The commencement of the so-called Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland is dated conventionally to 1169, although the first overseas mercenaries in fact arrived in the autumn of 1167 in the company of Diarmait Mac Murchada, the king of Leinster, who had been forced into exile in 1166 and had sought military assistance from Henry II, king of England, to recover his kingdom. The date 1169 derives from the near-contemporary account, the Expugnatio Hibernica (The Taking of Ireland), completed around 1189 by Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis), an apologist for Anglo-Norman intervention who consistently exaggerated the role of his own relatives in that enterprise, the first of whom, his maternal uncle, Robert FitzStephen, arrived in May 1169. Although the term Anglo-Norman to describe the incomers enjoys wide currency, there is no scholarly consensus on its use; Norman, Cambro-Norman, and Anglo-French have also been used. All are anachronistic: Contemporary sources of both Irish and English provenance consistently described the incomers as Saxain, i.e., English. The earliest were adventurers from the South Wales area and of mixed ethnic background: hence the terms Cambro-Norman, and sometimes also Flemish, the latter referring more specifically to those drawn from the Rhos peninsula, where the English king, Henry I (1100-1135), had established a Flemish colony. A more identifiably English influx was already apparent by August 1170 when Richard FitzGilbert, lord of Strigoil, popularly known as Strongbow, arrived in Ireland. Although he was a landholder in South Wales, he also had extensive lands in England from where he drew some of his followers, whom he was to install as his tenants in Leinster following the death of Diarmait Mac Murchada in the spring of 1171. The English element was further reinforced by the personal intervention in Ireland in 1171 of Henry II. The use of the term "invasion" might also be debated, since the earliest incomers arrived as mercenaries in the employ of Diarmait Mac Murchada and invariably fought alongside Irish forces until Diarmait’s death in 1171.
The major military expedition led by Henry II to Ireland in October 1171 marked a significant new phase in the English advance. Henry remained in Ireland for a six-month period, during which time he obliged Strongbow to acknowledge him as his overlord for Leinster. Henry also made a speculative grant of the kingdom of Meath to Hugh de Lacy, who had extensive landed interests in England, the Welsh borders, and Normandy. Moreover, Henry decided that the Irish port towns should be appropriated for his own use. He issued a charter granting the city of Dublin to his men of Bristol, which not only confirmed the established trading links between the two cities, but was also an early indication that he was ready to exploit the economic resources of the Hiberno-Norse east-coast towns. During his stay, Henry did not travel beyond Leinster nor deploy his army against Irish forces. A substantial number of Irish kings voluntarily offered their personal submission to him, while the Irish episcopate was also prepared to endorse his intervention in the expectation that greater political stability would be achieved and the bitter disputes that had characterized the pursuit of the office of high king during the twelfth century might be brought to an end.
As a consequence of Henry’s personal intervention, a link between a part of Ireland and the English crown was inaugurated, the constitutional repercussions of which are still resonating. In 1175 the Treaty of Windsor was negotiated between Henry and Ruaidri Ua Conchobair, king of Connacht, and claimant of the high kingship of Ireland. This divided Ireland into two spheres of influence, one under Henry, the other under Ruaidri, with the latter acknowledging Henry as his overlord. The boundaries delimited by the treaty proved unstable, however, with individual English adventurers rapidly expanding beyond them, a notable instance being the intrusion into Ulaid (Ulster) in 1177 of the soldier of fortune, John de Courcy. In May 1177, Henry II modified the arrangements of the Treaty of Windsor by designating his youngest son, John, as lord of Ireland, with the intention that when he came of age he should personally assume control of the English colonists in Ireland. The king also made an additional series of speculative grants to actual and potential colonists in Munster. In 1185 John went to assume the lordship of Ireland in person, but retreated after a nine-month period, having failed to assert control over the English settlers there, and having suffered a series of military defeats at the hands of Irish kings. Nonetheless, John had made a further series of speculative grants to English members of his entourage, the most notable of whom was Theobald Walter, ancestor of the Butler earls of Ormond.
