Gaelic and Gaelicised Ireland E-Book

Kenneth Nicholls

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

When the first edition of this book appeared in 1972 it was acclaimed as a revolutionary breakthrough in the study of late medieval Ireland and of the autonomous lordships into which it was divided. Since then it has repeatedly and extensively cited as an authority, but has long been out of print. This edition of a pioneering and brilliant survey work is comprehensively revised and enlarged in the light of additional research by the author, and other scholars, carried out in the intervening period. New information on late Irish law and the lordships has been added, and the glossary and bibliography extended. Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland is an indispensable adjunct to all students and readers in medieval Irish and European history.

Leseprobe

GAELIC and GAELICIZED IRELAND in the MIDDLE AGES

K.W. Nicholls

Lilliput Press Dublin

Contents

Title Page

Preface to Second Edition

Preface to First Edition

PART I: Society and Institutions

1. INTRODUCTION: THE BACKGROUND OF LATE MEDIEVAL IRELAND

The Land

Ireland a lineage society

The expanding clans

The Anglo-Norman settlements and their decline

The Gaelic reconquest

2. POLITICAL STRUCTURES AND THE FORMS OF POWER

The Irish lordship

Tanistry and inauguration

Public assemblies

The Revenues and exactions of the lords

The right of the lords regarding land

Monopolies and pre-emption

Lords’ officers

‘Buyings’ and sláinte

3. THE LEGAL SYSTEM

The Irish legal system

The judges

Brehon law and English law

Legal procedures

Compensation and the principle of joint responsibility

The law of land: ‘Irish gavelkind’

Forms of partition

Customs approaching ‘gavelkind’

The pledge of land

4. SOCIAL LIFE AND SOCIAL GROUPINGS

The people

Nomenclature

Marriage and sexual life

Affiliation: the ‘naming’ of children

Fosterage

The professional learned classes

The poets

Military groupings

The galloglass

5. THE CHURCH AND CLERGY IN SOCIETY

The Irish Church

The clergy

Clerical life

Papal provisions

The monastic orders

Coarbs and erenaghs

6. ECONOMIC LIFE

Agriculture and pastoralism

The townland system

Patterns of settlement

Craftsmen and local industries

Foreign trade and the coastal towns

PART II: Historical Section

7. ULSTER

The O Neills of Tyrone

‘Little Ulster’ and Clandeboy

Tirconnell

Fermanagh and Oriel

8. CONNACHT

The O Connors down to the Bruce invasion

The rise of the Mac Williamships and the wars of faction

The later period

Brefny

The O Farrells of Annaly

9. MUNSTER

The O Briens of Thomond

The Mac Carthys of Desmond

The earls of Desmond and the Anglo-Norman lords of Munster

The Powers

The Butler territories

10. LEINSTER AND MEATH

The Mac Murroughs, kings of Leinster

The O Byrnes and O Tooles

Leix and Offaly

The Westmeath lordships

Further Reading

Maps

Glossary

Index

Copyright

Preface to Second Edition

It is perhaps a measure of the then neglect of research into the autonomous regions of Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland in the later medieval period – which for Ireland can be taken as extending down to the completion of the English conquest in 1603 – that the first edition of this book, when it appeared in 1972, should have attracted such attention and that it has continued to exercise a great deal of influence, to judge by its frequent citation, in writings on the period. This was in spite of its being, as I admitted in the Preface to that first edition, no more than an ‘interim report’ on my continuing research, of its being without references, in places badly expressed, and in others severely abridged by considerations of space imposed by the publisher. A new edition has been long overdue.

In spite of these weaknesses, and since I have seen no reason to change substantially any of the major conclusions, or indeed opinions, expressed in it, I have made as few changes as possible for the present edition. An exception is Chapter 6, of which the greater part has been completely rewritten and expanded. I have also greatly expanded a number of other sections, notably those on law and institutions, to make precise in the light of subsequent research what had been vague or doubtful, or, in two cases, to restore material dropped from the first edition for considerations of space. Excisions have been minimal. Those comparing the two editions will also notice some slight – and perhaps some not so slight! – changes of emphasis.

