Maurice Coakley focuses on key elements that contributed to Ireland’s development, examining its bloody and violent incorporation into the British state, its refusal to embrace the Protestant Reformation and failure to industrialise in the 19th century. Coakley considers the crucial question of why Ireland’s national identity has come to rest on a mass movement for independence.
Cutting through many of the myths – imperialist and nationalist – which have obscured the real reasons for Ireland's course of development, Ireland in the World Order provides a new perspective on Irish history.
Maurice Coakley focuses on key elements that contributed to Ireland’s development, examining its bloody and violent incorporation into the British state, its refusal to embrace the Protestant Reformation and failure to industrialise in the 19th century. Coakley considers the crucial question of why Ireland’s national identity has come to rest on a mass movement for independence.
Cutting through many of the myths – imperialist and nationalist – which have obscured the real reasons for Ireland's course of development, Ireland in the World Order provides a new perspective on Irish history.
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Overview
Maurice Coakley focuses on key elements that contributed to Ireland’s development, examining its bloody and violent incorporation into the British state, its refusal to embrace the Protestant Reformation and failure to industrialise in the 19th century. Coakley considers the crucial question of why Ireland’s national identity has come to rest on a mass movement for independence.
Cutting through many of the myths – imperialist and nationalist – which have obscured the real reasons for Ireland's course of development, Ireland in the World Order provides a new perspective on Irish history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781849647328 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 07/06/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 413 KB |
About the Author
Maurice Coakley lectures in the Journalism and Media Studies faculty of Griffith College, Dublin.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Passages from the Medieval
POLITICS AND SOCIAL ORGANISATION IN ANGLO-FRENCH IRELAND
Ireland in the late medieval period can be roughly divided into two different entities: the Gaelic territories, under the control of Gaelic chiefs, and the Anglo-French regions, under the control of the Anglo-French aristocracy. While there were no clear demarcation lines, and a good deal of interaction between the two, Gaelic Ireland and Anglo-French Ireland possessed different social structures and developed along different lines.
In the twelfth century Anglo-French knights colonised substantial parts of Ireland, especially in the south and east. They established a social organisation and an administrative system along mainstream western European lines and owed loyalty to the English monarchy. Yet over the next few centuries, Anglo-French Ireland came to diverge sharply from England in its politics, culture and social organisation.
The Impact of the Anglo-French
Superficially at least, the socio-political evolution of England and the southern and eastern regions of Ireland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries seem fairly similar. Both were conquered by French-speaking knights who established a seigniorial social order under the authority of the English monarch. In both territories a manorial economy was developed along with castles, trade and urban centres. The Latin Church played a crucial role in their cultural life; most of those who could read and write were clerics, and the Latin language played a central role in their culture.
A few centuries later, certainly by 1500, literacy was becoming diffused throughout England, not only among the nobility, but more widely. Among the elite, French had been superseded by English as a spoken language. Latin retained a position of importance, but it was in decline. Alongside the development of a vernacular English literacy in the second half of the sixteenth century, English itself came to acquire a standard written form (Clanchy, 1993; Fisher, 1986).
Across most of the south and east of Ireland, the descendants of the French-speaking warrior elite retained control and for the most part remained loyal, at least nominally, to the King of England. But while a good deal of administrative writing survives, there appears to have been little general diffusion of literacy. The same period saw the initial rise of English as a spoken language followed by a sharp decline until it was hardly spoken at all outside the cities, and even within the cities, English would seem not to have been the language of the urban poor. What accounts for these linguistic changes and why did literacy in eastern Ireland not undergo the same diffusion that occurred in England?
Before examining these issues it is worth pointing out the very real achievements of the Anglo-French elite in medieval Ireland.
Political supremacy: Within a few decades the Anglo-French aristocracy had established military supremacy across most of the island. Gaelic power was confined to the western regions or mountainous and marshy areas of the south and east, and even there, the Gaelic communities were usually subordinate to the local Anglo-French feudal lord.
Government and law: While the Anglo-French knights' involvement in Ireland began as something of a freelance adventure, it was quickly brought under the control of the English monarchy, with the imprimatur of the Papacy. The institutions of royal government and law were developed in subsequent decades.
Manorial organisation: Throughout most of the south and east of Ireland, the Anglo-French lords established a vibrant manorial economy, based upon intensive arable agriculture and involving a significant movement away from pastoral husbandry.
Urban growth and commerce: Alongside a manorial economy, an extensive trade network and urban development occurred. The Vikings had already established towns along the Irish coastline; these were occupied and consolidated by the Anglo-French forces, and new cities were established.
Religious organisation: The conquest was accompanied by the introduction of 'orthodox' religious structures and monastic organisation; from the twelfth century onwards, the Christian Church in Ireland was systematically reorganised in line with orthodox Roman practices.
