Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447-1603

English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule

Steven G. Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317901426
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The second edition of Steven Ellis's formidable work represents not only a survey, but also a critique of traditional perspectives on the making of modern Ireland. It explores Ireland both as a frontier society divided between English and Gaelic worlds, and also as a problem of government within the wider Tudor state. This edition includes two major new chapters: the first extending thecoverage back a generation, to assess the impact on English Ireland of the crisis of lordship that accompanied the Lancastrian collapse in France and England; and the second greatly extending the material on the Gaelic response to Tudor expansion.

Chapter 1
The Crown’s Irish Problem in the Later Middle Ages

By 1460 the whole approach of kings of England to the problems of governing Ireland was in urgent need of reconsideration. Since the fourteenth century, English power and influence in Ireland had declined alarmingly, and beginning in the 1420s there had been a disastrous feud among the lordship’s leading families. The belated response of Henry VI, the appointment of Richard, duke of York as lieutenant in 1447, in a bid to tackle the lordship’s mounting problems, was widely welcomed in Ireland, even though the king’s primary purpose was to exclude from influence over the more important French theatre of operations a leading opponent of his policies there. Yet, with the degeneration of English politics into civil war in the 1450s, Richard used the lordship as a base from which to evade arrest and execution as a traitor and to launch an attempt on the throne itself. The duke’s career in Ireland illustrated most strikingly the weakness of royal authority there and the dangers that English kings might face if their Irish lordship were finally extinguished.¹

The Loss of Political Initiative

Not that this situation was altogether new, for in general English government in Ireland had then been in decline for at least 150 years. At its zenith, c. 1300, the influence of royal government was felt, albeit intermittently in some districts, in about two-thirds of the island, but by 1460 it was confined to much less than half of Ireland. Such statements can, however, be misleading. Under Edward I (1272–1307), the government had exercised some control over many districts which had been only thinly colonized and in which the ruling Gaelic clans had been brought reluctantly to acknowledge the overlordship of a Norman baron: by 1460 English influence was largely reduced to those areas which had earlier witnessed extensive Norman colonization.² Moreover, the fourteenth century had witnessed an important change in the lordship’s character. Under Edward I the Anglo-Norman colonists had been a dominant minority exercising an influence in Ireland which was out of all proportion to their numbers: by 1400 this dominance was in many respects a thing of the past. The colonists were fast losing sight of their claim that the lordship of Ireland should extend over the whole island; Gaelic chiefs had recovered many districts conquered in the thirteenth century and were exacting tribute from the king’s subjects in others; and the activities of the Dublin administration were increasingly geared to the defence of the principal centre of English influence, the coastline between Bray and Carlingford and its hinterland. In fact the feebleness of royal government under Henry VI (1421–61, 1470–1) meant that the lordship was in some danger of splitting into a series of independent lordships, like Gaelic Ireland, each controlled by a local magnate. Thus although English influence was generally strong throughout much of Leinster and Munster, the particular influence of the Dublin government was intermittent outside ‘the four obedient shires’, the (medieval) counties of Dublin, Louth, Meath and Kildare, which together were later to comprise the English Pale.³

The Nature of the Norman Settlement

How and why had this situation come about? The answer to this question provides both an insight into the state of Ireland in the later fifteenth century – the king’s Irish problem as analysed in the remainder of this chapter – and an indication of why, without any great effort on the king’s part, the half-century or so from 1470 should have witnessed a significant revival in the lordship’s fortunes. Recent research has made it increasingly clear that the medieval lordship was at no time a peaceful little England across the Irish sea; rather it was a highly regional land in which central government resources had always been fairly limited and its influence correspondingly weak:⁴ and since royal government had never been strong, its decline was less precipitous than formerly imagined. In fact the lordship’s fragmentation and strong local traditions are largely explained by factors of geography and the piecemeal and partial nature of the Norman invasion and conquest.

