THE NORMAN INVASION
1169-1520
After the fall of the Danes the Normans, conquerors of England,
entered on the dominion of the sea--"citizens of the world," they
carried their arms and their cunning from the Tweed to the
Mediterranean, from the Seine to the Euphrates. The spirit of conquest
was in the air. Every landless man was looking to make his fortune.
Every baron desired, like his viking forefathers, a land where he
could live out of reach of the king's long arm. They had marked out
Ireland as their natural prey--"a land very rich in plunder, and famed
for the good temperature of the air, the fruitfulness of the soil, the
pleasant and commodious seats for habitation, and safe and large ports
and havens lying open for traffic." Norman barons were among the
enemy at the battle of Clontarf in 1014. The same year that Ireland
saw the last of the Scandinavian sea kings (1103) she saw the first of
the Norman invaders prying out the country for a kingdom. William
Rufus (1087-1100) had fetched from Ireland great oaks to roof his Hall
at Westminster, and planned the conquest of an island so desirable. A
greater empire-maker, Henry II, lord of a vast seacoast from the Forth
to the Pyrenees, holding both sides of the Channel, needed Ireland to
round off his dominions and give him command of the traffic from his
English ports across the Irish Sea, from his ports of the Loire and
the Garonne over the Gaulish sea. The trade was well worth the
venture.
Norman and French barons, with Welsh followers, and Flemings from
Pembroke, led the invasion that began in 1169. They were men trained
to war, with armour and weapons unknown to the Irish. But they owed no
small part of their military successes in Ireland to a policy of
craft. If the Irish fought hard to defend the lands they held in civil
tenure, the churches had no great strength, and the seizing of a
church estate led to no immediate rising out of the country. The
settled plan of the Normans, therefore, was to descend on defenceless
church lands, and turn them into Norman strongholds; in reply to
complaints, they pleaded that the churches were used by the hostile
Irish as storing places for their goods. Their occupation gave the
Normans a great military advantage, for once the churches were
fortified and garrisoned with Norman skill the reduction of the
surrounding country became much easier. The Irish during this period
sometimes plundered church lands, but did not occupy, annex, or
fortify them. The invaders meanwhile spread over the country. French
and Welsh and Flemings have left their mark in every part of Ireland,
by Christian names, by names of places and families, and by loan-words
taken into Irish from the French. The English who came over went
chiefly to the towns, many of them to Dublin through the Bristol
trade. Henry II himself crossed in 1171 with a great fleet and army to
over-awe his too-independent barons as well as the Irish, and from the
wooden palace set up for him in Dublin demanded a general oath of
allegiance. The Normans took the oath, with some churchmen and
half-a-dozen Irish chiefs.
In Henry's view this oath was a confession that the Irish knew
themselves conquered; and that the chief renounced the tribal system,
and handed over the land to the king, so that he as supreme lord of
all the soil could allot it to his barons, and demand in return the
feudal services common in Normandy or in England. No Irish chief,
however, could have even understood these ideas. He knew nothing of
the feudal system, nor of a landlord in the English sense. He had no
power to hand the land of the tribe over to any one. He could admit no
"conquest," for the seizing of a few towns and forts could not carry
the subjection of all the independent chiefdoms. Whatever Henry's
theory might be, the taking of Dublin was not the taking of an Irish
capital: the people had seen its founding as the centre of a foreign
kingdom, and their own free life had continued as of old. Henry's
presence there gave him no lordship: and the independent temper of
the Irish people was not likely, after their Danish experience, to be
cowed by two years of war. Some cunning explanation of the oath was
given to the Irish chiefs by the subtle Angevin king and his crafty
Norman counsellors--that war was to cease, that they were to rule as
fully and freely as before, and in recognition of the peace to give to
Henry a formal tribute which implied no dominion.
The false display at Dublin was a deception both to the king and to
the Irish. The empty words on either side did not check for a month
the lust of conquest nor the passion of defence.
One royal object, however, was made good. The oath, claimed under
false pretences, yielded under misunderstanding, impossible of
fulfilment, was used to confer on the king a technical legal right to
Ireland; this legal fiction became the basis of the royal claims, and
the justification of every later act of violence.
Another fraud was added by the proclamation of papal bulls, which
according to modern research seem to have been mere forgeries. They
gave the lordship of the country to Henry, and were readily accepted
by the invaders and their successors. But they were held of no account
among Irish annalists and writers, who make no mention of the bulls
during the next three hundred years.
