Anglo-Norman, or English society, in medieval Ireland was shaped by two distinct but related forces: one was aristocratic, the other royal. The conquest was initially effected by aristocratic adventurers who wished to improve their fortunes by carving out lordships for themselves in Ireland. From the royal expedition in 1171-72 of King Henry II (1154-89), however, royal authority was stamped upon Ireland. As the trappings of royal power in England grew during the thirteenth century, they were systematically extended to Ireland. By the turn of the fourteenth century, almost all the principal English institutions had a miniature colonial counterpart. With royal power came assumptions about feudal customs, the use of the common law, and English inheritance practice. Despite all this, Anglo-Norman lords were frequently left to fend for themselves, and the social reality was that independent aristocratic forces remained powerful. For those operating on the frontier with the native Irish, survival sometimes depended on departing from the central government’s legalistic ideal of how society should function. It was, perhaps, the principal lesson of the fourteenth century that royal power was better served by working with the nobles of Ireland rather than by reacting against them.
Royal Government
It is dangerous to press the distinction between royal and aristocratic interests too hard. Their intentions were fundamentally identical: Both saw Ireland as a source of land; both hoped to make that land profitable by colonizing and cultivating it on the model of the English manor. Nonetheless, the imposition of royal authority was of the greatest importance. Pointing to Scotland’s experience, R.R. Davies has reminded Irish historians that Anglo-Norman colonization could have progressed without Ireland becoming an English colony. Henry II’s intervention removed that possiblity by ending the entrepreneurial nature of the conquest. The Anglo-Norman adventurers now held their land of the king of England by feudal tenure, with all the obligations that entailed. Any new projects they engaged in—for instance the de Burgh conquest of Connacht in the 1230s—were initiated at the nod, or rather by charter, of the king.
The feudal relationship was central to the functioning of colonial society. In return for grants of land, the nobles owed the lord of Ireland—who, for most of the period, was king of England—military service, which in practice was frequently commuted to a cash payment called "scutage" (royal service [see Feudalism]). This relationship was replicated at each level of society so that theoretically everyone was engaged in a bond with some social superior, ultimately leading to the king. The king, in return, was obliged to protect his subjects, to lead them in war, and to provide justice. In fact, the king was usually absent from Ireland, but his obligations of lordship were exercised by proxy through his chief governor. Just as royal authority in England was bolstered by its precocious administrative institutions—for instance the chancery, the exchequer, and the court system—so all these organs of royal power were provided for the lordship of Ireland. Dependence on England carried with it the assumption that the colony would be governed by English law. This assumption was sometimes made explicit, as in the famous case of Magna Carta, which was sent to Ireland as the Magna Carta Hiberniae (Great Charter of Ireland) in 1217. To the end of the medieval period, many other English statutes were transmitted to Ireland and there promulgated by the central government or later ratified in the Irish parliament. Royal authority was also strong in local government because of the shire system. By the turn of the fourteenth century, royal sheriffs executed the king’s writs across most of Ireland.
In a society in which land was the source of wealth and power, the most far-reaching effects of English law were in connection with property. The king as feudal overlord exercised considerable rights in this respect. By the late twelfth century, primogeniture— the descent of lands to the eldest son—had become the normal practice for dealing with inheritance in England. Its application in Ireland was in stark contrast to the Gaelic system of partible inheritance. In the colony, all land theoretically reverted to the lord of Ireland at the death of one of his tenants. The heir then had to pay a large sum of money—known as a relief— to gain possession of his inheritance. If the heir to a great estate was a minor (usually meaning under 18-years-old), the king took him into his custody as a ward of the crown, and all his property was placed under royal protection. This practice was of considerable profit to the king, both because of the revenues he received from the lands during the minority of the heir, and because it was source of patronage. The wardship did not have to be held by the crown personally, but could be granted out to another great noble. A grant of wardship was much sought after, but could have disastrous consequences for the ward’s lands. In 1344, the earldom of Ormond was granted in wardship to the first earl of Desmond (d. 1356) during the minority of James Butler (d. 1382). Rather than protecting the lands, the earl of Desmond ravaged them.
The king also reserved the right to consent to the marriages of his vassals’ daughters. Marriage, in this period, cannot be divorced from politics. A good marriage was intended to secure inheritance, forge alliances, and patch up former disputes. One of the more spectacular marriage networks in Ireland was devised by Richard de Burgh, the "Red Earl" of Ulster (d. 1326). Among the husbands of his female progeny numbered some of the most exalted nobles in Ireland, England, and Scotland, including Robert Bruce, king of Scotland (d. 1329); Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester (d. 1314); the second earl of Kildare (d. 1328); the first earl of Desmond (d. 1356); and John de Bermingham, earl of Louth (d. 1329). The marriages of minor heirs were also arranged by the Crown, and in the later Middle Ages, the king employed this right to bind the nobility of England and Ireland together. The young fourth earl of Kildare (d. 1390) was present at the siege of Calais in 1347, and Edward III took the opportunity to marry him to the daughter of one of his knights, Sir Bartholomew de Burghersh.