The Normans had colonized most heavily the low-lying areas of Munster and Leinster, and these remained the heart of the medieval colony; but the survival of an independent Gaelic civilization in other areas created serious administrative problems. The government responded by encouraging local magnates to recruit and retain troops to defend the marches against Gaelic raids, and at particularly vulnerable points it might organize and pay for a ward itself. In addition, the governor, with the support of the magnates, organized military expeditions to induce Gaelic chiefs to submit and put in pledges to keep the peace. Even in the fourteenth century, however, the government had given priority to Leinster, and in particular to combating raids by the chiefs of the Leinster mountains. Elsewhere, the various communities under the leadership of local lords had primary responsibility for defence, and intervention by the governor was usually confined to moments of crisis.⁵

In part the government was forced to delegate authority and to encourage self-reliance in this way because it lacked the men and money to perform its duties in any other manner: throughout medieval Europe the resources and potential of governments were small and they relied heavily on the unpaid services of wealthy and well-disposed subjects who in return could expect the king’s favour in their private interests. What made Ireland different from many regions, however, was the premium placed on armed might for purposes of defence as well as to maintain law and order, although in the marcher areas of northern England, Scotland and Wales conditions were very similar. Thus, because the maintenance of peace and stability was so much more costly and troublesome, the efficiency of government was correspondingly less. Moreover, the private armies of the magnates were frequently used in less acceptable ways – to pursue personal feuds, notably the Geraldine-Butler and Talbot-Ormond feuds of the fifteenth century, to pervert justice or to encroach on the king’s rights and interests. In this way the power of the Dublin administration was still further reduced, and Gaelic chiefs could exploit internal dissensions among the colonists.

The Art of Good Government

Besides the problems arising from inadequate resources, the nature of his adversary confronted the governor with others. Gaelic Ireland was not a centralized monarchy like England, but rather a politically decentralized country in which dozens of independent chiefs pursued their own interests: there was no single individual with whom the governor could negotiate. Instead he had to deal with a score of border chiefs, each of whom was important for the defence of a particular march. A good governor set out first to learn the politics of the various border chieftaincies, and much of the art of government consisted in ensuring that chiefs remained at odds with each other and well disposed towards the government, and in correctly predicting trouble and drafting in forces for its containment. Nevertheless, he could not be in two places at once, and an inexperienced governor could do a lot of damage if he mishandled important chiefs like O’Neill, O’Connor or MacMurrough Kavanagh.

Of crucial importance to the government was control of the king’s highway down the Barrow valley, the only available overland route connecting ‘the four obedient shires’ with the other main English districts in the south. This road was swept by Gaelic raids from the midlands and Leinster mountains and by 1400 was almost impassable without an escort. The government had from 1361 relocated the central courts at Carlow, in a bid to provide closer supervision of the area and to facilitate communications, but after reiterated complaints that the town was unsafe and the king’s business impeded, the central administration was moved back to Dublin in 1394. The result was that the lordship became even more fragmented than before, and increasingly communications between Dublin and Waterford or Cork were by sea.⁶

The Lordship’s Political Decline

Before 1315 the lordship had been a source of profit to the king. But instead of using the money to consolidate his control of border districts and to complete the conquest of Ireland, Edward I had creamed off any surplus revenue to help finance the conquest of Wales (completed in 1282–3) and to support his claim to the overlordship of Scotland. Ireland was for long undergoverned to leave money for these purposes, but the consequent disorders adversely affected the revenues and so further reduced the Dublin government’s ability either to assist the king elsewhere or to maintain royal authority in Ireland.⁷ Then in 1315 English control over Ireland was jeopardized by the invasion of Edward Bruce, the king of Scots’ brother, in an effort to relieve English pressure on Scotland and to destroy the lordship’s military and financial value. Although Bruce was eventually killed in 1318 and the Scots expelled, the countryside had been ravaged and English influence gravely weakened. The colony received a further crushing blow from the Black Death which from 1348 affected the lordship’s ports, towns and corn-growing areas far more than the largely pastoral districts of the Gaelic west. Mortality probably approached that in the Great Famine of the nineteenth century, and by 1400 successive outbreaks of plague had apparently reduced the population of English Ireland by 50 per cent. Recovery was slow even in the heart of the lordship, and elsewhere English power collapsed as Gaelic chiefs exploited the opportunity and overran border settlements: the balance of power tilted firmly away from the colonists.⁸

