Although never in contemporary usage, modern historians use the term "lordship of Ireland" in acknowledgement of the fact that the king of England from 1171 to 1541 bore the title "lord of Ireland" (dominus Hibernie). The term sometimes carries a more restricted connotation, denoting that part of medieval Ireland over which the king of England exercised effective power.
The term was first given expression in 1155 in the papal privilege of Pope Adrian IV (1154-1159) known as Laudabiliter. This letter, which was addressed to Henry II, authorized a conquest of Ireland with the aim of reforming the Irish church. Henry contemplated at that point bestowing Ireland, so the chronicler Robert of Torigni claims, on his youngest brother William, but nothing came of the proposal, and he himself did not intervene in Ireland until 1171-1172, when papal support for his actions was used as an important legitimizing force. The role of Adrian IV in granting the lordship to Henry II was subsequently cited; for example, in 1317 in the Remonstrance of the Irish princes (see below). The submission of the Irish kings and bishops to Henry during his visit to Ireland was regarded as a public acceptance by them of his lordship, and in the words of Giraldus Cam-brensis, Ireland was made subject to the English crown "as if through a perpetual indenture and an indissoluble chain."
In 1177, at a council in Oxford, Henry granted Ireland to his youngest son, John, who was the first to use the title "lord of Ireland." Henry’s intention was that John should become King of Ireland, and plans were set in motion to obtain a crown from Rome for him. This can be seen as part of Henry’s wider strategy to hold together the scattered lands of the Angevin Empire by entrusting them to the government of different sons. Had the future turned out as Henry had envisaged it, Ireland would have descended in a cadet line of the Plantagenet house. Instead a sequence of deaths resulted in John being made King of England in 1199. His accession to the throne was a significant moment in Irish history, and from that date the title dominus Hibernie became permanently part of the royal style for the rest of the Middle Ages, interestingly inserted immediately after "king of England" and before "duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and count of Anjou." Even so, official records in the first quarter of the thirteenth century sometimes contain references to the "kingdom of Ireland." During John’s reign there was a greater degree of royal involvement in Ireland than at any other time during the medieval period, and many historians regard him as the real creator of the medieval lordship.
In 1254, Henry III endowed the future Edward I with wide territories that included the lordship of Ireland. However the lands were given to him on condition that they never be separated from the crown of England but remain "wholly to the kings of England for ever." This marked a decided change from the grant to John in 1177. While the land of Ireland could be granted to another person, the lordship remained separate and inalienably held by the crown. The principle was established that the lordship was vested in the English crown, not in any one king or royal line, and this was the constitutional principle that underpinned Anglo-Irish relations throughout the later medieval period.
Lordship of Ireland implied control over the whole territory of Ireland, but the reality was very different. It has been said that medieval Ireland was not so much a lordship as a patchwork of lordships, a reference to the fragmented geography of power that pertained throughout the land. Under Henry II and John, royal authority had been acknowledged by the submission of both Anglo-Norman magnates and Gaelic kings to their feudal lordship. However, by the time of Edward I it was only considered necessary to obtain the allegiance of the English lords who were theoretically in control of the whole island. Furthermore, the exclusion of the Irish as a race from the common law, the means by which a subject obtained the protection of his king, had the effect of denying to many of the inhabitants of Ireland the benefits of lordship.
The Remonstrance addressed to Pope John XXII in 1317 in the name of the Irish kings, magnates, and people complained that the Irish no longer held their lands directly of the crown nor benefited from the protection of a powerful overlord. Therefore, it was claimed, they were vindicated in their withdrawal of obedience from Edward II. A serious attempt was made during the reign of Richard II to reestablish the lordship of the English crown over the whole island. In 1385, Richard had briefly granted to his favorite Robert de Vere (who would bear the titles "marquis of Dublin" and "duke of Ireland") the lordship and lands of Ireland almost as an independent palatinate, and all writs ran in de Vere’s name, his arms replacing those of the king in Ireland, although the experiment lapsed shortly afterward. The renewed submissions taken from Gaelic leaders by Richard during his own 1394-1395 expedition to Ireland (the first by a lord of Ireland since 1210) were a significant confirmation of royal lordship and the benefits of personally discharging the obligations that entailed.
Richard II failed to achieve his ideal of uniting all the inhabitants of Ireland under his lordship, and thereafter royal intervention in Ireland was limited in scope and interest. However, although Ireland was frequently ignored and neglected by England, at no point did the king ever consider relinquishing lordship in Ireland or abrogating his obligation as a lord to protect his subjects there. Moreover, at no point was the position of the king as lord of Ireland seriously threatened, not even by the separatist tendencies that were given expression in the challenge to the constitutional position of Ireland in the parliament of 1460.
Not long after this date, shortly after the Geraldine ascendancy began, the Irish parliament can be found reminding the king that Ireland was "one of the members of his most noble crown, and eldest member thereof." In 1541, at another parliament—this one held in Dublin—a bill was presented that stated that Henry VIII and his heirs "should from thenceforth be named and called king of the realm of Ireland." The bill was apparently passed without the slightest opposition. Thus, the medieval lordship of Ireland and the constitutional principle that had governed Anglo-Irish relations from 1171 was brought to an end.