K.W.Nicholls,May2003

Preface to First Edition

This book consists of two distinct parts. The first section is devoted to a general account of the society and institutions of Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland during the later middle ages, so far as the available evidence permits us to reconstruct them. The available materials on the economic condition of the country are unfortunately so scanty that no adequate picture can be drawn and I have designedly left aside literature and art, partly from consideration of space but principally because these aspects, unlike the political and legal structure, have been already the subject of a considerable degree of published work. Some other sections, especially on the Church, have been regretfully omitted due to exigencies of space: I hope to publish some material on them elsewhere. The second portion of the work consists of a brief history of those regions of Ireland outside the control of the English administration during the same period.

Both sections of this work, with the exception of a few short paragraphs on specialised matters, are based almost entirely on original research, largely among unprinted sources, a fact which creates a number of problems for a work of a popular nature without footnotes or critical apparatus.

If one might coin an epigram, Gaelic Ireland in its later period has been as unfortunate in its historiography as it was in its history. Not only has there been a destruction of source material perhaps unparalleled in western Europe, when one adds to the destruction of the Irish Public Records in 1922 the destruction of private archives which has continued unabated down to the present day, but the subject itself, the history and institutions of Gaelic Ireland during its latest period, has been left almost entirely untouched by those who have concerned themselves with the history of Ireland. A few schematic generalisations, grounded not in research on the sources but on deductions from the conditions of an earlier age, have too often been the substitute for a detailed investigation of the actual society itself. That neither the society and institutions of late medieval Ireland nor the individual history of the various regions has up to now been the subject of a work of scholarly value might seem surprising to anyone unacquainted with the limitations of Irish historiography, especially when he notes that what seemed to have been a promising beginning had been made in the early and mid-nineteenth century. The explanation must be sought in a number of causes, not all of them in the world of learning, but certainly a most important factor in this neglect was the dichotomy which developed – and still exists – in Ireland between the fields of historical and Celtic studies.

The present work could therefore be described in the words used – with infinitely less justification than in the present instance – by Professor Otway-Ruthven to describe her HistoryofMedievalIreland, as an ‘interim report’ on my work on Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland, its society and institutions. The popular work has in this case come before the learned monograph; for the defects which must necessarily arise from this inversion of the normal order, as well as for the imbalance which considerations of space have imposed in certain parts, I beg the reader’s forbearance.

I must express my gratitude to Dr Gearóid Mac Niocaill, who drew my attention to some slips in my original draft of chapters 2 and 3.

The Crown copyright material quoted in this work appears by permission of the controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

K.W.Nicholls,July1971

PART I

Society and Institutions

1. Introduction: The Background of late Medieval Ireland

Ireland has suffered in its historiography through its geographical position. At the western extremity of Europe, Ireland – so far as the native Gaelic world was concerned – was yet outside the typical European social milieu, and its analogies must in many ways be sought outside western Europe. To take a glaring example, Christianity in medieval Ireland never seems to have really expanded outside the purely religious sphere of life. In this respect Ireland may be compared – the comparison does not originate with me – with another land at the extremity of Christendom, Ethiopia (Abyssinia). There, likewise, Christianity seems not to have succeeded in imposing its impress on the whole social system, as it did in both Latin and Orthodox Christendom. In Ireland and in Ethiopia alike, to take a notorious example, marriage and divorce (in practice if not in theory) tended to be determined by secular rules quite different from the teachings of the Church on these matters. Again, the principle of lineage or clan expansion, vital to an understanding of medieval Ireland, has no parallel elsewhere in Europe, outside the other Celtic lands of Wales and Scotland, although identical phenomena can be seen in many parts of Asia and Africa where, as in Ireland, a lineage system prevailed.

It has been customary to depict medieval Ireland as sharply divided into two worlds, the test of division being whether the ruling family in a particular area was of pure Gaelic or of Anglo-Norman origin. In fact it was not so. If we leave aside the Pale, where conditions might be said to have approximated to those of the northern border counties of England, although becoming increasingly penetrated by Gaelic influences in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the cultural picture of later medieval Ireland was very much the same, varying only in degree. If the Gaelic lordships of Ulster, remote from foreign influence, had retained the greatest degree of resemblance to conditions before the invasion of 1169, those of Munster were very different. If in the Anglo-Norman areas of Munster law and custom were a mixture of Irish and English forms and the rule of primogeniture was still generally, if not invariably, observed, the lordships of Anglo-Norman descent in Connacht and Westmeath would to an outside observer have appeared indistinguishable from their purely Gaelic neighbours, with whom they practised succession by tanistry and inheritance of land by ‘Irish gavelkind’. The notion that late medieval Ireland was sharply divided on the basis of the national origin of the ruling lineages is one which cannot survive an investigation of the actual facts.

