The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (13 page)

Although such colourful tales improve in the telling, Giraldus would not have had the inside track on any Irish plots and intrigues. Instead, it seems clear that he viewed as an affront John’s policy – sensible though it was from the Crown’s point of view – of granting lands to new settlers whose loyalty was not in doubt. It is highly unlikely – beard-pulling notwithstanding – that common cause was suddenly forged among the Irish lords; and rather more likely that the original Anglo-Norman settlers were by this stage so embedded in Irish society and so intent on following their own agenda that John could make no military or administrative impact on what was nominally his lordship.

John eventually left in December – a time of year when no ship would normally brave the crossing to Wales – and returned to his father with tales of the ungrateful and rebellious residents of Ireland. Nevertheless, Henry persisted in his plans for a separate kingdom; and to this end, an envoy arrived from Pope Urban III in January 1187 carrying permission to establish such a state in Ireland and a crown of peacock feathers for the new King John. This prospective new kingdom stands as one of the great ‘what ifs’ of Irish history. What if Henry’s plans had come to pass? Would Ireland have evolved into a state separate from, and equal to, England? If so, how would its varied society have developed? But Henry’s great plan was to unravel: one by one, John’s elder brothers died; and instead of becoming King of Ireland in due course, John succeeded to the throne of England in 1199. Ireland would remain a lordship, in a position subservient to the English Crown, for another four hundred years.

John has been popularly regarded as one of England’s worst monarchs. His record as an excellent administrator – overhauling the civil service, for example, and in the process laying down the foundations of a modern state – has traditionally been overshadowed by the rather more interesting litany of his sins, which range from losing control of Normandy to sparking a civil war in England, from mislaying the Crown Jewels in the East Anglian fens to being cruel, capricious, murderous and (worst of all) the arch-foe of Robin Hood. Yet he left a deep imprint on Irish affairs. It was during his reign (1199–1216) that the basis of royal government was created, with strongholds established at such strategic locations as Athlone and Clones, influencing events in Connacht and Ulster respectively. He is remembered too for ordering the construction of Dublin Castle, the foundations of which were laid in 1204: this complex would for centuries function as both the symbol and reality of foreign authority in Ireland. John’s reign also brought, in 1207, the first national coinage, and the application of English common law in the Irish colony. The interpretation and traced consequences of these facts have inevitably been disputed down the years, but their impact cannot be doubted. It was also the case that John, like his father before him, was at least as concerned by the actions of his independently minded Anglo-Norman landowning subjects as he was by those of the Irish; as a result, he learned to treat the latter as a group that might be wooed to keep the colonists in check, putting a final stop to the freewheeling adventuring that had gone before. Moreover, John’s misfortunes elsewhere in Europe impacted directly and immediately on Ireland: as his European territories shrank and the Angevin Empire began to focus on England, so the energy available for Ireland increased. It was a sign of events to come.

John’s lightning final trip to Ireland in the summer of 1210 demonstrates that, while in English history he is known disparagingly as ‘Lackland’, he understood well how to conduct a thoroughly effective military campaign. He landed at Waterford on 21 June and, in the course of a two-month stay, managed both to build bridges with Irish chiefs (and extract hostages from them too, in order to be certain) and to settle the main Anglo-Norman issue of the day, the rebellion of Hugh de Lacy in Ulster. De Lacy’s strings of castles on the northeast coast and on Lough Neagh were popularly regarded as impregnable – but John swept all before him and de Lacy fled to Scotland. With all issues settled, the king departed Ireland in a swirl of efficiency and was back in England by the end of August. These were not the actions of a conqueror, in spite of what Giraldus might have claimed: what John sought was a stable, trustworthy and revenue-producing polity on his western flank.

The death of John six years later had immediate and long-lasting repercussions for Ireland. He had inherited from his father Henry the concept of his realm as a federation of kingdoms and duchies bound by loyalty to their ruler – and he was, therefore, instinctively open to the Gaelic concept of the high king as a loose overlord to whom one owed allegiance in return for a good deal of flexibility in running one’s own affairs. So long as John remained on the throne, this delicately poised status quo remained in place: with his death, however, it broke down, and new policies began instead to highlight the chasm between native Irish and colonists. Almost immediately, for example, the new statutes of Magna Carta came into effect: the rights of landowners and nobles in the lands settled by the Anglo-Normans were thus guaranteed – but the charter did not extend to the Irish themselves. At the same time, Irish appointments to the Church were forbidden. In a letter to the Irish Church, Pope Honorius reacted sharply:

It has come to our knowledge that certain Englishmen have, with unheard-of audacity, decreed that no Irish cleric, no matter how educated or reputable, is to be admitted to any ecclesiastical dignity. We are not prepared to allow so temerarious and wicked an abuse to pass in silence, and we command you by authority of this letter to denounce the decree as null and void, forbidding the said Englishmen from enforcing it or attempting anything of the kind in future. You are to make known that Irish clerics, whose merits are attested by their lives and learning, are to be freely admitted to ecclesiastical dignities, provided they have been canonically elected to their posts.
¹⁴

While the Crown might from time to time call upon the Gaelic lords to provide manpower and weapons – in 1244, for example, the men of Connacht turned up to fight for Henry III in Wales – it was generally happy to emphasize vital distinctions between Irish and non-Irish in the colony. One source describes ‘two races, one of which…dwells in the towns, castles and seaports; the other is a wild people…who speak a strange language…which have neither town, house, castle nor dwelling and dwell always in the woods, and on the mountains of the country, and have many chiefs among themselves, of whom [even] the most powerful go barefoot and without breeches, and ride horse without saddles.’
¹⁵