These social, political and cultural developments, which transformed Ireland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, were part and parcel of a wider European dynamic that would lay the foundation for the early modern state with its extensive pattern of literacy. Yet despite their achievements, the Anglo-French elite in Ireland did not bring about a more general diffusion of vernacular literacy, neither in English, French or Gaelic, nor – as occurred in England – did a new linguistic synthesis emerge.
The Language Question in Anglo-French Ireland
The Anglo-French colonisers of the twelfth century brought with them to Ireland a regime founded upon literate practices, similar to that operating in England. The English system of law and government was transferred to Ireland virtually unchanged. As in England, writing was focused upon religion, law and government and was carried out in two languages: Latin and French. Latin was the primary language of religion; Latin and French were the only languages of law and government.
Record keeping was at the heart of the system of law and government. All landholdings derived ultimately from royal bequest and all such holdings had to be recorded. The functioning of government depended upon its ability to tax, and any taxes raised, in whatever form, had to be carefully documented.
The warrior and clerical elite who conquered the south and east of Ireland spoke a dialect of French as their first language, though this began to decline over the course of the thirteenth century. French continued to be used (alongside Latin) for government documents and legal records up until the end of the fifteenth century, and was also used as the lingua franca of trade and commerce (Picard, 2003).
Apart from the French-speaking elite, the twelfth century witnessed a substantial popular migration of English – and to a lesser extent Welsh and Flemish – speakers into Ireland. For a period the three languages – English, French and Irish – appear to have vied with each other for supremacy. However, by the late thirteenth century English had clearly become the dominant language of the towns and large parts of eastern Ireland developed its own dialect characteristics, known to historians as Hiberno-English (not to be confused with modern Irish dialects of English).
English was not widely used in official documents in Ireland until the later part of the fifteenth century. After 1500 English was widely used in writing, though by the middle of the century no longer displayed features of the Hiberno-English dialect. This increased use of written English in the later part of the fifteenth century is somewhat paradoxical: it came after English had declined as a spoken language in Ireland, to be replaced by (Gaelic) Irish (Bliss, 1976).
From the mid-fourteenth century onwards English, from having been widely spoken across eastern Ireland, declined significantly to a point where by the early sixteenth century it was not spoken at all outside of the towns and a couple of small rural areas (the Forth and Bargy area south of Wexford town, and Fingal in north county Dublin). In the towns the poorer population seem to have spoken Irish as a first language and it would seem that most English speakers were bilingual. The clearest evidence for the decline of English in medieval Ireland comes from the acts passed by an Irish parliament in 1366 – the Statutes of Kilkenny – which prohibited the use of the Irish language, on pain of losing one's lands. The statutes make clear that the English colony in Ireland had undergone a profound transformation in the fourteenth century, of which linguistic change was only one element (Bliss & Long, 1987).
Law and Social Structure in the English Colony
There is no way of calculating the exact size of the English community in medieval Ireland though it seems clear that there was a mass English settlement in Ireland in the twelfth century. Historians cannot quantify quite how dense the settlement was, though there is little doubt that there was a substantial merchant, artisan and peasant English community in the south and east of Ireland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This mass migration clearly differentiates the thirteenth century conquest of Ireland from that of England a century earlier, where the settlement was confined to an aristocratic – warrior and clerical – stratum (Empey, 1986; O'Brien, 1993).
From the broader perspective, this migration can be seen as part of the wider expansion of the feudal social order across the European continent. The knights were able to use their superior military power to seize large stretches of territory but these territories were of no use to them without peasants to work them. This same period saw a demographic boom which ensured that there were large numbers of peasants looking for new land to farm. In order to make it worth their while to travel long distances to a new home, the lords granted them favourable conditions, including freedom from servile status (Bartlett, 1993; Brenner, 1996).
The conquest of England occurred before the major demographic expansion of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Perhaps more importantly, England had been manorialised long before the coming of the Norman-French and it was more densely populated than Ireland. While arable agriculture did exist in Ireland before the Anglo-French conquest, it had always played a subordinate role to pastoralism. To develop demesne agriculture and take advantage of trade, the Anglo-French lords needed to encourage settlers. As well as building castles and dividing up their new lands, the lords established towns, or at least burgage tenure appropriate for urban growth (Empey, 1986).
By the mid-thirteenth century the Anglo-French colony was at the height of its power. Most of Leinster, Munster and eastern Ulster had been subdued, and Anglo-French knights had even established military supremacy in Connaught. Throughout most of the conquered region, a manorial economy had been established which produced a surplus large enough to permit a substantial export of grain and other produce. The existence of a large agricultural surplus encouraged the formation of an extensive urban settlement and helped finance many of the English wars against Scotland and France (Down, 1987; O'Brien, 1993).