Thus the grounds of the English title to Ireland were laid down, and
it only remained to make good by the sword the fictions of law and the
falsehoods of forgers. According to these Ireland had been by the act
of the natives and by the will of God conferred on a higher race.
Kings carved out estates for their nobles. The nobles had to conquer
the territories granted them. Each conquered tract was to be made into
a little England, enclosed within itself, and sharply fenced off from
the supposed sea of savagery around it. There was to be no trade with
the Irish, no intercourse, no relationship, no use of their dress,
speech, or laws, no dealings save those of conquest and slaughter. The
colonists were to form an English parliament to enact English law. A
lieutenant-governor, or his deputy, was set in Dublin Castle to
superintend the conquest and the administration. The fighting
garrison was reinforced by the planting of a militant church--bishops
and clergy of foreign blood, stout men of war, ready to aid by
prayers, excommunications, and the sword. A bishop of Waterford being
once sent by the Lord Justice to account to Edward I for a battle of
the Irish in which the king of Connacht and two thousand of his men
lay dead, explained that "in policy he thought it expedient to wink at
one knave cutting off another, and that would save the king's coffers
and purchase peace to the land"; whereat the king smiled and bade him
return to Ireland.
The Irish were now therefore aliens in their own country. Officially
they did not exist. Their land had been parted out by kings among
their barons "till in title they were owners and lords of all, so as
nothing was left to be granted to the natives." During centuries of
English occupation not a single law was enacted for their relief or
benefit. They were refused the protection of English law, shut out
from the king's courts and from the king's peace. The people who had
carried the peaceful mission of a spiritual religion over England and
Europe now saw that other mission planted among themselves--a
political church bearing the sword of the conqueror, and dealing out
anathemas and death in the service of a state which rewarded it with
temporal wealth and dominion.
The English attack was thus wholly different from that of the Danes:
it was guided by a fixed purpose, and directed by kings who had a more
absolute power, a more compact body of soldiers, and a better filled
treasury than any other rulers in Europe. Dublin, no mere centre now
of roving sea-kings, was turned into an impregnable fortress, fed from
the sea, and held by a garrison which was supported by the whole
strength of England--a fortress unconquerable by any power within
Ireland--a passage through which the strangers could enter at their
ease. The settlers were no longer left to lapse as isolated groups
into Irish life, but were linked together as a compact garrison under
the Castle government. The vigilance of Westminster never ceased, nor
the supply of its treasure, its favoured colonists, and its ablest
generals. From Henry II to Elizabeth, the aim of the English
government was the same. The ground of Ireland was to be an immediate
holding, "a royal inheritance," of the king. On an issue so sharp and
definite no compromise was possible. So long as the Irish claimed to
hold a foot of their own land the war must continue. It lasted, in
fact, for five hundred years, and at no moment was any peace possible
to the Irish except by entire renunciation of their right to the
actual soil of their country. If at times dealings were opened by the
English with an Irish chief, or a heavy sum taken to allow him to stay
on his land, this was no more than a temporary stratagem or a local
expedient, and in no way affected the fixed intention to gain the
ownership of the soil.
Out of the first tumult and anarchy of war an Ireland emerged which
was roughly divided between the two peoples. In Ulster, O'Neills and
O'Donnells and other tribes remained, with only a fringe of Normans on
the coast. O'Conors and other Irish clans divided Connacht, and
absorbed into the Gaelic life the incoming Norman de Burghs. The
Anglo-Normans, on the other hand, established themselves powerfully in
Munster and Leinster. But even here--side by side with the great lords
of the invasion, earls of Ormond, and Desmond, and Kildare--there
remained Irish kingdoms and the remnants of old chiefdoms,
unconquered, resolute and wealthy--such as the O'Briens in the west,
MacCarthys and O'Sullivans in the south, O'Conors and O'Mores in the
middle country, MacMurroughs and O'Tooles in Leinster, and many more.
