The Story of Ireland

by Neil Hegarty

  The Scottish invasion of Ireland was particularly savage. Having pacified much of eastern Ulster and created a safe Irish base, Edward led his men south, the intention being not to capture and subdue the fortified bases of Leinster but to burn communities, lay waste to the countryside and create anarchy for the Dublin government. It was, from their point of view, a sensible strategy – the Scots had besieged the castle at Carrickfergus at the heart of their Ulster base for over a year before finally capturing it, and they had presumably learned a lesson or two in the process – and it worked too: the rich farmland of Leinster provided the economic pulse of the lordship and the Scots’ depredations did indeed create economic turmoil. But it was unfortunate for the invaders – not to mention the civilian population of Ireland – that the three-year campaign in the country coincided with a Europe-wide famine. While the Scottish troops might be able to seize what provisions they could find, a succession of bitter winters and cold, stormy summers meant that there was simply no food to be had.

  Ultimately, Edward Bruce’s campaign failed because, in spite of the Crown’s increasingly tenuous hold over Ireland, the authorities’ control of Dublin was never seriously compromised. In 1317 the Scots briefly threatened to take the city, and the authorities responded by setting fire to the northwestern suburbs in an effort to hamper the advance; this strategy worked, even if in the process the fire spread and burned down much of the centre of the city. Nor did the Irish come together in an alliance against the Crown; and the Anglo-Irish barons, rooted in their own cultural identity, saw clearly that the English connection offered more than a Scottish one ever could. Edward withdrew once more into Ulster and, on 14 October 1318, he was killed in battle near Dundalk; parts of his dismembered body were brought to Dublin as evidence of his death.

  The invasion was eventually stemmed, then, but at great cost. The slowness of the Dublin authorities in meeting and defeating the Scots was evidence of their own underlying military and fiscal weakness; and their sluggish and limited response to the destruction wrought by the Scottish armies exposed further what was clearly the threadbare nature of the English presence in Ireland. Put frankly, governance of much of Ireland was increasingly beyond the administration’s strength. Vast tracts of countryside lay wasted following the Scottish campaigns, and would remain unproductive in the decades ahead. The castles, keeps and fortifications built during the thirteenth century were decaying; on the eve of the Scottish onslaught long sections of the walls of Dublin were crumbling; highways, causeways and bridges were increasingly in a state of ruin. The story was the same in towns across the east and south of Ireland. The treasury in Dublin simply did not have the funds to undertake the necessary repairs. The countryside was depopulating too: in these years, many of the smaller communities established in the first years of the lordship vanished from the records for ever; and the English government, involved now in expensive and debilitating war with France, was in no position to invest attention, much less hard cash, in its Irish colony. And, to complete this litany of woe, outbreaks of smallpox and influenza swept through Ireland in the 1320s.

  The arrival of the Black Death in Ireland, although it did not mark the culmination of these misfortunes, certainly added to them. The disease had first arrived in southern Europe in the spring of 1348, coming to Sicily from the Black Sea aboard Genoese trading vessels: following long-established trading routes, it had then spread with terrifying speed across the continent. It was first recorded in Ireland in the late summer at the eastern ports of Drogheda, Howth and Dalkey – ferried on ships from Chester and Bristol, maybe, or from France on vessels carrying wine to the Irish market. At Kilkenny, Friar Clyn recorded the frightful impact of the plague before himself being struck down:

  More people in the world have died in such a short time of plague than has been heard of since the beginning of time…. The pestilence was so contagious that whosoever touched the sick and the dead was immediately infected and died, so that penitent and confessor were carried to the grave…that pestilence deprived of human inhabitants villages and cities, so that there was scarcely found a man to dwell therein…. Many died of boils and abscesses and pustules which erupted on their shins or under their armpits; others died frantic with pain in their head and others spitting blood…this plague was at its height in Kilkenny during Lent; for on the sixth day of March eight of the Friars Preachers died. There was hardly a house in which only one had died, but as a rule man and wife with their children and all the family went the common way of death.2

  The Irish chronicles give the plague only glancing mentions. Its effects on the society of Gaelic Ireland remain elusive; but it is clear that its impact was much greater on the crowded and urban world of Anglo–Ireland. It is estimated that the population of Dublin – approximately twenty-five thousand before the onset of the plague – shrank by more than half in its immediate aftermath, and had fallen to less than five thousand a century later.3

  Such records as have survived report the gloom of these years in the lordship. By the 1360s Ireland had become a charge on, rather than a net contributor to, the coffers of the English exchequer. A circle of decay set in, as agriculture diminished, government revenues fell away, and the reach and clout of the authorities declined. Dublin itself became increasingly detached from the life of the lordship in Munster and Leinster: it became difficult and dangerous to travel from the city to other parts of Ireland; and such urban centres as Limerick and Cork once more became the de facto self-governing city-states that they had been in Norse times.