It must be borne in mind that the Ireland of the later middle ages was far from being a static society. While the basic framework of customs and institutions remained the same, the actual personnel of society was constantly changing as the clans multiplied or diminished, rose or fell in political – and therefore social – status. As the stronger lineages increased and the weaker died away or sank into the landless poor, the pattern in any particular area changed accordingly. In addition, throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the marcher areas saw a gradual replacement of surviving English institutions by Gaelic ones, a trend that did not begin to be reversed until after 1534, while the sixteenth century was to see what appears to have been a general increase in violence everywhere, leading to a decline in material conditions and economic life.

THE LAND

Gerald of Wales describes Ireland, at the close of the twelfth century, as a land full of woods, bogs and lakes, and for most of the country, and especially the midland plain and the north, the description would still have been true in the sixteenth century. In the areas where Anglo-Norman colonization had been dense, however, the clearance for cultivation of the level and good ground, already advanced by 1169, had continued through the thirteenth century, and by the sixteenth century the counties of the Pale were almost treeless, while clearing had also taken place on a small scale throughout the period in the Gaelic areas; Paul MacMurry, canon of Saints’ Island in Lough Ree, who died in 1394, is recorded in his obit as the man who cleared Doire na gCailleach (Derry-nagallagh, County Longford) and Doire Meinci (two woods, as the first element in their name, doire, shows) for his priory. Of more importance than deliberate clearance, however, once the first great period of settlement was over, must have been the prevention of natural regeneration by heavy grazing. English writers of the sixteenth century note the absence in most parts of Ireland of good high timber suitable for ship-building; the Desmond Survey of 1586 records that the woods of north Kerry consisted of ‘underwood of the age of fifty or sixty years, filled with doted [i.e. decayed] trees, ash-trees, hazels, sallows, willows, alders, birches, whitethorns and such like’. But in many areas, such as the counties of Wicklow and Wexford – where in the sixteenth century there existed an important export trade in ship-building timber as well as in the pipe-staves which were to be so important an article of Irish commerce in the first part of the seventeenth century – there were still large stands of good oak timber. Woods of Scots pine (‘fir’) were also to be found in many mountainous areas, such as Glenconkeen in County Londonderry, in spite of the assertions of some modern writers to the contrary, and an English writer of 1600 notices the yew woods along the rivers of County Cork. The great destruction of the Irish woods dates from the seventeenth century; Boate, writing in 1654, records that many areas well wooded in 1600 had been already completely cleared by his time, and the Strafford Survey map of the barony of Athlone in County Roscommon, where in 1570 the mapmaker, Robert Lythe, had recorded the presence of extensive forests of ‘great oaks and much small woods as crabtree, thorn, hazel, with such like’, shows that by 1637 the woods in this area, although still extensive by later standards, were confined to the rocky and broken ground unsuitable for agriculture and to the islands in the bogs.

In general it could be said that fifteenth and sixteenth-century Ireland was extensively wooded in all mountainous areas, even those of the western seaboard – and on the margins and islands of the bogs of the central plain. Notable in this respect were the woods which occupied the strips of dry ground lying along the rivers of the bog country, such as the Barrow and the Suck. An extensive area of woodland, already referred to, was that which covered northern Wexford and the adjacent parts of Wicklow and Carlow. The woods provided a habitat for the goshawks for which Ireland was renowned in the sixteenth century and for the capercaillies or ‘cocks of the woods’ which were regarded as peculiarly Irish birds – with the clearing of the woods in the next century both the goshawk and the capercaillie were to disappear as Irish birds – and both woods and mountains contained large numbers of red deer, as well as the wolves which did not finally disappear until late in the eighteenth century and which made it necessary for the livestock to be brought at night into bawns or enclosures, or into the dwelling-houses themselves. The wild pigs which were common in Gerald’s time still existed in the sixteenth century, but little research has been done on the Irish fauna and flora before the transformation of the landscape.

