Ireland Read online

  One effect of the Viking raids and wars was that the kings of Tara gradually gained more power. Just as the Viking threat was beginning to wane, the king of Tara defeated the king of Cashel in an important battle which was to bolster Tara’s power. But early in the tenth century, a new wave of Viking invasions came. In 914, the Viking town of Waterford was established, and much of the south and south-west of the island was raided from this base. A small native kingdom in the west of Ireland began to expand, however, and repel the Norsemen. They captured the Viking town of Limerick, and then all of Munster by 980. Under their leader, Brian Boru, they began building a powerbase in Cashel. Meanwhile, the king of Tara defeated the Norse in Dublin in 981. But Brian Boru wanted to expand his kingship and he defeated both the king of Tara and his subordinate Dublin Norsemen in 999. After defeating another important Irish king in 1002, Brian declared himself king of Ireland. He spent the next decade defeating various other Irish kings in Ulster and Leinster. In his final battle to overcome a resistant king in Leinster (who was allied with some Viking tribes), Brian was slain in the battle of Clontarf in 1014, even though his armies were victorious. Dynastic wars amongst the Irish kings followed soon after Brian’s death.

  There were many other effects of the age of the Vikings. Trade increased dramatically between Ireland and Scandinavia. Metalworking and craft skills were traded extensively. Irish sailing was perfected. Town settlements became more common and Ireland ceased to be a completely rural society. One of the most significant effects of the age of the Vikings was that the centre of power and commerce in Ireland moved from the midlands to the east coast. Furthermore, many monks and scholars removed books and other valuables from the country to prevent them falling into pagan hands. They brought many texts to the continent for safe-keeping. This helped to found a long tradition of Irish scholarship and teaching. This was also the period of much stone building in Ireland, and some monasteries built tall ‘roundtowers’ in order to protect themselves and their valuable manuscripts from plunder. Many of these towers still survive. Great stone carving also flourished in these years, and many of the famous stone crosses in Ireland today date from this period.

  After the disruption of the age of the Vikings, Ireland experienced a religious flowering in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Monastic expansion and increased sophistication in stone carving were all part of a period of strong growth in Irish culture and the arts that lasted through the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was the high point of Celtic Ireland, before the invasion of the Normans in the late twelfth century. Perhaps one of the most significant changes to take place during this period, however, was reform in the church. The monasteries changed from being based solely on Latin and producing Latin manuscripts, to recording Irish traditions, epics and other learning. Since the church was largely monastic, there had been a general lack of priests to work with the people. In 1152, a church synod was held at Kells (county Meath), and Ireland was divided into thirty-six sees (bishoprics) with four archbishoprics. This reform completely changed the nature of Irish Christianity because it started the process of connecting clergy more directly with local people. By the time the Normans arrived in Ireland, therefore, the political and religious culture of the island was diverse and sophisticated. Although not strongly unified geographically, Irish culture at this time was strong enough to make it almost impossible to overturn. This is perhaps one important reason why the Normans, and subsequent settlers, did not attempt its eradication.

  NORMAN IRELAND (1169–1300)

  The Normans were a dynastic group from Normandy in France, with their origins in the Viking bands that had settled there and ruled since the early 900s. In 1066, under their leader William, they invaded and conquered England. The Norman arrival and settlement of Ireland a hundred years later was one of the most significant events in the history of the island because it established the effective control of the crown of England over Ireland. But the Normans did not ‘invade’ Ireland in the same sense that they invaded England with a plan of attack and massive armies. In Ireland, it all began in a bitter dispute between Dermot MacMurrough of Leinster and Tiernán O’Rourke of Breifne (modern County Leitrim). Between 1156 and 1166, two kings fought for control of Ireland (Murtough MacLochlainn in the north and Rory O’Connor from Connacht). Dermot MacMurrough supported MacLochlainn and Tiernán O’Rourke supported O’Connor. The battle engulfed the whole country. O’Connor eventually won, but O’Rourke did not want to make peace and continued to fight MacMurrough. MacMurrough fled to seek the help of the English king, Henry II, in defeating O’Rourke and gaining back his lands.

