,
But Limerick is worse.
Which is worst I cannot tell,
They’re everyone so filthy,
But of the towns which I have seen
Worst luck to Clonakilty.”
—Anonymous. “Clonakilty,” from Geoffrey Grigson’s Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs, Faber & Faber (1977)