In 1199, all his brothers having died, John became king of England, an event that could not have been foreseen by Henry, and this was to forge a more direct administrative link between the English crown and the English-held areas of Ireland. Until 1204, John’s lordship in Ireland was but one among an assemblage of diverse territories that stretched from the Anglo-Scottish border to the Pyrenees, each of which had its own customs and laws. However, King John’s 1204 loss of the duchy of Normandy to Philip Augustus, king of France, altered the English crown’s relations with Ireland. English-held Ireland may be said to have been transformed more directly into a colony. A mark of that relationship was that many of the institutions for the governance of England and English laws were transferred to Ireland, although these were to be applied only to English-controlled areas.
King John was said to have taken the laws of England with him on his second expedition to Ireland in 1210 during which he sought and largely succeeded in asserting control over his English subjects in Ireland, though much of his success was to be compromised subsequently by the baronial wars in England that culminated in the procural of Magna Carta from the king, to be followed by the eleven-year minority of his son Henry III. The loss of a substantial portion of its continental lands altered the character of the English crown’s interest in Ireland. The English lordship of Ireland came to be seen as an annex of an England-centered sphere, while the English settlers in Ireland, the most noteworthy of whom still retained lands in England, sought to remain within the political orbit of the English royal court. In the early decades, a fairly rapid superimpo-sition of English political overlordship had been established in the southeast, central, and northeast of Ireland which demarcated a zone of Anglicization, the visible impact of which is still evidenced on the landscape by the surviving mottes and baileys and stone castles that were erected.
A slower transformation followed of the social, economic, and ethnic landscape of significant parts of the country and the creation of communities that remained self-consciously English. English settlement was concentrated in the physically better-endowed lands of the south and east as well as in the port towns. Invasion and colonization are different if often sequential processes. Invasion typically involves the establishment of lordly or royal control and the imposition of a new aristocracy. Certainly, a new French-speaking aristocracy was installed in Ireland, the more important of whom continued to hold lands on both sides of the Irish Sea. Colonization involves settlement of the land and dispossession of the previous occupiers. Claims for a substantial peasant migration in the train of the new aristocracy have frequently been made, though it remains largely undocumented and impressionistic, and the numbers and density of actual settlers are very difficult to estimate. The establishment of so-called rural boroughs as a spur to colonization, where some of the tenants of a private lord were granted the privilege of holding their plots by the preferential legal and economic status of burgage tenure suggests that, in reality, there were difficulties in attracting settlers to Ireland. Even in the densest areas of English settlement, there were natural impediments to the process of colonization in the mountainous terrain, woodlands and bogland, and the Irish population survived on these less fertile lands retaining its essentially Gaelic character and remaining as pockets of colonial weakness. It proved difficult to maintain or give permanent effect to the colonizing impetus.
The high-point of English colonial initiative had been reached by the mid-thirteenth century, after which a combination of unfavorable political and economic circumstances ensured the so-called Gaelic revival. A steady colonial retreat occurred even in core regions such as the Wexford area, where the first settlers had established themselves, and where the town was exhibiting signs of urban decline already by the end of the thirteenth century. A critical turning-point in a process of de-colonization and loss of English governmental control was reached with the outbreak of plague in 1348. A distinctive "Anglo-Irish" political identity emerged out of the peculiar strains of perennial insecurity experienced by the colonial ruling elite in Ireland, coupled with a sense of its neglect, disregard and misunderstanding by the English crown, while culturally it formed an intermediate grouping characterized by varying degrees of Gaelicization or assimilation. Tensions between the English born in Ireland and the English of England who were sent recurrently as administrators remained constant. An English invasion there may have been in the twelfth century, but a conquest of Ireland was never achieved. In reality, the greater part of Ireland did not experience thoroughgoing Anglicization, and on the eve of the Tudor plantations English governmental control had shrunk to the defensive area known as the Pale, the colonial hinterland of Dublin.