These new policies find their best expression in the application of the law. Although the common law of England had been extended in theory to Ireland, it was not applied in the distinctive Angevin manner – that is, with reference to already existing local law and mores. Time and experience had demonstrated the sense of this Angevin custom, which made the existence of a new regime, a new ruling elite, much easier to digest. In Wales, for example, it was common practice to hear cases according either to the laws of Wales or to English common law, depending on where the court was sitting – and this in spite of the Crown’s persistent difficulties in asserting its rule in the country. In Ireland, however, traditional Irish laws were not permitted any place in the workings of the new colonial administration. This state of affairs had much to do with the fact that certain aspects of Irish law – those permitting vendetta, for instance, or calling for material compensation in reparation for an act of homicide – were regarded by the English authorities as another example of the barbarism intrinsic to the Irish nature. As a result, the indigenous aristocracy was without legal protection for the lands they still held; simultaneously, the common Irish labourer, tied to his landowner, was denied legal protection simply as a result of his status. Individuals would on occasion be granted the protection of the common law – but the situation remained fundamentally discriminatory.
¹⁶

This gradual assertion of colonial authority in the thirteenth century also found physical expression: the large-scale construction of castles and keeps, many of which survive in one form or another to the present day, transformed the countryside. Giraldus, noting the strategic and military utility of the castle in the Irish landscape, muses that:

the less remote part of the country, as far as the river Shannon, which divides the three eastern parts of the island
[i.e. Ulster, Munster and Leinster]
from the fourth
[Connacht]
, should be secured and protected by the construction of many castles…it is far, far better to begin by gradually connecting up a system of castles built in suitable places and by proceeding cautiously with their construction, than to build large numbers of castles at great distances from each other, sited haphazardly in various locations, without their forming any coherent system of mutual support or being able to relieve each other in times of crisis.
¹⁷

These infrastructural changes were altogether new: Irish kings, even the most powerful, tended not to live in what one would call castles or elaborate forts. Instead – largely because each local or provincial economy revolved to an extent around the herding of cattle and other livestock – they lived a partially nomadic life; the creation of large centres of power in such a milieu would run contrary to cultural norms and political reality. The newcomers, on the other hand, were firmly invested in the principle of creating buildings that were meant to last. They believed in them not only for defensive purposes, but also symbolically: a great man needed a great residence in which to live and dominate the surrounding countryside. The flip side of such vast works of encastellation, however, lies in the clear understanding that they were so urgently
needed
: the colonial expansion across the country was constantly opening up new areas of conflict and dispute; and the colonizers’ grip on their lands could never be taken for granted.

At the same time, new agrarian practices were being implemented in Ireland. It would be wholly inaccurate to imagine the landscape of Gaelic Ireland as purely pastoral: land continued to be given over, as it had for many hundreds of years, to the production of oats and barley, with a little wheat and flax for the production of linen. But the twelfth century in Europe had witnessed an agricultural revolution, and now the Anglo-Normans transferred the rudiments of this sophisticated agrarian economy into Ireland by means of the cultivation of cereal crops on a much larger scale. This conversion to more intensive agriculture was driven by the recognition that much of Leinster and Munster were ideally suited to these methods of farming. It was given added urgency by the loss of the fertile plains of Normandy to the French in 1204: the English were obliged to make up the difference with a more thorough exploitation of land elsewhere.

In the middle of this changing rural landscape, new communities began to develop: most of the market towns in the south and east of Ireland can trace their beginnings back to this period, as full urbanization took root in the country. The aim of the colonists in establishing what was sometimes quite a dense network of towns and communities was to re-create a familiar country beyond the Irish Sea. They wished to replicate in Ireland the familiar paraphernalia of life that had existed back home: the crops and castles joined by parish churches and monasteries, by priests and labourers, by merchants and tradesmen and farmers. And in consequence, the colonial presence was no longer a matter of adventurers on the make; it became a story of cultural transformation, as men and women and children by the shipload began to arrive in Ireland, as towns and countryside were moulded into a more comfortable form. This gradual expansion of the English colony at the expense of the Irish in the course of the thirteenth century was culturally and economically shocking. As the boundaries of the colony extended outward, the Irish were left increasingly with the marginal and less agriculturally viable land. It would create a powerful imperative in the Irish mind to hold whatever territory was left.

Chapter Four

Wasted and Consumed

In the century that followed John’s campaign in Ireland, the authority of the lordship became firmly recognized across the south and east. The names of counties that are familiar today – Carlow and Kildare, Kilkenny and Tipperary and Kerry – were already inscribed on the maps; established settlements and fortified strongholds had spread along the coasts of Ulster and Connacht as far as Donegal Bay and Lough Foyle; and no part of the island of Ireland was immune to the influence of the colony. Yet the maps and records tell only one side of the story: in practice, the political situation was curiously unresolved. The authorities at Dublin were engaged in a game of checks and balances with a host of rulers up and down the land – local powers in any number of hues, both Irish and Anglo-Irish, all of them able to command the attention and loyalty of swathes of the population. The power of the lordship on the ground was far from undisputed, and the fragility of colonial authority in Ireland was becoming increasingly apparent.