The absence of hedges and fences in the Irish countryside is remarked upon by such writers as Spenser, and in most regions enclosed fields seem to have been almost unknown. They existed, however, in parts of such old and densely settled regions as County Kilkenny, while in the areas where stone was abundant the stones cleared from the ground to facilitate cultivation must have been piled into dividing walls, as they had been since Neolithic times and still are today. Nevertheless, the normal Irish practice was to enclose the ploughed and sown areas with temporary fences made out of posts and wattle, and then to use the materials of these temporary fences for fuel during the winter months. The supply of materials for these temporary fences must itself have been a heavy drain upon the woodlands. Permanent banks or ditches were, however, usual as boundaries between adjacent townlands, while gardens and orchards, where these existed, would of course have been surrounded by earthen banks and hedges. A feature which must be be noted in the lowlands was the number of lakes, remarked on by Gerald. Many of these which are known from sixteenth and seventeenth-century maps and records have since been drained, or more often converted into bogs by natural processes. On the subject of roads and tracks information seems almost non-existent. An interesting reference of 1475 mentions the highway leading from Barry Og’s country into that of Mac Carthy Reogh as having been blocked by ‘walls and ramparts and great ditches’ on account of the war between these two areas. Stone bridges were fairly common in the former colonial areas and are occasionally heard of elsewhere.

IRELAND A LINEAGE SOCIETY

Medieval Ireland was, of course, a society of clans or lineages – referred to as ‘nations’ in contemporary English terminology – and the most outstanding feature in the Gaelicization of the Anglo-Norman settlers was the speed with which, within the first century following the invasion, the concept of the clan had become established among them. Irish scholars have shown a curious dislike of the word ‘clan’, itself an Irish word (clann, lit. ‘children’, ‘offspring’) borrowed through Scotland, but as the term is in normal use by social anthropologists to denote the kind of corporate descent-group of which I am speaking, I have no hesitation in employing it. The study, however, of clan- or lineage-based societies – which, whether in Medieval Ireland, in Asia or Africa, constitute a particular form of organisation with distinctive features in common – is comparatively recent. In the sense in which I am using it here, a clan may be defined as a unilineal (in the Irish case, patrilineal) descent group forming a definite corporate entity with political and legal functions. This latter part of the definition is an important one, for the functions of the clan in a clan-organised society lie entirely in the ‘politico-jural’ and not in the ‘socio-familial’ sphere; that is to say, they are concerned with the political and legal aspects of life and not with those of the family. The earlier Irish term for such a unit was fine, which by late medieval times had been replaced in Ireland (although it survived in Gaelic Scotland) by the term sliocht (literally, ‘division’) translated into Renaissance Romance-English as ‘sept’. Normally a clan would occupy and possess particular lands or territory, its occupation or ownership of the land being one of its most important corporate functions. (This does not, it need hardly be said, imply that the territory was held in common among the members of the clan or that outsiders would not be present within the clan territory. The objection of some Irish scholars to the concept of the clan may owe its origin to a reaction against absurdities of this kind.) As the clan is a corporate entity with functions only in particular spheres and aspects of life it is, of course, absurd to conceive of a clan-based society as being divided into clans as if into compartments; the clan, like a modern company, can be a very variable thing. A clan may be represented by a single individual only, the only member remaining of his descent-group, which nevertheless continues to exist so long as any member of it survives. The small descent-groups within a larger clan may each constitute entities or clans, while remaining part of the larger one, and may again be similarly subdivided themselves.

In the case of Ireland, the greater part of the humbler classes certainly did not belong to any recognized clans or descent-groups other than their immediate family groups (father and sons, or a group of brothers). In the case of persons like these, devoid of political influence or property, the clan would have had no functions which could serve to hold it together. Conall Mageoghegan, writing in 1627, refers contemptuously to persons of this sort as ‘mere churls and labouring men, [not] one of whom knows his own greatgrandfather’. The phrase is significant; in a lineage-based society the keeping of genealogies is of primary importance. Not only is membership of the clan conferred by descent, but the precise details of this descent may determine a person’s legal rights in, for instance, the property of the clan. In Ireland the keeping of genealogies was entrusted to the professional families of scribes and chroniclers. In 1635 we find a genealogy of the Butlers of Shanballyduff in County Tipperary prepared by Hugh Óg Magrath ‘out of the new and old books of his ancestors written in the Irish language’, and in 1662 Arthur O Neill, about to be admitted as a knight of the Order of Calatrava in Spain and asked for his pedigree, referred the Order to ‘the chronicler Don Tulio Conrreo’, otherwise Tuileagna O Mulconry, who duly produced the required pedigree back to Donnell of Armagh, King of Ireland in 976.

