There is little sense that Irish rulers in the decades after 1066 fully understood the implications of William’s victory. The Normans were ruthless, thorough and efficient conquerors. Their origins were in the Viking terrorisation of France that had forced the Frankish monarchy to cede them control of what came to be called Normandy. In England, they mixed extreme violence with cold calculation. During the so-called Harrying of the North in 1069–70, the Normans destroyed food stocks to create a murderous famine. Yet their operation was mostly a classic case of what historians call ‘elite transfer’: 5,000 families took ownership of English estates without disturbing the underlying economic structures. This elite was emphatically military: the heavily armoured Norman knight, virtually fused with his huge armoured horse into a terrifying machine, was a product of great wealth and highly specialised training.
It was inevitable that, having consolidated their rule in England and subdued Scotland and Wales, they would look to Ireland. Successive attempts to establish an effective unitary Irish kingdom had failed; the annalists had a stock formula for the chief ruler: ‘high king with opposition’. As early as 1155, at the Council of Winchester, the Anglo-Norman king Henry II discussed a possible invasion of Ireland. As it happened, internecine warfare allowed an opportunist lord, Richard de Clare, whom Henry had deprived of his title of earl of Pembroke, to beat the king to the punch.
In 1166, would-be high king Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair defeated and banished the Leinster overlord Diarmait Mac Murchada. Diarmait offered his allegiance to Henry II and received permission to recruit allies in Wales. In 1167 with the help of a small force of Flemings under Richard fitz Godebert, Diarmait reclaimed part of his kingdom. More Anglo-Norman adventurers arrived to support him, with Robert fitz Stephen, Hervey de Montmorency and Maurice de Prendergast helping him take Wexford. The most significant arrival was de Clare, known in Irish history by his nickname Strongbow. He captured Waterford in August 1170, married Diarmait’s daughter Aífe, went on to take Dublin and fought alongside Diarmait until the latter’s death, in 1171.
Strongbow summed up the qualities of the Anglo-Norman elite: energetic opportunism, military prowess and acquisitive efficiency. He died in Dublin in April 1176. The plain, almost blunt monument that stands over his grave in Christ Church is at best a symbolic representation of Strongbow. His original monument was, as an inscription recalls, ‘broken by the fall of the roof’ in 1562 and ‘set up again’. Strongbow’s most important monuments were to prove more enduring.
46. Laudabiliter papal bull, 1155
Laudabiliter satis et fructuose de glorioso nomine propagando in terres…tua magnificencia cogita: ‘Quite laudably and profitably, your majesty considers how to extend the glorious name on earth…’ Perhaps the most controversial object in Irish history is one that may not exist. Laudabiliter—t he name of a bull issued by Pope Adrian IV to the English king Henry II in 1155—granted Henry the right to claim lordship over Ireland. Or did it? In the bull, Adrian (the only English pope) praises Henry’s plan to ‘reveal the truth of the Christian faith to peoples still untaught and barbarous and to root out the weeds of vice from the Lord’s field’. He then permits Henry to enter Ireland in pursuit of these good causes and expresses the wish that ‘the people of that land may receive you honourably and respect you as their lord’. The earliest source for the text of Laudabiliter is that seen here, in the Expugnatio Hibernica of the Cambro-Norman propagandist Giraldus Cambrensis.
Giraldus, the first foreigner to write a book on Ireland, came to Ireland at least three times (1183, 1185 and 1188) to see relatives among the Anglo-Norman invaders. He wrote his text to justify Henry’s claims and to further his own career in the church. Henry did not refer to Laudabiliter when he landed near Waterford in 1171; it does not appear in the English or Vatican archives; it is not referred to in subsequent papal correspondence with Henry. Giraldus, moreover, was not averse to a spot of forgery: Expugnatio also contains a letter from Adrian’s successor as pope, Alexander III, that few believe to be genuine. It is almost certain that Adrian did write to Henry regarding Ireland, and Giraldus’s text may even be partly genuine. As Professor Anne Duggan has pointed out, however, it fails to follow the format of every known papal declaration of the period. She suggests that Giraldus altered the order of the pope’s paragraphs to make the bull read like a stronger endorsement of a putative conquest of Ireland than it actually was. Moreover, Giraldus omitted paragraphs that required Henry to seek the consent of Irish bishops and rulers for his overlordship.