Although primogeniture had advantages in terms of settling succession disputes, in an Irish context it sometimes had serious drawbacks. Besides the vulnerability caused by minorities, there was a risk that an estate could be fractured if a male line of heirs failed. This happened dramatically in the mid-thirteenth century. Five successive sons of William Marshal (d. 1219) died childless with the result that the great lordship of Leinster was divided between his five daughters. Meath was similarly divided at the death of the heirless Walter de Lacy in 1241. There were further subdivisions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the splintered estates that resulted were of little interest to the absentee English nobles to whom they descended. Their neglect was a source of considerable weakness in the lordship. It was the risk of division that led to the practice of granting estates in "tail male." This practice—employed in the cases of the earldoms created in the early fourteenth century and also used extensively among the lesser nobility—meant that an estate always descended to the nearest male relative and so could not suffer fracture between heiresses.
Magnate Power
Irish historians assessing the lordship of Ireland have long tracked the growth of royal lordship to about the year 1300 and have thereafter bemoaned the general decline that saw the contraction of royal authority to the Pale by the later fifteenth century. However, equating royal lordship and an efficient administration with a successful society can be perilous in a frontier region like Ireland. The work of Robin Frame is particularly important in this regard. He has reminded us that although royal authority was theoretically extensive by the end of the thirteenth century, "the areas with which the administration was closely involved were probably less securely held and less prosperous than they had been sixty years earlier, when royal government was simpler and less intrusive, and the large, undivided lordships of Leinster and Meath still existed" (Frame 1981).
For all the crown’s complicated administrative machinery, the resident magnates themselves remained of prime importance. How they exercised power, both officially and unofficially, reveals some important points of divergence from England. Although an English earl might take his title from a region in which he held lands, those lands were not usually geographically consolidated. He would usually hold manors scattered across several counties, which ensured that the county or shire court remained the primary focus of local jurisdiction. Ireland was different. Lands were held in large blocks, which gave their lords a territorial dominance highly unusual in England. Moreover, from the start of the conquest, grants were often made of liberty jurisdiction. This meant that the king delegated royal authority to the lord within the bounds of the liberty or franchise, except for four pleas reserved to the crown: arson, rape, forestall (highway robbery), and treasure trove. Leinster, Meath, and Ulster were liberties in the thirteenth century, and in the fourteenth century the earls of Kildare, Ormond, and Desmond each held a former county as a liberty (Kildare, Tipperary, and Kerry respectively). Even when the liberty of Kildare was suppressed in 1345, never to be restored, the county of Kildare effectively remained under the control of the local earl.
This official policy—although often decried by later historians as spelling the ruin of royal government (see Feudalism)—in fact ensured the strength of English lordship in much of Ireland at moments when direct royal aid could not be forthcoming because of preoccupations elsewhere. This is true both in the early stages of the conquest and in the fifteenth century when the three resident earls dominated much of Ireland. Particularly in the later middle ages, however, less official methods of maintaining power became common. In England, since the time of the early Norman kings, private war had been prohibited. For the nobility of Ireland defending territories on the march (or frontier) with the hostile native Irish, that prohibition was impracticable. Although it horrified English administrators, private armies were common and were often billeted on the countryside (see Coyne and Livery). A famous case is the force controlled by the first earl of Desmond known as "MacThomas’s rout." It should not be imagined that these private forces were perpetually inimical to the native Irish. In fact, since the earliest points of the conquest when the native Irish recruited Anglo-Norman knights, there had been alliances between the two nations. By the fourteenth century, these arrangements were often standardized, such as the "bonnaght" of Ulster (the 345 Gaelic satellites, or troops, that the northern chieftains owed the earl of Ulster), or the agreements of retinue made between the earls of Ormond and his neighboring Gaelic chiefs in the 1350s.
In the first half of the fourteenth century, royal administrators endeavored on several occasions to bring the Irish magnates under control and curb their "unofficial" practices. Such attempts bred hostility between the "English of Ireland" and the "English of England," and it soon became clear that it was easier to rule through the nobility rather than against them. By the late fifteenth century, the magnates were strikingly independent, but they were also buttresses of English lordship. The fourth earl of Ormond (d. 1452), who served several times as the king’s lieutenant in Ireland, promulgated private ordinances for the governance of his lordship. These ordinances intertwined different legal traditions—common, march, and bre-hon law—and are an indication of his extraordinary independence and self-confidence. A famous and possibly apocryphal story about Gerald FitzGerald, the Great Earl of Kildare (d. 1513), like all great cliches, conveys a basic truth: in 1496, on being told up that all Ireland could not control the Great Earl, King Henry VII (1485-1509) reputedly replied: "Then, in good faith, shall this Earl rule all Ireland."
The practices described above are often ascribed to "Gaelicization," the process common to border societies in which the settlers adopted many of the customs of the indigenous population. In Ireland this involved abandoning common law and the English inheritance system. But points of divergence ought not to be stressed alone. Although it is a less familiar concept to Irish historians, both Gaelic and colonial societies were operating in ways similar to "bastard feudal" England, where each lord had a private affinity of retainers who served him in peace and war. Even the custom of designating the leaders of "Gaelicized" lineages as "chiefs of their nations" and allowing them to discipline their own extended families is reminiscent of the claim by English lords that they should be allowed to discipline their own retainers. What is more, in England and Ireland alike, "bastard feudal" practices were condemned by royal administrators. Later medieval Ireland, in other words, was not a totally alien society. When viewed solely from a royal standpoint, it is revealed in too negative a light. The shifting politics may have been difficult to follow and some social practices unconventional, yet others must have been familiar. Although royal authority retreated in the later middle ages, the magnate power that took its place was not negative. Indeed it was the resident nobility’s resilience that maintained nominal English control over much of Ireland into the early modern period.