England and other parts of Europe were similarly affected by the plague. Recurrent visitations and the trade slump of the period meant that population in England long continued to decline, and the first signs of recovery did not occur until the 1460s.⁹ This had important consequences for Ireland: a precondition for Norman expansion there had been the barons’ ability to attract tenants from England and Wales to till the lands which they had conquered and organized into manors. These tenants had been attracted by prospects of larger holdings on better terms.¹⁰ But when, during the fourteenth century, population began everywhere to fall, land became more plentiful, rents fell and tenants became scarce. Yet in Ireland the Dublin government was unable to maintain peace or protect the king’s subjects in border areas, and this prompted many to abandon their holdings and to seek a better life, either in more settled parts or, because ties between the two countries remained strong, in England itself. Thus began a haemorrhage of English blood out of Ireland which progressively undermined the colony’s stability: in 1536 the Irish council reported that

the English blood of the English conquest is in manner worn out of this land.¹¹

Without tenants the lords could not defend the land, which was progressively overrun by resurgent Gaelic clans. Rather than suffer this they brought in Gaelic peasants. The native population had in any case been retained on most manors after the conquest, but they had since been at least partially ‘anglicized’: these population movements, therefore, upset the previous cultural balance between English and Gaelic even in those parts where Anglo-Norman lords managed to hold on to their lands. Irish historians have traditionally but misleadingly described a progressive ‘gaelicization’ of the lordship, whereby the colonists ‘became more Irish than the Irish themselves’. Yet in practice, among the peasantry at least, it was more often a case of the replacement of English by Gaelic. Moreover, the English of Ireland were never accepted as Gaedhil, and English officials normally talked about the ‘degeneracy’ of the English, the loss of their distinguishing characteristics as a people Qgen so, and the ‘decay’ of the body politic.¹² Movements of acculturation were of the essence of medieval frontier societies – in which the English state abounded – but what concerned these officials was the general contrast, in manners and appearance, between the ‘civil’ inhabitants of lowland England and the ‘wild’ men of the marches, not the particular differences between different groups of ‘savages’ in Ireland and Wales.

By 1360 the government was becoming alarmed at the deteriorating situation in Ireland. Of course it failed to appreciate the real nature of the changes taking place – medieval governments had little understanding of social and economic change – but the symptoms of malaise were obvious enough. Where Edward I had drawn over ¿40,000 from Ireland between 1278 and 1306 (at a time when the internal revenue was usually about ¿5,000 per annum), after 1315 the revenue barely sufficed to govern and defend the English districts.¹³ The king’s subjects were leaving Ireland in large numbers, and those who held lands in both countries were neglecting their Irish possessions, which were being overrun by the wild Irish. In other districts the colonists were apparently growing wild and rebellious, adopting Gaelic law and customs and allying with the king’s Irish enemies.

The Statutes of Kilkenny

The government attempted to remedy the situation in two main ways. From 1361 it pumped large quantities of men and money into the lordship in a heroic but doomed attempt to shore up the tottering structure; and it tried by legislation to arrest the ‘degeneracy’ of the local Englishry. These two strategies continued to exercise an influence on official thinking well into the Tudor period, and so merit more detailed consideration here. Yet it was social and economic change in the sixteenth century and the pressure of new circumstances, more than the government’s persistence with its traditional strategies, that eventually brought about an improvement.

The most celebrated and comprehensive body of legislation was the Statutes of Kilkenny, enacted by the lordship’s parliament in 1366. There was little in them tha...