As the clan was a unit only in a legal and political sense, one must not, of course, expect it to show the sort of internal solidarity one expects of the family. Indeed, causes of tension and conflict might be expected to be highest within the lineage group, where rights over the clan property would be a constant ground for dispute. When we read in an early seventeenth-century law suit, with reference to two Purcell brothers who held in common a minute property in County Tipperary, that ‘the said Patrick was killed by the said Geoffrey for some difference betwixt them about the said land’, we see what must have been a common outcome of fraternal tension. Where the succession to a great lordship was at stake, violence of this kind would be even more likely and cousins, whose interests would normally be in direct opposition, would be almost automatic enemies. The clan might close its ranks against an outsider and collectively seek vengeance against the slayer of one of its members, but within itself it might equally exist in a permanent state of hostility and division. Such hostility, if continued over generations, would inevitably lead to its division into separate fragments, each of which would function as a separate clan, and the more numerous the clan, the sooner was this likely to happen.

THE EXPANDING CLANS

One of the most important phenomena in a clan-based society is that of expansion from the top downwards. The seventeenth-century Irish scholar and genealogist Dualtagh Mac Firbisigh remarked that ‘as the sons and families of the rulers multiplied, so their subjects and followers were squeezed out and withered away’ and this phenomenon, the expansion of the ruling or dominant stocks at the expense of the remainder, is a normal feature in societies of this type. It has been observed of the modern Basotho of South Africa that ‘there is a constant displacement of commoners by royals [i.e. members of the royal clan] and of collateral royals by the direct descendants of the ruling prince’, and this could have been said, without adaptation, of any important Gaelic or Gaelicized lordship of late medieval Ireland. In Fermanagh, for example, the kingship of the Maguires began only with the accession of Donn Mór in 1282 and the ramification of the family – with the exception of one or two small and territorially unimportant septs – began with the sons of the same man. The spread of his descendants can be seen in the gene-alogical tract called GeinealaigheFhearmanach; by 1607 they must have been in possession of at least three-quarters of the total soil of Fermanagh, having displaced or reduced the clans which had previously held it. The rate at which an Irish clan could multiply itself must not be underestimated. Turlough anfhíona O Donnell, lord of Tirconnell (d. 1423) had eighteen sons (by ten different women) and fifty-nine grandsons in the male line. Mulmora O Reilly, the lord of East Brefny, who died in 1566, had at least fifty-eight O Reilly grandsons. Philip Maguire, lord of Fermanagh (d. 1395), had twenty sons by eight mothers, and we know of at least fifty grandsons. Oliver Burke of Tirawley (two of whose sons became Lower Mac William although he himself had never held that position) left at least thirty-eight grandsons in the male line. Irish law drew no distinction in matters of inheritance between the legitimate and the illegitimate and permitted the affiliation of children by their mother’s declaration (see Chapter 4), and the general sexual permissiveness of medieval Irish society must have allowed a rate of multiplication approaching that which is permitted by the polygyny practised in, for instance, the clan societiesof southern Africa already cited.

Within a century of the invasion of 1169, the concept of the lineage or clan seems to have been already established among the descendants of the original settlers. It is perhaps significant, however, that it first appears in those whose founders had come in the original immigration from south Wales, and it is possible that the infusion of Welsh blood and ideas had prepared the way for the acceptance of the Irish system. Before the end of the thirteenth century we find a great magnate like Richard de Burgo, earl of Ulster, engaging himself as surety for ‘the felons of his name’. In 1310 the concept received formal recognition in an Irish statute which decreed that the chief of every ‘great lineage’ should be responsible for its members, a principle which was already in force in Hiberno-English law as regards the native Gaelic clans, but which was now formally extended to those of Anglo-Norman origin. By this date many of these foreign clans had multiplied themselves in the usual Irish fashion; in 1317 a general pardon granted to various persons in County Cork included sixty-three members of the family of de Caunteton (afterwards Condon) and no less than a hundred and eleven of that of Roche. Both these families, it is interesting to note, were of Pembrokeshire origin and belonged to the original Cambro-Norman connection. The Roches were also a numerous clan at this date in other counties, such as Wexford, Kilkenny and Limerick.