  The situation for the colonists became increasingly straitened. In 1349, the citizens of Carlow are recorded as complaining that their lands were being attacked and plundered to within the shadow of the town walls, and the extinction of the settlement itself seemed likely; in 1388, the people of Cork expressed an identical grievance. It is tempting to see these as ploys designed to extract more money from a reluctant treasury – and, indeed, this was doubtless sometimes the case. But not always: by the 1390s, Carlow had truly been plundered and its people had for the most part fled; security had further deteriorated to such an extent that a strong military escort was needed to venture between one town and another; protection money was paid to the Irish chieftains by those colonists who could afford to do so.

  It was not, however, all a tale of woe. These same surviving records, for example, detail an export trade in rude health. Ireland may have been more isolated now than it had been for years, but it was by no means wholly adrift from the shipping lanes, and contact with other parts of Europe continued apace. Trade with England, Scotland and Flanders throve; ships called at Irish ports from as far away as the Baltic, the Mediterranean and Portugal, bringing wine, silks and other luxuries in return for Irish wool, timber, hides, fish and corn – ample evidence that parts of the Irish countryside were productive in spite of the prevailing political uncertainty. There are glimpses of an export trade in linen – that most Irish of products – to the markets of Bristol. Sometimes, indeed, there are even records of investment and new building in the southern and southeastern ports. And, although this export trade slackened gradually – most dramatically in the aftermath of the Black Death – it continued through the course of the fifteenth century, even as the economic and political strength of the lordship continued to wane.

  Significantly, one reason for this vitality lies in a measure of cooperation that, at certain times and in certain places, existed between the cultures of Ireland. As central control diminished, for example, it made sound economic sense for the trading ports (that handled the export trade) and the hinterlands (that controlled the supply of raw materials) to come together on occasion to assure the flow of trading goods to their mutual benefit. For all that violence and bloodshed were common features of Irish life, then, it was also true that the Irish and the English settlers would sometimes be obliged – increasingly – to communicate in non-confrontational ways. Collision could not be the norm always and everywhere: notions of cultur
al exclusiveness and purity could vanish rapidly amid the rough and tumble of everyday life; and for both sides, this slow process of acculturation manifested itself in the adoption of certain customs, forms of dress, food and drink, and language when it was prudent or profitable to do so.

  As a result, Irish appointees began to take up positions in the civic administrations of the coastal ports, often to the chagrin of the local grandees; and there were settlers in parts of the countryside who were scarcely distinguishable, in dress or language or manner, from the Irish alongside whom they lived. The great settler families, such as the earls of Ormond in Leinster and of Desmond in Munster and (most influential of them all) the FitzGeralds of Kildare, continued to identify strongly with England and to consider themselves English – legally, indeed, they could have held no place in the English hierarchy in Ireland had they not done so. Yet even these dynasties were, to a greater or lesser extent, partly gaelicized – they belonged to both cultures and to neither.

  The Statutes of Kilkenny, formulated by the Irish parliament sitting at Kilkenny in 1367, had been an early response to this blurring of the cultural lines in Ireland. The statutes had themselves been anticipated in previous legislation governing the relations between the Irish and colonists, but the laws enacted at Kilkenny were much more clearly directed, seeking to impose a solution to the problems of the colony in Ireland and stating baldly why stern measures were necessary:

  Many English of the land forsaking the English language, dress, style of riding, laws and usages, live and govern themselves according to the manners, dress and language of the Irish enemies and also had contracted marriages and alliances with them whereby the land and the liege people thereof, the English language, the allegiance due to our lord king, and English laws there are put in subjection and decayed….4

  The colonists had become ‘degenerate’ and the first aim of the statutes was to stamp out this sickness and renew the colony’s essential Englishness.

  A host of measures was proposed to this effect. Irish poets and musicians, for example, were forbidden from moving among the colonists, for fear they would spy out their secrets and ways; and the colonists themselves were to be subject to a whole raft of new legislative restrictions. The Irish language was singled out for attention: a colonist caught using Gaelic faced the penalty of being removed from the safeguard of the common law and treated as Irish – a serious penalty, in that the sentence for killing an Englishman was death, whereas the punishment for killing an Irishman was only a fine. This particular clause, in fact, had a broader cultural resonance: simultaneously, the English government was championing the use of English over French as part of its struggle against France in the Hundred Years’ War. But the statutes had much more than the Irish language in their sights:

  It is ordained and established that no alliance by marriage…fostering of children, concubinage or sexual liaison or in any other manner be made henceforward between English and Irish on one side or the other…Also, it is ordained and established that every Englishman use the English language, and be called by an English name abandoning completely the Irish method of naming and that every Englishman use English style in appearance, riding and dress, according to his position in society…. And that no Englishman worth one hundred shillings a year in land, holdings or rent shall ride otherwise than on a saddle in the English style….

  Some of the statutes seem trifling today: the playing of a game called horling – which appears in fact to have been a precursor to modern hockey, rather than to modern hurling – was forbidden, with colonists enjoined to practise archery or throwing the lance instead. Taken together, however, they demonstrate the degree of foreboding in the administration of the lordship at the time: if the colony were to survive, it was essential that such drastic measures be adopted.

