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:
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)