THE ANGLO-NORMAN SETTLEMENTS AND THEIR DECLINE

It would be difficult to assign an optimum date, in purely territorial terms, to the Anglo-Norman settlement in Ireland, but perhaps the last decade of the thirteenth century could be taken as such. By this date, however, the frontier in what is now County Longford was being pushed rapidly back by a succession of able chiefs of the O Farrells, while a considerable area in west Cork and south Kerry which had been effectively occupied in the first half of the century had been lost ever since the battle of Callan (1262). On the other hand the last quarter of the century saw the occupation of eastern Thomond by the de Clares and the expansion of the de Burgo earldom of Ulster along the coast of County Derry and into Inishowen. Throughout the height of the conquest a vast area of Ulster west of the Bann, in Brefny (Counties Cavan and Leitrim) and in northern Roscommon remained in uninterrupted Irish possession, although in the first half of the century some tentative occupation, accompanied by land-grants in the area, had been made on its frontiers and such great Anglo-Norman lords as the de Verdons of Meath and the de Burgo earls of Ulster drew more or less substantial tributes from their Irish neighbours over whose lands they claimed rights, as did the Crown from the royal O Connors of Connacht in the small area left to them. This great independent area was referred to in contemporary records as ‘the Great Irishry’ – magnaIrecheria. Elsewhere in Ireland, except for western Thomond, some parts of the west Connacht seaboard and – after the battle of Callan in 1262 – the extreme south-west, the free Irish remained as an independent force only in a few pockets of wooded mountain or bogland, the most extensive being centred on the mountains of Slieve Bloom and embracing the great wooded and boggy area to their north.

Over the greater part of the south and east of Ireland, and in much of Ulster east of the Bann, the colonization had taken place in depth and a solid structure of village communities had been established. These usually had either a manorial or some sort of borough organisation – the number of these ‘rural boroughs’ was very great in the south – and were peopled either by a peasantry of English descent or by Irish – usually unfree betaghs – who had been effectively absorbed into the feudal and manorial system. There were a few cases of Gaelic Irish retaining their social position as feudal landowners. A rather different case is that of the O Neills of County Tipperary, an important pre-conquest clan who managed to retain a small territory near Carrick-on-Suir, in an area otherwise completely taken over by settlers. They were, however, an exceptional instance. In most cases native Irish landowners disappeared completely from the well-settled areas of good land, and only remained in the wooded and mountainous regions which had been imperfectly subdued. Here their position would appear to have varied. The 1305 survey of Ely O Carroll, for instance, does not mention a single O Carroll and the only Gaelic free tenants who occur in it were a group of fourteen of the O Banan family, who held two carucates (say 500 acres) between them, but within forty years the entire territory had been recovered by the O Carrolls, who must consequently have been still present in the neighbourhood at least, presumably as sub-tenants to Anglo-Norman free tenants. By contrast, the survey of Imaal (which is of about the same date as that of Ely) shows a number of O Tooles as free tenants, and not long after we find the O Mores of Leix as the recognized tenants of a considerable part of that territory under its Mortimer lords. In general, however, the Irish must have occupied the position of tenants-at-will, probably largely as pastoralists, and only rarely obtained from the new lords the charters of enfeoffment which would give them a legal title to the land.

In Connacht the settlement, which did not really get under way until after 1235, was of a rather different character. Although almost the entire area of the de Burgo lordship, and the southern half of the ‘five cantreds’ reserved to the king, had been granted out in fiefs and landholdings, there seems to have been no settlement in depth outside the commercial boroughs and their immediate neighbourhood – ‘rural boroughs’ of the kind so common in the south of Ireland would appear to have been absent – and the humbler type of agricultural settler seems not to have established himself. It is probable that almost everywhere in Connacht the native Irish remained as actual occupiers of the land under the new lords.

