Ireland: A Concise History from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day

by Paul Johnson

Overview

Drawing from a wealth of historical and scholarly sources, Johnson traces the important social, religious and political development of Ireland's struggle to become a unified, settled country. Johnson describes with accurate detail Ireland's barbarous beginnings, Oliver Cromwell's religious "crusade," the tragic Irish potato famine, the Ulster resistance and the outstanding fact of the constant British-Irish connection and the fearful toll of life it exacted. Among the anonymous multitude are famous names such as "Silken Thom" Kildare, Thomas Wentworth, Archbishop Plunkett and Lord Frederick Cavendish. And yet many great men marshaled their energies and wits to settle Ireland: Sir Henry Sidney, Sire Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, Churchill and others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780897331234
Publisher:	Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/30/2005
Edition description:	REVISED
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	757,238
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Paul Johnson, a well-known writer and journalist, was the editor of the New Statesman from 1965 to 1970 and is the author of several books, including A History of Christianity, A History of the Modern World from 1917 to the 1980s, and A History of the Jews.

Read an Excerpt

Ireland

A Concise History from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day

---

By Paul Johnson

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 1980 Paul Johnson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89733-123-4

---

CHAPTER 1

Gaelic Ireland and the English Pale

The English presence in Ireland arose from the failure of Irish society to develop the institution of monarchy. The Irish, of course, had kingship; too much of it, indeed. The chief kings were those who held Meath and Leinster, Munster, Connaught and Ulster; but between the fifth and twelfth centuries, with a population which never exceeded 500,000, Ireland had about 150 kings at any given date, each ruling over a tuath or tribal kingdom. A chanson degeste describing the Anglo-Norman invasion of the twelfth century says

En yrland event reis plusur
Cum alures erent les cunturs

('In Ireland there were as many kings as counts elsewhere'). The twelfth-century English chronicler William of Newburgh, in his Historia Rerum Anglicanum, says that Ireland at the time of the invasion was like Britain in times of old. By this he meant that the Irish, like the Saxons with their bretwalda, had the notion of an over-king, which they called a high king. But whereas the Bretwalda was developed by the royal house of Wessex into a national monarchy, which the Norman kings of England inherited, the Irish high kingship at no stage implied monarchy. Even Brian Boru, who destroyed the Norse tyranny of the ninth and tenth centuries, and was acknowledged as high king by his peers between 1002 and his death in battle in 1014, never exercised governmental authority over the whole of Ireland. In Ireland, the high king reigned but did not rule. The concept of monarchy required a radical revolution which in highly conservative Irish society could only be brought about by foreign intervention. Such intervention was inspired by the modernizing and reforming spirit of the Church of Rome. The Hildebrandine reforms, called after their progenitor Archdeacon Hildebrand, later Pope Gregory VII, spread over Western Europe in the closing decades of the eleventh century. Pope Gregory sanctioned the Norman conquest of England by William I, who carried with him the credentials of a crusader and a papal command to reform the English church, regarded by Rome as corrupt, heretical and schismatic. This William did, under his great Archbishop of Canterbury Lanfranc; and Norman barons also took the Hildebrandine programme to Scotland (under Queen Margaret) and to Wales. In every case these ecclesiastical reforms were accompanied by conquest and settlement. It was almost inevitable that the same pattern should be repeated in Ireland.

The essence of the papal reform was the establishment of strong bishoprics in the principal towns and cities, linked to Rome by a regular chain of command underwritten by canon law. In practice such reforms could only be achieved with the cooperation of powerful, centralizing monarchs. There was no possibility of such a monarchy evolving in native Ireland. There, kings were not merely myriad but limited in sovereignty by customary law guarded by a class of professional law-minders or brehons. The kings could not change the law: they could only interpret it. The bishops were mere functionaries of rural monasteries, under abbots drawn from the ranks of local ruling families. In practice, then, the many Irish communities were ruled not as monarchies but as triarchies, the law giving equal status to kings, chief brehons and abbots. Canon law was received only in so far as the abbots permitted it, and there were innumerable irregularities. Irish laws, for instance, accepted eight forms of marriage and permitted divorce and concubinage.