Laudabiliter is a dodgy dossier. Henry’s invasion of Ireland was pre-emptive. His fear was that Strongbow would establish himself as king of Leinster (through his marriage to Diarmait Mac Murchada’s daughter Aífe) or even of Ireland. Henry’s show of force (thousands of troops arrived with him in Waterford in October 1171) was aimed as much at his own Anglo-Norman vassals as it was at the native Irish. Henry’s ships were loaded not just with arms but with sealing wax, the material needed for royal edicts, but also for authenticating charters by which he granted away entire Irish kingdoms. Irish kings and chieftains were quick to declare their loyalty. The submissions of Diarmait Mac Carthaigh of Desmond and Domhnall Mór Ua Briain of Thomond were followed, on Henry’s progress northwards, by those of the kings of north Leinster, Bréifne, Airgialla and Ulster. The relative ease with which these rulers became subject to a distant Anglo-Norman king sharply contrasts with their unwillingness to submit to one of their own.
47. Figure of a horseman, thirteenth century
It may not look much, but this damaged figure of a horse and rider, found in 1844 at Knockmannan Hill near Kinnitty, Co. Offaly, tells an important story. As a piece of freestanding sculpture of a nonreligious subject it is rare, but its significance lies in something that would have been immediately obvious to any thirteenth-century viewer; the horseman is Anglo-Norman. How do we know? He is using a humble object that made a big impact on European history: the stirrup.
Images of the Norman knight centre on the big-ticket items of military hardware: the armour, the kite-shaped shield, the lance, but what made the Norman cavalry charge so mighty a force was the humble stirrup, which anchored the rider to his horse and gave him the control necessary for disciplined concerted action. Irish cavalry, by contrast, were lightly armed and did not use stirrups. Nevertheless, these military advantages did not allow the Anglo-Normans to subdue Ireland easily. Henry II’s power was threatened by revolts in his Breton and Gascon territories, drawing some of his followers away from Ireland.
Conflict with Irish kings continued. In 1175, Henry signed the Treaty of Windsor, witnessed by the archbishop of Dublin, Lorcán Ua Tuathail, assigning Dublin and the south-east to the Anglo-Normans and the rest of Ireland to the control of the high king, Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair. The deal, however, broke down—neither Henry nor Ruaidrí was able to exert authority over his own side. Rapacious Anglo-Norman warlords continued to carve out new territory, with John de Courcy invading Ulster in 1177. Henry’s appointment of his ten-year-old son, John, as Lord of Ireland that same year did nothing to end the turbulence. When John finally came to his Irish domain in 1185, his stay was brief and ineffective. Irish history might, nonetheless, have been different had John managed to establish a separate Irish kingdom. Instead, he succeeded his brother Richard as king of England in 1199, and Ireland remained as a ‘lordship’.
Although fighting with Irish kings continued during John’s reign, the Anglo-Norman colony did consolidate itself, literally, by placing those most imposing new features on the Irish landscapes—castles. Castles were not unknown in Ireland: Toirrdelbach Ua Conchobair built three in Connacht in 1124, but the scale of the castles John had built at Lismore, Dublin, Limerick and elsewhere, or those built by Hugh de Lacy along the north-east coast, was new. They gave imposing physical form to more subtle changes, such as the introduction of the first national coinage and of English common law.
Armed adventurers were followed by farmers, traders
, clerics and administrators. These ‘Normans’ who came to Ireland did not necessarily have their roots in Normandy—many had English, Welsh, Flemish or Breton forebears. Indeed, the loss of Normandy itself to the English in 1204 spurred on the development of the colony in Ireland. During the thirteenth century, it created a system new to Ireland: that of villages, manors, parish churches and the most loved of Irish entities, the county.
48. Domhnach Airgid, c.1350
The Domhnach Airgid—or Silver Church—is a splendid exercise in mediaeval retro. It is not just an antique; it is a very deliberate display of self-conscious antiquity. One of the reasons the Anglo- Normans represented a far more potent threat to the established order in Ireland than the Vikings had ever done is that these newcomers were enormously interested in controlling the Irish church. The reform of a supposedly decadent Irish Christianity was a key ideological justification for the Anglo-Norman invasion. This also justified the supplanting of native by foreign abbots and bishops.