  In 1155, Pope Adrian IV had given Henry permission to go to Ireland and implement religious reform in order to bring Irish Christianity more into line with Rome. Henry had been too preoccupied with other affairs of state to bother with an Irish religious expedition even though he had papal permission. But when Dermot MacMurrough asked for his help in early 1167, Henry saw an opportunity to conquer Ireland without having to commit himself personally, so he told MacMurrough he would allow him to recruit armies in England and Wales. In return, MacMurrough swore fealty to Henry and promised to rule in Ireland under the English king’s control. In Wales, MacMurrough found men who were willing to fight with him, and gained the important help of Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, also known as Strongbow. In return for helping to conquer Ireland, Strongbow demanded MacMurrough’s daughter in marriage as well as the kingship of Leinster. MacMurrough went back to Ireland with a small force in August 1167, but was defeated by O’Rourke. He then sent messages back to Wales promising great riches and lands for Strongbow and his other allies if they would invade. The first force (without Strongbow) came in May of 1169 and captured Wexford. O’Connor and O’Rourke settled terms with MacMurrough and offered him the kingship of Leinster if there were no further invasions. He agreed but sent word back to Strongbow in Wales that it was obvious that all of Ireland could be taken. Strongbow came and captured Waterford in August 1170. He married MacMurrough’s daughter immediately and became king of Leinster. His forces then captured Dublin in September 1170. In May 1171, MacMurrough died and Strongbow took over the kingdom. Under Strongbow, the Normans were in a very solid position in Ireland. But Henry II worried that perhaps Strongbow was getting too powerful, and might eventually prove a threat. So he went to Ireland himself in 1171, landing in Waterford and proceeding up to Dublin. Strongbow and the Normans, the Irish and the remaining Vikings all submitted to Henry in November 1171. Rory O’Connor recognized Henry as king of Ireland in exchange for becoming High King of the unconquered areas of the country. Henry directly controlled Dublin and some of the surrounding areas. Strongbow retained most of Leinster as a vassal to Henry. The rest of the settled part of the country was given to various Normans.

  The Norman conquest of Ireland was only half-done, however. It was not centrally organized, nor was it complete. Many of the more remote parts of the country were left untouched, and the different Norman lords ruled differently. By 1250, roughly seventy-five percent of the country was controlled by the Normans. Norman superiority in weaponry, battle strategy and tactics made them very difficult to defeat. Eventually, under King John (1199–1216), the Normans built some sort of centralized administration and brought a measure of peace to Ireland. They held the first Irish parliament in 1297, with representatives coming from various parts of the country. Despite border wars with some native Irish chiefs, this period was one of relative calm. In fact, the Normans usually restored order amongst warring Irish tribes in many areas. Most native Irish retained their land under the Normans, even though many of the old Irish nobility lost land to them. They established many towns, and built monasteries, abbeys and cathedrals. By the mid-thirteenth century, however, Norman influence in Ireland began to decline. This was largely because there had been no comprehensive plan to conquer the country. Also, the English wars in Scotland and Wales were drawing away many great Norman fighters, and there was an increase in native Irish
opposition to Norman rule. Throughout the thirteenth century, there were several battles between native Irish and Norman Irish, and the native forces won several important ones, wresting back control of many counties. Also important was the fact that several victorious native kings agreed to name Brian O’Neill king of Ireland in 1258. But he was killed in the battle of Downpatrick in 1260. A few chiefs had failed to recognize him, so the idea of a unified Irish kingship died with O’Neill.

  Many historians argue that the problem with the Norman rule of Ireland was that it was only half a conquest. English kings never paid full attention to Ireland, and consequently, for their own interests, they left native Irish chiefs in possession of too much of the country. By 1300, therefore, there was a sort of stalemate between the natives and the settlers, but it was a stalemate which could have erupted into violence at any time.