There were, however, modern-minded Irish churchmen who favoured reforms, chiefly in the Norse trading settlements established at Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, Cork and Limerick. These were the only towns in Ireland, largely inhabited by people of Norse descent – Ostmen, as the Irish called them. Their bishops sought to regularize themselves with Rome and to promote the reforms. Thus Patrick, chosen Bishop of Dublin in 1075, travelled to Canterbury, was consecrated by Lanfranc and swore obedience to him as Primate, and brought back with him a letter to the high king, Turloch O'Brien, asking him to reform abuses in the church. Thereafter, bishops from the Ostmen towns usually slipped over to England for consecration, and wrote letters to Rome complaining bitterly of the state of the church in the rest of Ireland: the absence of a single, proper ritual, and of canonical marriage, the non-observance of clerical celibacy, the failure to pay tithes, and the secular control of church appointments. Church reform and strong government went together, and it is notable that reforming bishops were supported by those Irish kings who sought to make the high kingship a reality. Thus Turloch More O'Connor, king of Connaught and high king in 1119–56, tried to centralize the reform, and place it firmly in an Irish national context, by cutting the links with Canterbury and holding a synod at Kells in 1152.

The synod, however, seems to have been a failure, and the death of Turloch in 1156 led to a period of secular confusion, of marching and countermarching until all Ireland, as the annalist put it, became 'a trembling sod'. In 1154 an English monk from St Albans, Nicholas Brakespear, became Pope as Adrian IV, and revived the Hildebrandine programme. The same year Henry II was universally acknowledged King of England, thus ending the anarchy of King Stephen's reign, and immediately set about a vigorous process of centralization. It was natural, then, that Pope Adrian should turn to Henry, the strongest monarch in Western Europe, to carry through the reforming programme in Ireland, though it is likely that the initiative came in the first place from Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury, who had lost his authority over the bishops in the Ostmen towns. Probably in 1155, Adrian issued a Bull, Laudabiliter, giving Henry authority to enter Ireland:

Laudably and profitably does Your Majesty contemplate spreading the glory of your name on earth ... [whereas] you have expressed to us your desire to enter the island of Ireland in order to subject its people to law and to root out from them the weeds of vice. ... We, therefore, meeting your pious and laudable desire with due favour and according a gracious assent to your petition, do hereby declare our will and pleasure that, with a view to enlarging the boundaries of the church, restraining the downward course of vice, correcting evil customs and planting virtue, and for the increase of the Christian religion, you shall enter that island and execute whatever may tend to the honour of God and the welfare of the land; and also that the people of that land shall receive you with honour and revere you as their lord....

The text of Laudabiliter does not survive in the papal archives and we have it only through the twelfth-century Expugnatio Hibernica (The Conquest of Ireland) written by the Welsh cleric Giraldus Cambrensis, and which is anti-Irish in tone. At one time Irish nationalist historians questioned its authenticity, but modern scholarship has resolved any reasonable doubts. The Bull was probably brought to England by the great clerical scholar John of Salisbury, who (writing in 1159) says that Adrian 'sent by me to the King a golden ring, adorned with a fine emerald, in token of his investiture with the government of Ireland'. According to one authority, the issue was debated at Henry's council in 1155, but the King declined to take on any more responsibilities at present.