Long before the coming of the Anglo-Normans, however, the Irish church was in touch with the reforming movements of European Christianity. The reorganisation of the Irish church into territorial dioceses on the continental model was likewise undertaken before the Anglo-Norman invasion. The great continental monastic orders were already established in Ireland, notably at the Cistercian abbey of Mellifont, which had been founded in 1142 by monks from Clairvaux.
The newcomers nevertheless had a huge impact on the church in Ireland. They brought—in tandem with their establishment of lordly manors—the system of parishes that has had such a profound impact on the Irish sense of belonging. They encouraged the rapid expansion of the Cistercians, Benedictines and Augustinians, as well as the introduction of new orders such as the Templars and Hospitallers. This influx created a direct challenge to the authority of native bishops, not least when, in 1217, it was decreed that, as ‘the peace of Ireland has been frequently disturbed by elections of Irishmen’ as bishops, none should be consecrated in future—a move denounced by the pope as an ‘unheard of audacity’.
Part of the fightback by the native clerical aristocracy can be seen in a rash of elaborate refurbishments of ancient sacred objects associated, especially, with the founder of the Irish church, St Patrick. The Domhnach Airgid was made to enclose a miscellany of relics. Traditionally, the shrine was claimed to be that given by St Patrick himself to his companion St Macartan, making it an object of great veneration.
Around 1350, the abbot of Clones, Co. Monaghan, John O Carbry, commissioned a substantial remodelling of the Domhnach Airgid. This remodelling brings the ancient relic up to date, in the international gothic style. It fuses contemporary feudal ideals with an insistence on the validity of indigenous traditions: native saints (Macartan, Patrick, Brigid, Columba) take their place alongside some late-mediaeval newcomers (Catherine of Alexandria, James the Great and John the Baptist in tandem with Salome). Already, an object from the distant Irish past is being used to make a contemporary political point.
49. Waterford charter roll, 1215-1373
In the 100 years after the Anglo-Norman invasion, more new towns were established in Ireland than at any other period before or since. The existing Hiberno-Norse cities of Cork, Wexford and Limerick were rejuvenated, while Henry II declared Waterford and Dublin royal ports. The towns became centres of an increasingly efficient governing bureaucracy of mayors, judges and tax collectors.
Waterford, where both Strongbow and Henry had landed, initially enjoyed the biggest boost, becoming the main link between Ireland and the royal house of Anjou’s rich possessions in France. In the early-thirteenth century, however, this pre-eminence was threatened by the rise of William Marshall, husband of Strongbow’s daughter. Marshall, who developed his own port at New Ross, became immensely powerful, effectively ruling England as regent for three years after the death of King John in 1216. With the accession of Henry III, Waterford again pressed its claims to a monopoly on shipping. The result was a compromise: all ships, except those connected to Marshall’s English or Irish possessions, would have to land at Waterford.
The compromise was unenforceable, and there were several pitched battles as Waterford tried to prevent ships landing at New Ross. Eventually, with the general decline in trade in the fourteenth century, Waterford’s authorities took their claim for a renewed monopoly to King Edward III in 1373. They created a four-metre-long charter roll, containing documents or transcripts relating to the city going back to 1215. The charter roll also has seventeen remarkable illustrations. Among them are portraits of five kings of England, including the earliest contemporary portrait of a mediaeval English monarch, Edward III (shown opposite); the earliest portraits of a judge in either Britain or Ireland; of justiciars (governors of Ireland); of the mayors of Dublin, Waterford, Cork and Limerick; and the earliest view of an Irish city, Waterford itself.
Eamonn McEneaney of Waterford Museum of Treasures calls the charter roll ‘the mediaeval equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation’, designed to ‘flatter the king, add weight to the legal arguments and keep those listening to the mayor’s presentation focused on the facts being elaborated’. The roll is a brilliant early example of targeted advertising. It worked: the king restored Waterford’s shipping monopoly.
