Racial and cultural conflict in medieval Ireland is most famously described in a document written to the Pope, John XXII, in 1317 known as the Remonstrance of the Irish Princes. Composed as a justification of the Bruce invasion, it describes the fallout that resulted from English attempts to "extirpate" the native population: "Whence . . . relentless hatred and incessant wars have arisen between us and them [the Irish and the English], from which have resulted mutual slaughter, continual plundering, endless rapine, detestable and too frequent deceits and perfidies."
English policy never included anything approaching a "final solution" to the Irish problem during the Middle Ages, yet the description in the Remonstrance of a turbulent relationship between the two nations was not a fiction. Racial and cultural conflict was real and sprang from multifarious factors: economic disadvantage, legal disability, cultural suppression, violence, and fear of expropriation. At its simplest, it stemmed from an invasion that put two different cultures in competition for the same resources.
The Anglo-Norman invasion of the late 1160s was in fact not the first cultural clash Ireland had experienced. The first Viking incursion came in 795 c.e., with permanent settlements appearing in the mid-ninth century. The English invasion was a more thorough affair and was also more thoroughly documented, but there were definite similarities. In both cases, the invaders met a Gaelic race that was not politically centralized but that had a profound awareness of national identity. One result of this was that both sets of invaders were immediately identified as something different. A distinction emerged between the Goidil (the native inhabitants) and the Gaill (the foreign invaders), and although both Viking and English underwent Gaeli-cization over time, the terminology endured. Already by approximately1100, the propaganda work Cogad
Gaedel re Gallaib (the war of the Irish with the foreigners)—written for the aspirant to the high kingship of Ireland, Muirchertach Ua Briain (d. 1119)—repre-sented an historical tradition that celebrated the conflict between native and foreigner, irrespective of how important the Vikings had become to the Irish polity. This distinction, which was transferred seamlessly from Viking to Englishman, is now a commonplace of Irish history, but it remains important because perceived differences were the building blocks of racial and cultural conflict.
The perception of difference was equally strong on the part of the invader. Both the Viking and English invasions had sprung from economic imperatives: the problems of overpopulation and lack of land were to be solved by conquest and the opportunity to gain plunder, power, and political preeminence. Overlying the base motive for conquest was an ideology that saw the invaded as inferior and the invasion as justified. The most famous exponent of this view is Giraldus Cam-brensis (1146-1223), the first "foreigner" to describe in detail Ireland and the Irish. His description was not flattering. He saw the Irish as a barbarous people, economically backward, morally and sexually debased, lazy, and wicked. They may have been Christian in name, but in reality they were a pagan and "fifthy people, wallowing in vice." For centuries these racial condemnations have been pounced upon with either delight or disgust, and historians have long labored to show how misguided Giraldus was. The various marriages between the early settlers and native Irish prove that the situation was indeed more complex than one of total racial segregation. Undoubtedly, however, the contrast between the mainstream "Frankish" culture of the Anglo-Normans and that of Gaelic Ireland provoked in many of the invaders a reaction similar to Giraldus’s.
For all the cultural differences, the language of racial conflict could be remarkably similar. Both communities, for instance, charged the other with treachery. Giraldus was adamant that the Irish were "constant only in their fickleness" and should be feared "more for their wile than their war . . . their honey than their hemlock," but the Irish similarly saw treachery as a key characteristic of the foreigner. The Annals of Inisfallen in 1233 relate a story of one Tadc Duibfedha Mac Carthaig, who after being blinded was given a prod with a knife by one of his Gaelic captors. The anecdote continues: "He [Tadc] enquired who that was, and he was told it was Domnall Gall (i.e., foreign Domnall). ‘That is true, indeed,’ said he. ‘He did that like a foreigner.’" The Remonstrance of 1317, referred to above, similarly details the treachery practiced by the English upon the Irish population.
Racial and cultural conflict was, however, more than just rhetoric. Some newcomers to Ireland—like Stephen of Lexington, who was sent in 1228 to reform the Cistercian monasteries of Ireland—strove to avoid the charge of racial discrimination against the Irish, but many were less sensitive. Broadly speaking, colonial policy toward the native Irish came to be one of exclusion. The Irish in general had no access to the colony’s English-style justice. Attempts were made to exclude natives from positions in the colony’s cities and towns and to prohibit the promotion of Irish clergy to church offices, and the Irish nobility was not represented in the colony’s parliament. More fundamentally still, the native population was driven from the most fertile land and many of them were compelled to survive by raiding and plundering the colonists.
Of course, there were always exceptions to the rule. The king, for instance, qualified the exclusion of native Irish clergy by saying that it should not apply to the Irish who lived faithfully within the territory controlled by the royal government. Moreover, some of the exclu-sionist policies should be related to general European attitudes in the later Middle Ages. The prohibition on admitting native Irishmen to municipal office was coincidental with similar attempts in cities on the German-Slav frontier to exclude from guilds those who were not of German origin. Then there is the fact that much of the hysterical rhetoric of both sides flies in the face of what was the reality of colonial warfare. In nearly every engagement between colonist and native, there was a native fighting on the colonial side (and vice versa in many instances).
These are important qualifications, but they should not disguise the fact that national antagonisms were real. It would be impossible to plot precisely the growth or decline of racial and cultural conflict, yet some general trends may be discerned. It seems clear that England’s attempts to lord it over the whole British Isles heightened hostility in Ireland. There was considerable sympathy in Ireland for the Welsh and Scottish struggles against English dominance from the mid-thirteenth century, and when Edward Bruce invaded Ireland in 1315 he was a focus for anti-English sentiment. Equally, England’s adventures against France in the Hundred Years War heightened its insecurity about all things foreign.
This insecurity became particularly important in the last century of the Middle Ages when the lordship of Ireland became increasingly culturally alienated from England (see Anglo-Irish relations). It is now generally accepted that the famous Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366 were not a direct attack on Gaelic culture. They were an attempt to curb Gaelicization by prohibiting, among other things, the English community from marrying or fostering children with the Gaelic Irish or even using the Irish language. The statutes reveal a deep insecurity about the fact that, to survive in frontier conditions, the character of the lordship of Ireland had for the most part departed from English norms. In the fifteenth century, those from the lordship of Ireland, whether Irish or English, were classified as aliens in England. By the time of the later Tudors, a reversion to a policy of reconquest and plantation was deemed necessary to deal with the Irish problem. The result was a rekindling of racial and cultural antagonisms, but with the added spice of religious conflict. One remarkable fact about sixteenth century commentators on Ireland was how little their ideas had advanced on the racial pronouncements of Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century.