When we come to deal with the question of the ‘Gaelicization of the Normans’ we must not forget that this expression is a misleading one. A large proportion of the members of the Anglo-Norman lineages which came into existence in the century and a half which followed the invasion were the sons of native Irish mothers. Although its extent has been underestimated by modern writers, intermarriage between the two races was common from the beginning. Thomas fitz Maurice, son of the conquistador Maurice fitz Gerald and ancestor of the house of Desmond, married an Irishwoman called Sadhbh, while his kinsman Richard de Carew (d. 1201), who inherited Robert fitz Stephen’s half of the ‘kingdom of Cork’, married Raghnailt, daughter of Mac Carthy. At a later date the wife of Richard de Bermingham, baron of Athenry and victor over the Irish in a famous battle there in 1316, was a Gaelic Irishwoman, as her name, Finola, shows. De Bermingham’s co-victor in the same battle, Sir William Liath de Burgo, was the son of an O Connor lady. But besides intermarriage the upper strata of the settlers must have had a large number of children by Irish mothers outside marriage, and it is interesting to note that it seems never to have been questioned that the children of such unions were entitled to the privileges of English status at law. According to a later tradition which, however, is hardly likely to be entirely without foundation, the four houses of the White Knights, the Knights of Glin and Kerry, and the Fitz Geralds of Ardnagragh in County Kerry described from the four sons of John fitz Thomas – son of the Thomas fitz Maurice and Sadhbh mentioned above – by the wives of four Irish chiefs under his authority. The children of such unions, although members by birth of a great Norman lineage and privileged as such, would have been brought up by their mothers in a purely Gaelic milieu. To such a background belonged a man like Sir William Liath de Burgo mentioned above. Such a man would have been equally at home in both worlds, and it is easy to see how his descendants, given the political circumstances of their time, would pass over entirely into the Gaelic one. To speak of the ‘Gaelicization of the Normans’ as if it were an external process, without taking into account the fact that many – perhaps most – of the people in question belonged by birth as much to one race as to the other, is to place the process of assimilation in a false perspective.

THE GAELIC RECONQUEST

In the areas to which it extended, the Gaelic reconquest of the fourteenth century swept away entirely the manorial system and its village settlements. A borough like Roscommon might temporarily hold out against the tide and manage to survive for some thirty years after the disappearance of English rule in the surrounding area, but in the end it was engulfed and disappeared, and – with one or two exceptions – only in a few episcopal towns did any truly urban settlements survive in the area of purely Gaelic rule. (The port of Sligo was an exception, while some sort of town grew up under the O Reillys at Cavan in the sixteenth century.)

If we may judge from the example of Annaghmore in County Clare, where, after the manor had passed from the de Burgos to the Gaelic Mac Namaras in the mid-fourteenth century, the latter expelled the native betaghs to replace them by their own followers, the Irish unfree population in the reconquered areas may not have benefited from the change, although some of them may have been able in the confusion to improve their status.

In general, however, the landowners who emerged in these areas after the reconquest were not the actual descendants of the pre-Norman holders but the members of the newly expanding lineages, either Gaelic lineages who had managed to keep their independence in the forests and mountains of the borders, or the lineages of ‘Gaelicized Normans’. Dualtagh Mac Firbisigh remarks that although Brian O Dowda (d. 1354) recovered Tireragh from the English, few if any of its former chieftains got back their hereditary lands, but ‘the sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of Brian divided the land among themselves’, and this would have been the usual pattern.

Although the Bruce invasion of Ireland in 1316 ended in defeat for the invaders and their Irish allies, the royal government seems never to have subsequently recovered the control of the country which it had possessed before the invasion, and the recovery of many areas by the Irish, for instance of Uí Maine by the O Kellys, certainly dates from this precise time. Thereafter the area in which the King’s writ ran in Ireland began rapidly to contract. Connacht was in effect lost after 1347, although some control was retained for a period over the episcopate and clergy of the province and nominal sheriffs of Connacht continued to be appointed throughout the fifteenth century.

In the second half of the fourteenth century the border areas of Westmeath similarly passed out of the governments’ control, their Anglo-Norman clans – Dillons, Daltons, Delamares and Tyrrells – becoming completely Gaelic. The degree to which the Daltons had by 1393 become an Irish clan like their Gaelic neighbours can be seen from the account of their doings in the following decade which is to be found in the local annals of Saints’ Island, and even more graphically illustrated in 1414, when after the poet Niall O Higgin had been plundered by the Lord Lieutenant Stanley, Henry Dalton ‘attacked the son of James Tuite and the King’s subjects’ (muintearanrigh) and took from them the equivalent of the stock which O Higgin had lost, which he delivered to the latter. It is noteworthy, I think, not only that we find Dalton as the protector of that sacred personage of the Gaelic order, a poet, but that the annalist obviously did not class him among ‘the King’s subjects’.