IRELAND UNDER THE NORMANS.*
Ws must congratulate Mr. Orpen on the completion of a second instalment of his history of Ireland from the Anglo-Norman conquest—the only scientific and impartial work on mediaeval Ireland that has yet been written. In the first two volumes, which appeared in 1912, he described the invasion and the settlement up to the death of King John. In the third and fourth volumes he now continues the story from the accession of Henry the Third in 1216 to the murder of William de Burgh, Earl of Ulster and Lord of Connaught, in 1333. It is significant that he has to deal with each province separately—to discuss • ireiand under the Norma., 1os-1333. By G. 11. Orpen. Vols. Ili., IV. Oxford : at the Clarendon Press. Rods. nut.l
in turn the partition of Leinster, the rise of the Geraldines in Munster, the conquest and sub-infeudation of Connaught, the short-lived settlement of Thomond which we now call County Clare, and the pacification of Ulster under Richard de Burgh, the " Red EarL" Ireland of herself bad no unity. She was a mere congeries of savage tribes, incessantly warring with one another. " United Ireland " in the historic sense was the creation of the English rulers and was not fully attained till the seventeenth century. The Anglo-Norman barons and knights, who, with some help from the Crown, gradually conquered Ireland in the century after 1170, were able to conquer the country piecemeal and never had to encounter any general resistance. The tribes hated each other far too bitterly to be able to unite against the invaders. On the contrary, in each district one faction usually enlisted the support of the Anglo- Normans against its local rivals. In Thomond, for example, Thomas de Clare was mainly concerned to check a civil war between two O'Brien factions, the most notable episode of which was known as the " Carnage of Clare " because Donnell O'Brien massacred the women and children and servants of his tribal enemies. In Connaught, again, there were fourteen so- called " Kings " in the half-century from 1274 ; one died in his bed, one was killed in battle against the. English, but twelve of these O'Conors were either killed or deposed by their own kins- men or followers. The newcomers did not cause this anarchy. As the author says, Ireland, which had unluckily escaped the discipline of a Roman occupation, had remained in the tribal stage of civilization and was centuries behind the rest of Western Europe.
The beneficent effects of the Anglo-Norman occupation are well stated by Mr. Orpen in his closing chapter. First of all, the occupation brought peace—comparative if not absolute— to a land of anarchy, where Bakunin's ideal of an " aggregation of amorphous communes " was only too fully realized. With peace came security for the farmer, and agriculture, hitherto conducted in the most primitive fashion, began to thrive ; Edward the First was able to draw large supplies from Ireland for his army in North Wales. Under the shadow of the Anglo- Norman castles, towns sprang up and flourished. Before the conquest Ireland had the four seaports of Dublin, Cork, Water- ford, and Limerick, which the Danes had founded. Left to themselves, the tribal chiefs would have had no towns ; all Ulster save the eastern seaboard remained in its tribal state up to the reign of Elizabeth, and it had even then hardly a place deserving the name of a town. As the towns grew, trade developed and coined money came into general use. The petty kings of Ireland, and their nominal overlord, were not civilized enough to have mints of their own, however rude, as the early British kings had. The Norse settlers coined a little silver, but the rich natives reckoned their wealth in cows or in bullion. The Anglo-Normans developed a considerable trade, importing wine from Gascony and exporting wool, leather, timber, and wheat. The Church benefited greatly by the conquest and lent its full support to the new rule, under which the clergy were freed from tribal exactions and endowed with more wealth and authority. Mr. Orpen, we may note, admits that there had been a sort of " golden age of art and learning " in the Irish monasteries after the conversion of Ireland, but he doubts " whether this outburst of art and learning penetrated appreci- ably beyond the cloister," and he points out that from the ninth century onward the Irish Church had decayed. The Anglo- Normans were in full sympathy with the revival, due especially to Malachy, that had begun before their coming, and one of Henry the Second's first acts was to summon the Synod at Cashel to reform and strengthen the Irish Church. The invaders built and endowed many monasteries and nunneries, and numerous cathedrals and parish churches, presumably importing builders from England to erect these fine examples of thirteenth-century English architecture. In brief, the Anglo-Normans replaced barbarism by civilization.
It was a misfortune for Ireland that their work was inter- rupted by the invasion of Edward Bruce in 1315-18. Northern England suffered much from the Scottish invasions after Bannockburn, but Ireland suffered still more. Bruce's armies did great damage in their marches through Eastern Ulster and Leinster, laying the country waste, while the barons, like their fellows in England, would not unite against an invader with whom some of them sympathized. The moral harm done was greater than the material damage, for the English lords were seen to be split into factions and the natives took heart again. Mr. Orpen shows that the Irish did not like the Scots and soon saw that Edward Bruce had brought misery to the people whom he professed to be liberating from an alien yoke; In his last fight at Faughart, near Dundalk, Edward Bruce was apparently not deserted by his Irish allies, as Barbour says ; but the Irish had no reason to regret his defeat and death. It is to be noticed, toe, that, at the worst moment of the Scots invasion in 1316, the English were strong enough to fight a pitched battle at Athenry with the insurgent " King " of Connaught and his supporters from other districts and to defeat him with such loss that the O'Conors never recovered from the blow. The Anglo- Normans might have held their own, if they had been able to compose their party and personal quarrels and if Edward the Second and Edward the Third had paid some attention to Ireland. As it was, the English baronage in Ireland slowly declined in vigour, and large parte of the country drifted back into anarchy, so that the Tudors had to begin the task all over again. Mr. Orpen shrewdly remarks that feudalism was at a disadvantage as opposed to tribalism. For while the fiefs often passed to heiresses or minors, the head of an Irish tribe was always chosen for his vigour in action. An able man like Richard de Burgh, with his vast estates in Ulster and Con- naught, could wield greater power than any Irish chiefs. But the " Red Earl " was an exception. The feudal baronage of the fourteenth century was impatient of control and absorbed in petty quarrels. Many of the English lords frankly adopted the Irish mode of life and degenerated into tribal chieftains. Tribalism reasserted its sway over much of the west and south. Nevertheless, the Anglo-Norman civilization was not wholly eradicated. Many of the towns survived, and the Church maintained its ground. The pity of it was that the Tudor reconquest was contemporaneous with the Reformation. Had Ireland been reduced to order a century earlier, when there were no religious differences between English and Irish, her later history would probably have been as peaceful as that of Wales. The neglect of our fourteenth and fifteenth century kings to uphold the Anglo-Norman settlement has cost both England and Ireland dear.
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