What prompted Henry's intervention, fifteen years later, was the need to control his own feudatories. Dermot MacMorrough, King of Leinster, was a modernizer (and for that reason has been portrayed as a bad man by the Celtic monks who wrote the Irish annals). He wished to combine his own secular ambitions with the introduction of church reforms. In 1166 Dermot travelled to Bristol to recruit Norman mercenaries and subsequently saw Henry II in Acquitaine to get his permission. This was granted and Dermot (who lacked an heir) sealed the arrangement by marrying his daughter Eva to Richard Fitzgilbert, Earl of Clare, known to history as 'Strongbow'. Giraldus says of Strongbow that his 'his pedigree was longer than his purse', and he evidently seized on the opportunity to carve out for himself a kingdom in Ireland. The first Normans landed in the summer of 1167, and they were strongly reinforced in May 1169 when Robert Fitzstephen and Maurice Prendergast landed at Bannow Bay in Wexford with '30 knights, 60 men-at-arms wearing breastplates, and 300 archers'. At the Baginbun headland they built their first motte-and-bailey castle of timber and earth. Most of the archers were from the Flemish community which had settled in Pembrokeshire, and the Irish annals say: 'The fleet of the Flemings came to Erin: there were 90 heroes dressed in mail, and the Gaels set no store by them.' Giraldus recounts that after Fitzstephen had helped Dermot to beat his enemies, the severed heads of some 200 of them were laid at the King's feet. Then, to the disgust of Fitzstephen, 'he lifted up to his mouth the head of one he particularly loathed, and taking it by the ears and hair, gnawed at the nose and cheeks, a cruel and most inhuman act'.

Strongbow himself came in August 1170, with 1,000 men, took Waterford and married Eva in its cathedral. Then he occupied Dublin. When Dermot died the following year, Strongbow asserted his claim to the kingdom of Leinster and made it good by winning a pitched battle on the banks of the Liffey outside Dublin. It was this event which provoked the intervention of Henry II. No doubt he was anxious to divert attention from the atrocious murder of Archbishop Becket in December 1170, by belatedly carrying out the Laudabiliter programme. But his chief motive was to stop Strongbow creating a position of private, quasi-regal power beyond his own authority. He ordered Strongbow to surrender all ports and castles, and when he landed on 18 October 1171 he took with him no less than 500 knights, mounted- and foot-archers and a large quantity of siege equipment: this was plainly aimed at Strongbow's castles, not the Irish.

In fact there was no fighting, and Henry was immediately acknowledged as lord by all concerned, Norman and Irish, lay and ecclesiastical. He called a council of kings and bishops at Cashel and, according to Giraldus, 'There the monstrous excesses and vile practices of that land and people were investigated, recounted at a public hearing and put into writings under the seal of the Bishop of Lismore, the papal legate, who on that occasion presided over all the others by virtue of his seniority'. Giraldus says the King then issued constitutions for the church based upon English practice, 'For it is proper and most fitting that, just as by God's grace Ireland has received her Lord and King from England, so too she should receive a better pattern of living from that quarter'.

Henry's proceedings were endorsed in September 1172 by Pope Alexander III, who wrote three letters, to Henry himself, to the kings and princes of Ireland, and to the Irish bishops. That to the bishops says he has heard from several of them

how great are the enormities of vice with which the people of Ireland are infected, and how they have departed from the fear of God and the established practice of the Christian faith, so that souls have been placed in peril. We have further learnt from your letters that Henry, the noble king of the English, our dearest son in Christ, moved by inspiration from God and summoning all his strength, has subjugated this barbarous and uncouth race, which is ignorant of divine law; and through his power those forbidden things which used to be practised in your lands, now begin to diminish ... we earnestly pray that through the vigilance and care of the King, and by your cooperation with him, this undisciplined and untamed people may in every way be led to respect the Divine law and the practice of the Christian faith.

In fact Henry II never carried out the papal programme in full; nor did he conquer Ireland. Irish history would have been very different, and perhaps happier, had he done so. Henry never returned to Ireland, thus inaugurating the tragic English tradition of benign (some would say malign) neglect. In 1175 he signed the Treaty of Windsor with Rory O'Connor, the high king, in which Rory did him homage. He sent over Hugh de Lacy as Constable of Dublin, and effectively viceroy, to balance Strongbow, and Hugh, says Giraldus, 'won the confidence of the Irish by the leniency of his government and his strict regard for treaties'. With the analogies of Scotland and Brittany in mind, Henry made his youngest son, John, Dominus Hiberniae or Lord of Ireland, in 1185. Of course John was not expected to become King of England too; thus when he did so in 1199, the lordship of Ireland then became accidentally attached to the English crown. But Henry II was never prepared to devote either time or money to the conquest and unification of Ireland.