  THIRTEENTH- AND FOURTEENTH-CENTURY IRELAND

  The thirteenth- and fourteenth-centuries in Ireland have often been described as peaceful times. This was also the period of the beginning of the Irish legal and monetary systems, based largely on English models. But like the rest of Europe, Ireland suffered greatly from the bubonic plague, which arrived in the winter of 1348–49 and killed about a third of the people. This period also saw a flowering of native Irish (or ‘Gaelic’) art and culture. A great many important Irish books were written in this period, including poetry, stories and legal tracts and commentaries. Many scholars were patronized by Anglo-Irish nobles, so there was a good deal of cultural communication between the descendants of the Normans (the Anglo-Irish) and the native Irish. Indeed, some Anglo-Irish wrote poems and stories in the Irish language. There was also much intermarriage, so the connections between the two groups became stronger. But this intermingling began to worry the English government, and they attempted to prevent the Anglo-Irish from marrying the native Irish. This proved impossible to enforce, but the revival of Gaelic customs also became a military concern. Financial resources and men were sent over from England, but never in sufficient numbers to quell the Gaelic chieftains. England was involved in the Hundred Years War with France and could ill afford to send precious resources to Ireland. King Richard II (1367–1400), however, finally led his own force to Ireland. He forced all the Irish leaders to submit to him in 1394. Richard went back to England, but the Gaelic chiefs rose again, and he was forced to return to Ireland in 1399. While he was fighting in Leinster, the Lancastrian Henry Bolingbroke (1367–1413, later Henry IV) seized the English throne. Richard returned to England to defend his crown but was defeated. After his victory over Richard, Henry IV had too many domestic problems to concern himself with Ireland, even though the Anglo-Irish appealed for help in fighting Irish chiefs who were regaining land. The Anglo-Irish were pushed back to the area around Dublin known as ‘the Pale’.

  FIFTEENTH- AND SIXTEENTH-CENTURY IRELAND (1400–1534)

  Generally speaking, Irish chiefs had supported the Yorkist side during the English Wars of the Roses (1455–85). They also supported the Yorkist pretenders to the throne after the House of Lancaster had won. The Anglo-Irish in Ireland (generally loyal to the House of Lancaster) either bribed Gaelic chieftains not to attack their land, or raised taxes on their populations to fund small armies. In 1449, Richard, Duke of York (1411–60), came to Ireland to be lieutenant of the country. He was an efficient administrator and became quite popular. Many Gaelic chieftains swore fealty to him. When it became clear that the Lancastrian king, Henry VI (1421–71), was weak, many looked to Richard as a potential king. Richard fought in the Wars of the Roses, but he was defeated and returned to Ireland in 1459. By this time, an Irish parliament had been established. It made him chief governor and declared in 1460 that only laws passed by the Irish parliament were valid in Ireland (English laws were not necessarily valid until they were subsequently passed by the Irish parliament). With the support of Irish chiefs, Richard went back to England but was defeated at the battle of Wakefield in 1460. But the York cause eventually won, and Richard’s son, Edward IV, became king of England in 1461.

  Edward IV made the Earl of Desmond, a somewhat gaelicized Anglo-Irish lord, the chief governor of Ireland. But Desmond became too independent and too Gaelic for Edward’s tastes, and the king sent the Earl of Worcester to bring Desmond to heel. Worcester arrived in Ireland in 1467; he charged Desmond with treason and had him beheaded in February 1468. But the reaction to Desmond’s execution was swift and strong from both the Gaelic chieftains and many Anglo-Irish. Worcester fled back to England, and Desmond’s brother-in-law, the Earl of Kildare, took over. The Kildare earls ruled for a long time, wisely intermarrying their daughters and sons into Anglo-Irish families and into those of Gaelic chieftains. So, when Henry VII (1457–1509) came to the English throne in 1485, the earls of Kildare presented a potential threat. In May 1478 the Yorkist pretender, Lambert Simnel (1475–1535), crowned himself as ‘Edward VI of England’ (which was a direct challenge to Henry VII) at a ceremony in Dublin, and the ‘Great Earl of Kildare’, Gerald More Fitzgerald (1456–1513), sent a force to invade England. It was defeated in 1487, and Simnel was captured. Again, in 1491, a Yorkist pretender came to Ireland to enlist the support of the Earls of Kildare. Clearly Henry VII could not let these threats continue, so he sent Sir Edward Poynings (1459–1521) to Ireland in 1494 to bring the country into ‘whole and perfect obedience’.

  Poynings summoned the Irish parliament and passed a number of acts in 1494. These created a formal boundary between the Pale and the rest of the country, proscribed the use of Irish customs and laws, and tried to discourage Irish dress and manners. The most significant legislation became known as ‘Poynings’ Law’, which essentially said that the Irish parliament was subordinate to the British one, could only meet when given permission by the King, and could only pass laws that had already been approved by the King. Poynings’ Law was an attempt to prevent another strong Irish earl from using the Irish parliament to gain too much power and threaten England. Poynings had the Great Earl of Kildare arrested on treason, but King Henry VII released him in 1496, and he again controlled most of the country. Kildare changed his sympathies to the Lancastrian House (the Tudors) and was in control of Ireland, although not its official governor or king, until his death in 1513. In 1520, the new English king, Henry VIII (1491–1547), sent the Earl of Surrey to Ireland in an attempt to quell resistance to the crown. But Surrey could not accomplish this without a massive force, and he told Henry that control of Ireland would require a complete conquest.