  The statutes also betray the fear that the authorities felt for the colonial population itself – in particular for its elite, now governing its lands in its own interests and in its own way, regardless of the wishes of the Crown. The great irony here is that this population as a whole, regardless of the manner in which they lived their lives, continued to regard themselves as culturally English. The statutes were simplistic in the extreme and were handed down by administrators who seemed to have little true sense of the intricacies and subtleties of Irish society.

  The Statutes of Kilkenny resonate in Irish history, but they also have a place in the broader context of the evolution of greater state control and the slow rise of central government in England itself. While they are distinctively racial in their preoccupations and cultural anxieties, they can also be related to the Statute of Labourers that was passed in England in 1351 with the intention of curbing the social and economic mobility of those former landless serfs who had been newly empowered, following the Black Death, by the dearth of available labour. The Statute of Labourers sought to reimpose the power of the aristocracy over this class of peasants; like the Statutes of Kilkenny, it reflected an anxiety to maintain certain structures of power and authority in what was a rapidly changing world. Most striking of all, perhaps, is the understanding that both sets of laws were essentially unenforceable: legislators were gazing Canute-like at the advancing tide, powerless to act. In the case of the Statutes of Kilkenny, the evidence speaks for itself, for they would be enshrined, adopted – and duly ignored. As the fourteenth century ended and the fifteenth began, intermarriage continued; ecclesiastical offices came into the hands of Irish clerics because Englishmen could not be found to fill them; and Irish tenants moved on to the settlers’ manors in the absence of anyone else to till the land.

  Further attempts would be made to shore up the position of the colony. The expeditions of Richard II – the third and last English monarch to visit medieval Ireland – in 1394–5 and 1399 seemed to achieve their aims, in that a number of Irish chieftains submitted to the king; the colony may have seemed set fair now for a revival. But it was not so: Richard ‘gained but little; for the Irish, then feigning submission to his will, straight away after his departure were in revolt, as all men know’.5 Furthermore, Richard’s absence in Ireland resulted in the loss of his kingship (usurped by Henry Boling-broke) and subsequent death.

  Meanwhile, the borders of the Pale – that zone encompassing Dublin and its hinterland in which the Crown’s writ more or less ran – had shrunk by the middle of the fifteenth century to within a few miles of the city, and the authorities were obliged to fortify the roads running into Dublin from the west in order to protect it from attack. Stories were told of corn stolen from the fields of the Pale and of buildings attacked and looted by the Irish under cover of darkness. It was not until the very end of the fifteenth century, with the Tudor dynasty more or less established on the throne of England, that the administrations in Dublin and London would at last be in a position to address the situation in Ireland anew. Power would be centralized ruthlessly by the Tudors – and both the freewheeling English barons of Ireland and their Irish neighbours would meet one of history’s immovable forces.

  On 13 October 1494 an English delegation put in at the harbour of Howth, just north of Dublin, and made its way into the city. At its head was Sir Edward Poynings, the king’s new representative in Ireland.* Poynings’s spell in the country was brief – he would be gone again by 1496 – but what happened in these few years symbolized the renewed English determination to order events in the Irish colony. One of Poynings’s first acts was to sweep away the entrenched caste of administrators at Dublin Castle and replace it with English-born officials – representatives of an Old English culture were being supplanted by New English loyalists; it was a decision that set off a wave of unrest and violence in the countryside of the Pale. Very soon, however, Poynings felt secure enough to summon the Irish parliament to meet at Drogheda, on the northern edge of the Pale: the session opened at the beginning of December 1494.

  The parliament would sit at Drogheda for several months, and during this time it promulgated a series of thirty o
r so acts known today as Poynings’ Law. Of these, the best remembered is the ninth, which declared that the Irish parliament could no longer legislate independently: all laws would now have to be approved by the English monarch or his representative in Ireland; furthermore, the parliament itself could henceforth not even meet without the monarch’s consent. Other provisions – for example, regulating the hiring of certain servants (that is, Gaelic Irish servants) employed by Old English families within the Pale – were reminiscent of the Statutes of Kilkenny in their intentions; others – such as those banning the keeping of private firearms – spoke of a determination to end the private wars and legal and military free-for-all that had characterized life in the lordship. As a whole, there was a clear intentionality behind Poynings’ Law: these measures, designed to imprint themselves on the political life of the country, were drafted and pushed through by the will of a new regime that had just taken power in England.

  Henry VII, the first of the Tudor monarchs, had come to the throne in 1485. His first pressing task was to reconcile a state torn apart for three decades by the chaotic Wars of the Roses fought between the Houses of Lancaster and York, and thus to copper-fasten the dubious Tudor claim on the throne itself. Ireland had already played a significant part in one early threat to Henry’s power. In late 1486 or early 1487 one Lambert Simnel, a pretender to the throne, escaped from imprisonment in the Tower of London and made his way to Dublin. Here he was supported covertly by Gerald FitzGerald, the eighth Earl of Kildare and first Lord Deputy of Ireland – and thus the king’s official representative in the country – and crowned at Christ Church Cathedral on 24 May 1487. Simnel’s supporters in Ireland raised an army that was dispatched to England a few weeks later, only to be annihilated at Stoke Field in Lincolnshire on 16 June.*