It has been held that all later misfortunes would have been averted if
the English without faltering had carried out a complete conquest, and
ended the dispute once for all. English kings had, indeed, every
temptation to this direct course. The wealth of the country lay spread
before them. It was a land abounding in corn and cattle, in fish, in
timber; its manufactures were famed over all Europe; gold-mines were
reported; foreign merchants flocked to its ports, and bankers and
money-lenders from the Rhineland and Lucca, with speculators from
Provence, were carrying over foreign coin, settling in the towns, and
taking land in the country. Sovereigns at Westminster--harassed with
turbulent barons at home and wars abroad--looked to a conquered
Ireland to supply money for their treasury, soldiers for their armies,
provisions for their wars, and estates for their favourites. In haste
to reap their full gains they demanded nothing better than a conquest
rapid and complete. They certainly cannot be charged with dimness of
intention, slackness in effort, or want of resource in dilemmas. It
would be hard to imagine any method of domination which was not
used--among the varied resources of the army, the church, the lawyers,
the money-lenders, the schoolmasters, the Castle intriguers and the
landlords. The official class in Dublin, recruited every few years
with uncorrupted blood from England, urged on the war with the dogged
persistence of their race.
But the conquest of the Irish nation was not so simple as it had
seemed to Anglo-Norman speculators. The proposal to take the land out
of the hands of an Irish people and give it to a foreign king, could
only have been carried out by the slaughter of the entire population.
No lesser effort could have turned a free tribal Ireland into a
dependent feudal England.
The English kings had made a further mistake. They proposed, like
later kings of Spain in South America, to exploit Ireland for the
benefit of the crown and the metropolis, not for the welfare of any
class whatever of the inhabitants; the colonists were to be a mere
garrison to conquer and hold the land for the king. But the
Anglo-Norman adventurers had gone out to find profit for themselves,
not to collect Irish wealth for London. Their "loyalty" failed under
that test. The kings, therefore, found themselves engaged in a double
conflict, against the Irish and against their own colonists, and were
every year more entangled in the difficulties of a policy false from
the outset.
Yet another difficulty disclosed itself. Among the colonists a little
experience destroyed the English theory of Irish "barbarism." The
invaders were drawn to their new home not only by its wealth but by
its beauty, the variety and gaiety of its social life, the
intelligence of its inhabitants, and the attraction of its learning
and art. Settlers, moreover, could neither live nor till the lands
they had seized, nor trade in the seaports, nor find soldiers for
their defence, without coming to terms with their Irish neighbours. To
them the way of wealth lay not in slaughter but in traffic, not in
destroying riches but in sharing them. The colonists compromised with
"the Irish enemy." They took to Irish dress and language; they
recognised Irish land tenure, as alone suited to the country and
people, one also that gave them peace with their farmers and
cattle-drivers, and kept out of their estates the king's sheriffs and
tax-gatherers; they levied troops from their tenants in the Irish
manner; they employed Irishmen in offices of trust; they paid
neighbouring tribes for military service--such as to keep roads and
passes open for their traders and messengers. "English born in
Ireland," "degenerate English," were as much feared by the king as the
"mere Irish." They were not counted "of English birth"; lands were
resumed from them, office forbidden them. In every successive
generation new men of pure English blood were to be sent over to serve
the king's purpose and keep in check the Ireland-born.
The Irish wars, therefore, became exceedingly confused--kings, barons,
tribes, all entangled in interminable strife. Every chief, surrounded
by dangers, was bound to turn his court into a place of arms thronged
by men ready to drive back the next attack or start on the next foray.
Whatever was the burden of military taxation no tribe dared to disarm
any more than one of the European countries to-day. The Dublin
officials, meanwhile, eked out their military force by craft; they
created and encouraged civil wars; they called on the Danes who had
become mingled with the Irish to come out from them and resume their
Danish nationality, as the only means of being allowed protection of
law and freedom to trade. To avert the dangers of friendship and peace
between races in Ireland they became missionaries of disorder,
apostles of contention. Civil wars within any country exhaust
themselves and come to a natural end. But civil wars maintained by a
foreign power from without have no conclusion. If any strong leader
arose, Anglo-Norman or Irish, the whole force of England was called
in, and the ablest commanders fetched over from the French wars, great
men of battle and plunder, to fling the province back into weakness
and disorder.
In England the feudal system had been brought to great perfection--a
powerful king, a state organised for common action, with a great
military force, a highly organised treasury, a powerful nobility, and
a dependent people. The Irish tribal system, on the other hand, rested
on a people endowed with a wide freedom, guided by an ancient
tradition, and themselves the guardians of their law and of their
land. They had still to show what strength lay in their spiritual
ideal of a nation's life to subdue the minds of their invaders, and to
make a stand against their organised force.