  INTERPRETATIONS – ANCIENT AND EARLY-MEDIEVAL IRELAND

  Differing ideas of Irish history are at least as old as arguments over the details of Saint Patrick’s life and career. Recent debates have followed a somewhat similar path to those of the ‘traditionalist’ versus ‘revisionist’ debates, in the sense that two more or less opposing interpretative schools dominated scholarship. The first has emphasized the strength of ancient pagan Irish societies and cultures and the ways in which they withstood a cultural swamping by the coming of Christianity. Pejoratively, this has been called the ‘nativist’ school. (This scholarly ‘nativism’ is not to be associated or confused with the racist and xenophobic nativism that has plagued many countries in modern times.) Perhaps its most significant historian was Myles Dillon, whose Cycles of the Kings (1946), Early Irish Literature (1948), and The Celtic Realms (1967) used a great deal of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century archaeological, historical, and linguistic research to bring many central elements if early Irish history to light. Similarly, Kenneth Jackson’s work with the famous Ulster Cycle (including The Oldest Irish Tradition: a Window on the Iron Age, 1964) showed how ancient Irish legends and mythology could be interpreted to understand the nature of Celtic Ireland.

  The other, ‘revisionist’, school argues that the Christianization of Ireland had a deeper impact than the nativists would allow, and that the reason Ireland became so strongly Christian in later centuries was because of that influence. Further, they argued
, the ancient lore so extensively used by the ‘nativists’ as evidence for a strong Celtic culture were more likely written composed in later, Christian, centuries. In their view, the themes in many of these legends mirrored ancient Greek epics, such as The Illiad, which were brought with early Christian monks. The leaders of this interpretative school have been Donnchadh Ó Corráin (Ireland Before the Normans, 1972, and many other significant works), Liam Breatnach (whose work draws from early Irish law), and Kim McCone (an expert on the Old and Middle Irish languages, whose Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature, 1990 provides a strong overview of his interpretations in this field).

  Not surprisingly, a ‘post-revisionist’ strain of scholarship also exists in early Irish history. One of its most important contributions has been to situate ancient and early-medieval Ireland within the interpretative mainstream of the political and social organization of contemporaneous cultures in the rest of western Europe. Bart Jaski (Early Irish Kingship and Succession, 2000) and scholars from the Irland und Europa project, including Michael Richter and Próinséas Ní Chatháin (editors of Ireland and Europe in the Middle Ages: Texts and Transmission, 2002), further show that Ireland, and Irish society, was more closely integrated to the wider medieval world than previous scholars have considered.

  The differences in emphasis and interpretation of these different schools may be attributed to two major factors. The first is the ways in which ancient Irish sources have come to light and have been used since the mid-nineteenth century. History as an academic discipline (that is, one that ostensibly examines historical evidence critically) is mostly a nineteenth-century invention. Ancient and medieval texts which had been used to solidify legends and strengthen the hagiographical approach to the history of European Christianity, were now examined more ‘scientifically’ (a term often applied to early professional history). Biases, such as the possible inflation of the numbers of Viking ships to arrive at (or attack) an Irish coastal town, were exposed. Assessments of personalities and motives were not taken solely at face value, and Christian writings were not interpreted as truth solely because they were Christian. Monks began to be seen as fallible as other historical figures, and they were not expected to produce dispassionate analyses of the history of their times. Modern historical methods have served the ‘nativists’, ‘revisionists’, and ‘post-revisionists’ well, but each school has come to different conclusions. The nativists were perhaps surprised to find early Irish literature still so rich and Celtic, even after Christianization, and so they emphasized Ireland’s unique position as a more mixed society (half-Celtic, half-Christian) than other places in Europe. Revisionists, using more expansive and historical techniques in the second half of the twentieth-century, made the case that these same sources actually showed how much Christianity changed Irish life, and was, indeed, responsible for the nature of these original sources.