The bitterness of the fight over commercial privileges between Waterford and New Ross shows that, even in the crisis-ridden fourteenth century, there was much to fight over. The variety of trade pursued in Anglo-Norman Ireland can be judged from the range of goods on which tolls were levied in the towns: wine, salt, foodstuffs, horses, cattle, hides, wool, cloth, iron, lead, tin, dyes, timber, millstones, nails, wax and so on. Town life was abuzz with small industry. The Great Parchment Book of Waterford (1361–1649) lists goldsmiths, tailors, shoemakers, weavers, mercers, cordwainers, tanners, saddlers, smiths, carpenters, masons, fishermen, vintners, butchers, bakers and millers. Most, to judge from their surnames, came from south west England. Their descendants became a permanent part of Irish life.
50. Two coins, 1280s and 1460
The significance of these coins is not the objects themselves, a penny from the 1280s (top) and a groat from 1460, but the gap of almost 200 years between them. Coins are tokens of the health of the colonial Anglo-Norman economy in Ireland. That the colony produced virtually no new coins for such an extensive period is striking evidence of the series of disasters that overtook it during the fourteenth century.
‘When sorrows come’, says Hamlet, ‘they come not single spies, but in battalions’. Four big battalions of sorrows beset Anglo-Norman Ireland: the invasion of Edward Bruce from Scotland, the Great European famine, the Black Death and the Hundred Years War. The long and bloody wars of the fourteenth century, as the English monarchy struggled to assert control over France, took a heavy toll on the Irish colony, used as a source of men, provisions and money for the English war machine.
In 1315 the Scottish king (of largely Anglo-Norman stock) Robert Bruce was at war with England; he sent his brother Edward to Ireland to open a second front. Bruce was proclaimed King of Ireland by his Irish supporters on his arrival in 1315. His attack on Dublin was repulsed, however, and he was killed in 1318. His intervention was disastrously destructive: the Irish annals described him as ‘the destroyer of Ireland in general’. Irish forces took advantage of the Bruce invasion to plunder Anglo-Norman towns, with the O’Tooles and O’Byrnes attacking the coastal towns of Wicklow, the O’Mores raiding Laois and the O’Hanlons besieging Dundalk.
Concentrated as it was in crowded and unhygienic towns, the Anglo-Norman population was much more susceptible than the rural native populace to the ravages of epidemic disease. The Black Death, the combination of bubonic and pneumonic plague that decimated Europe, was preceded in Ireland by severe outbreaks of smallpox and influenza in 1327 and 1328. The plague arrived in 1348 and raged for three years. The Kilkenny friar John Clyn wrote of himself ‘as if among the dead, waiting till death do come’. It has been estimated that t
he Black Death killed between one-quarter and one-third of the population, with disproportionate mortality again in the towns. Some medieval towns, such as Fore, in Co. Westmeath, and New Town Leys, in Co. Laois, disappeared altogether.
It has been estimated that Ireland’s population had risen to over one million by 1300. By the fifteenth century it may have fallen to as few as 500,000. This decline affected the indigenous population as well as the colonisers, but the balance between them also shifted. The extent of Anglo-Norman control shrank, remaining strong in the areas around Dublin and east Leinster but becoming intermittent elsewhere. The revenue of the Irish exchequer declined and English monarchs were forced to contemplate new invasions to re-establish what had once seemed a secure lordship.
51. Processional cross, 1479
What is most interesting about this cross is that it was given to the Franciscan friary at Lislaghtin, Co. Kerry, by Cornelius Ó Conchobhair and his wife, Avelina (Eileen), daughter of the Knight of Kerry. It marks a new prominence of high-status women in fifteenth-century Ireland. The cross, the finest of its kind from mediaeval Ireland, is of gilt silver. The elongated figure of the crucified Christ was surrounded by the symbols of the four evangelists; that for St Matthew, at the foot of the cross, is now missing. Figures of Franciscan friars decorate the base.
It is in late-mediaeval Ireland that high-status women begin to appear as patrons of monasteries and abbeys. The shrines of the Book of Moling and the Stowe Missal record the names of female as well as male patrons. The 1451 obituary of Margaret O’Carroll, daughter of Tadc O’Carroll, lord of part of what is now Tipperary, describes her death as a loss to ‘all the Learned in Ireland’, including ‘both philosophers and poets’. It also has her ‘preparing high-ways and erecting bridges, churches and Mass books’, suggesting that she could deploy considerable financial and organisational resources. Margaret also took part in a large-scale Irish pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain.
A History of Ireland in 100 Objects Page 9