The peasant population was divided into two main groups: a small stratum of free peasants who were predominantly of English extraction, and the unfree betagh population, the original Irish inhabitants or hibernici. In the documents of the time the terms hibernici and servi (in this context meaning serf) tend to be used interchangeably. It seems that the betagh continued to farm in their traditional manner, in kindred groups, while at the same time contributing labour services to their Anglo-French lords. This servile Irish population, like the unfree villein class in England, was excluded from royal law. They were also prohibited from making wills and testaments. The killing of an Irishman was not a felony, while, correspondingly, to accuse someone of being Irish was considered defamatory. A petition by leading clerics to have English law extended to the Irish population of the colony in the 1270s was rejected by the Crown (Bartlett, 1993; Hand, 1966a).
The exclusion of the Irish population – like the exclusion of villeins in England – from royal law had the effect of increasing the power of the lords; the unfree peasants had no legal protection from their arbitrary demands.
The essential point is that the services were uncertain. The only restriction on the lord's power to set the number of days to be worked on his domain was the custom of the manor. If any dispute arose it could only be litigated in the lord's court. Villeins had no right to bring an action in the king's court. The villein's unfree status meant that he had no rights against the lord: the relationship was one of power, the power of the lord over the tenant, rather than a relationship of law in which the parties had rights and duties in relationship to each other. (Lyall, 1994, p. 57)
Such a situation would hardly have seemed propitious for the Gaelicisation of the English population in Ireland, yet over the next century, much of the English colony did indeed become gaelicised. While the formal legal framework persisted, the actual social context of the Anglo-French colony was transformed. Historians have traditionally explained the Gaelicisation of the fourteenth century in narrowly military or political terms, but neither Edward Bruce's military engagement in Ireland in the course of the English/ Scottish wars, nor the increased military capacity of the Gaelic septs can convincingly explain this transformation.
The records of the 1297 parliament, long before the Bruce campaign (1315–18) make it clear that the colony was in a deep crisis, while the military weakness of the Dublin administration in the fourteenth century is directly related to their declining revenues. The breakdown of the Anglo-French order in the fourteenth century becomes less mysterious if it is borne in mind that all the evidence points to a generalised crisis of European feudal society in these years (Connolly, 1984).
The Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366 were not directed solely, or perhaps even primarily, against the indigenous Irish community. They clearly targeted people of English descent (defined by law as 'English') who were unable to speak the English language. Any 'English' person holding a benefice who did not speak English was given six months to learn it, or they would forfeit their benefice. These prohibitions were not confined to language issues; they were directed against a whole range of social customs, including the use of Irish dress, names, music and sport. They testify to the gradual Gaelicisation of the 'English' population in the colony. This process of Gaelicisation involved more than simple cultural absorption; it seems clear that the colony was experiencing a deeper social crisis. Many of the statutes were of a more direct socioeconomic import. The price of merchandise was to be fixed by officials, as were the wages of labourers. Labourers were forbidden to emigrate and any caught doing so were to be sentenced to a year's imprisonment (Hand, 1966b).
Such measures were not confined to Ireland. The European feudal social order as a whole was rocked by a deep social crisis throughout the fourteenth century. One of the symptoms of this crisis was widespread revolt against servile conditions and status. While interpretations of the fourteenth-century crisis differ, some of its key features are beyond dispute. The productive capacity of medieval agriculture had reached its limits. Feudal lords found themselves facing increased costs and reduced income, and attempted to deal with this by making new impositions upon the peasantry. The peasants responded with resistance or flight. It would seem that the relative ease of flight in the Irish context made full-scale resistance unnecessary.
Many of the measures proclaimed by the Kilkenny parliament in 1366 were repeated across the Latin Christian world with varying degrees of success. The attempt to restrict the rights of labourers replicated the Statutes of Labourers passed by the English parliament in 1349–51 (Hilton, 1985). What is not clear is how these attempts to restrict the freedom of labourers related to the laws against the use of Irish language and customs. What was the connection between the attempted imposition of serfdom and the assault on Gaelicisation?
The Crisis of the Feudal Order
The fortunes of Anglo-French Ireland in this era mirrored those of European feudalism as a whole. The amount of land under arable cultivation increased considerably, with a corresponding decline in pasturage and meadowland; as a result manure was less available to fertilise the land. Despite the large surpluses of grain exported or sold on the home market, yields were low. Population had increased and seems to have reached a point of overpopulation in settled areas by the end of the thirteenth century (Down, 1987; Nicholls, 1982).
Given the low yields and large surpluses extracted, the living conditions of most of the peasant population must have been precarious. Throughout the High Middle Ages, there was little real technical advance in Europe's agricultural production. Increases in agricultural output were achieved not by greater productivity of the land, but by greater productivity of labour: the peasants worked longer. In this respect feudal Ireland was hardly unique (Brenner, 1996).
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
PrefaceIntroduction
1. Passages from the Medieval
2. Roots of Capitalism and Nationality
3. Legacies of Uneven Development
4. Conclusion: Ireland in a Changing World Order
Glossary
Historical Time Line
Further Reading
Bibliography
Index