Instead, the process of subjugation and settlement was undertaken by individual great lords. Strongbow, and his famous son-in-law, William Marshall Earl of Pembroke, who inherited his claims, feudalized an area covering the five modern counties of Wexford, Carlow, Leix, Kilkenny and Kildare. The vassals of this great liberty included the founders of famous Irish names: the Fitzgeralds in Naas, the Berminghams in Carbery, the Carews in Carlow and the Prendergasts in Wexford. The de Lacys created a palatine empire of 500,000 acres in Meath, divided into eighteen baronies, some of which lasted until the Battle of the Boyne, and gave to Ireland such names as Tyrel, Fleming, Nugent, Nangle and Petit. The de Courcys conquered eastern Ulster, and enfeoffed baronies owned by the Hackets, Russells, Savages, Whites and Logans. From 1235 the de Burghs moved into Connaught, planting Welsh settlers who provided Ireland with another string of famous names: the Barrets, Lynnets, Merricks and Walshes in Mayo, with the Joyces in the mountains between Mayo and Galway.

This conquest was underwritten by wooden motte-and-bailey castles, replaced in stone as quickly as time and money allowed. The first real Irish castle was Carrickfergus, 1180–1204, built by John de Courcy on Belfast Loch, with a great square four storey keep, ninety feet high and big enough to stand comparison with Rochester, Dover, Newcastle or the White Tower in London. The de Lacys put up Trim, in Meath, the largest Anglo-Norman fortification in Ireland, covering three acres and with a wall perimeter of 1,500 feet. Of the great Fitzgerald castle at Maynooth in Kildare, only the fine gate-tower and massive keep remain. At Athenry in Galway, built by the Berminghams, only the three-storey keep remains also, but it is exceptionally well-preserved and for its date (1238) has unusually elaborate decorations on doorways and windows. There were also royal castles: Dublin and Kilkenny, Limerick, built by King John around 1200, Athlone, built in 1210 by his justiciar, John de Grey, and the magnificent castle at Roscommon, built by the justiciar Robert de Ufford around 1280.

But despite this considerable military and settlement effort, the installation by John, William Marshall and Hubert de Burgh of an Irish Exchequer, Treasury and Chancery (in Dublin Castle), and of Irish justices of Assize, only a small part of Ireland was administered on English lines during the thirteenth century. In 1217 Magna Carta was published in an Irish version, directing that English Common Law was to apply there, and that Common Law writs were valid in the King's courts. But the process of 'shiring', that is creating counties as administrative units, each with a sheriff and coroner, proceeded very slowly. By 1260 there were only seven: Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Kerry, Tipperary, Connaught and Louth. The justiciar, the King's viceroy in Dublin, did not control the great feudal liberties of the interior. Thus Ireland was divided into three: an area of direct English administration, radiating from Dublin, the feudal territories of the Anglo-Norman barons, and 'Irish' Ireland, where there was virtually no English presence. This last was itself divided into two, for though such kings as the O'Connors and the O'Briens held their land in the north by royal grant and under royal suzerainty, west of the River Bann, there were Gaelic kings who who had not admitted English overlordship at all. Irish kings such as Brian O'Neill of Ulster assumed the title of High King as late as 1260. The most independent were the O'Donnells of Tirconnel in Ulster, who claimed 'every man should have his own world'.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Ireland by Paul Johnson. Copyright © 1980 Paul Johnson. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Illustrations,
Acknowledgements,
Gaelic Ireland and the English Pale,
Conquest and Plantation,
From Cromwell to the Boyne,
Rebellion and Union,
Famine and Diaspora,
Ascendancy Culture,
Home Rule and the Land,
Ulster Resists, Dublin Rises,
Freedom and Partition,
From Revolt to Stalemate,
Epilogue,
Sources,
Index,

Editorial Reviews

"[Paul Johnson] is wonderfully adroit at condensing history in an interesting way." — Kliatt

From the Publisher

"A lively, intelligent, provocative accountof Ireland fromthe twelft century to our own."

Sunday Telegraph