The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (5 page)

Its people usually thought of England as an island, as a watery fortress walled by waves. Yet England shared that island with another independent kingdom with which it had been intermittently at war for two centuries; that war interrupted only by a series of broken truces. Scotland, under its Stewart kings, had its own patterns of lordship and power; of law-making and peacekeeping, of kinship and clientage, quite different from those of its southern neighbour and enemy. Despite failing kings and factious nobles Scotland maintained its independence, challenging the continuing claims of the English king to overlordship, and, potentially in alliance with France or with the Gaelic lords of
Ireland, posed a constant threat to England. Between England and Scotland lay a military frontier, its precise boundaries still disputed in the ‘Debateable Land’ between the two kingdoms. That the Scots had not penetrated south of the Tyne since 1388 did not mean that they could not come again, and the pervasive fear of invasion was given tangible form in the continued building of tower houses, of peel towers surrounded by barmekins (defensible walls). The English Borders, lying in the remote uplands of Coquetdale, Redesdale and Tynedale, were divided into three Marches, East, Middle and West, and here royal authority was delegated to wardens charged with defending the frontier in war, and maintaining law and order in time of peace. Law and order were relative in the unique society of the Borders, where the ‘surnames’, kin groups which had formed for mutual protection as a response to war against the Scots, lived by raiding, mainly cattle (known as reiving). The March had its own archaic laws, its own entrenched customs shared by the English and Scottish Borderers, who often had more in common with each other than with their own compatriots beyond the March. To southerners their customs seemed antediluvian, exotic, dangerous. When, in 1535, Henry VIII wished to watch the ghastly execution of traitors in London he came disguised as a wild ‘Borderer’.

On 24 September 1485 Henry had offered pardon to those in the ‘north parts’ of his land who had fought in the field with ‘the enemy of nature’, Richard III. The ‘north parts’ – which he specified as the counties of Nottingham, York, Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland and the bishopric of Durham – were recognized as a separate ‘country’ in the later fifteenth century, formed in part by the particular duty to defend the rest of England from the Scots. The royal writ did not run in almost half of the far North. The Bishop of Durham ruled in the lands ‘between Tyne and Tees’, a palatinate where he exercised powers which, elsewhere, were monopolized by the Crown. The Archbishop of York ruled at Hexham. Annexed to the Borders were ‘liberties’ where royal authority had effectively been granted to Border barons, who held quasi-royal power. Unable to rule the far North without the greatest regional lords, kings granted sweeping military and civil powers to men whose wealth and power were already great, and then found themselves unable to control them. The great and deadly feud between the most powerful magnate families – the Nevilles of Middleham and the Percys – not only dominated the political history of the North in the mid fifteenth century but also drew in the conflicting parties at Henry VI’s
court and became a moving cause of the Wars of the Roses. The support of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, and of his great northern affinity (his personal following of dependants, allies, tenants and servants) had helped at the Battle of Towton in 1461 to establish Edward IV on the throne. The Percys were, for the while, routed, and the Nevilles seemed set to become unchallenged lords of the North East. But a decade later Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’ had fallen at Barnet, fighting not for, but against, the King he had made. The vast Neville lands, with their powerful affinity, were entrusted by Edward IV to his brother, Richard of Gloucester, with malign consequences for the Yorkist dynasty and the whole kingdom. In 1485 the Nevilles were eclipsed, and Richard’s lands were in the new King’s hands, but the great regional power of the Percy Earls of Northumberland remained to alarm a wary king.

In Ireland also several distinct societies shared the same island. Ireland was a land of many lordships, with many marches in between them. Once there had been high kings of Ireland, invested by sacred rites in hallowed places. The Anglo-Norman invasion of the twelfth century had usurped these kingships and intruded the claims of another king, the king of England, who as Lord of Ireland claimed jurisdiction over the whole island and thought to be high king himself. If Henry VII had visited his lordship of Ireland – though no Tudor monarch ever went there – he would have encountered a world remote from anything he knew. The island was divided – not neatly, for nothing here was straightforward – between the
Gaedhil
(the native Irish) and the
Gaill
(the settlers). To the Irish, the English of Ireland – the Anglo-Irish descendants of the first invaders of the twelfth-century conquest – were
Gaill
(foreign); they were bound by the same statutes and to the same allegiance as the English of England, and spoke English, yet they were also clearly distinct from the English of England, for they were born in Ireland, and most also spoke Irish. The English of Ireland lived in close but uneasy proximity to a culture profoundly different from their own.

The
Gaedhealtacht
, or Gaeldom of the native Irish, had its own ancient language, laws and culture, its own Christian traditions. And even hostile foreign observers in the late middle ages allowed that the Irish, though ‘wild’, were also good Christians. Hereditary bards were custodians and celebrants of the royal past of the Gaelic ruling dynasties.

Using poetic conventions five or six centuries old, the bard evoked and eulogized the hospitality, piety, justice and martial prowess of his Gaelic lord and patron, and the fertility of the land during his rule. Historians recorded the genealogies and descent of the chiefly families. Hereditary judges were guardians of immemorial, seemingly unchanging laws.

The late medieval Gaelic world extended beyond the land of Ireland to the highlands and islands of western Scotland, divided only by the narrow North Channel. Gaelic Scotland and Ireland shared a common language and culture and, regardless of whether they lived in Scotland or Ireland, the people might be termed ‘Irishry’. The inhabitants of Gaeldom recognized a common identity, and saw themselves as surrounded by
Gaill
. The MacDonald, John of Islay, fourth and last Lord of the Isles, whose great lordship stretched from the glens of Antrim in Ulster, along the west coast of Scotland from Kintyre to Glenelg, and through the Hebrides, had aspired to be high king of all Ireland. When in 1493 the Scottish Crown annexed his troublesome lordship and divided MacDonald’s lands among his dependent chiefs, waves of migrants left Scotland for Ulster. Another wave followed in the 1540s after an abortive attempt to resurrect the lordship. The presence of so many Scots in north-east Ulster unsettled the province through most of the sixteenth century. The attempts by the government in Dublin to prevent intermarriage between Gaelic Scots and Irish, to contain the employment by Ulster lords of Scottish redshanks (mercenary foot soldiers), and to drive the Scots from Ulster perennially failed.

The land of Ireland was not easily delineated between highland and lowland, for broken rings of mountains arose in unexpected places, and even the lowland heart of Ireland, still undrained, was interspersed with lakes and bogs. Scrubby woodland covered half the island. To English observers the wildness of the terrain and the wildness of the people were all one. Where the country was ‘nothing but woods, rocks, great bogs and barren ground’, all untilled, the inhabitants were bound to live ‘like wild and savage persons’, by robbery and rustling. True, in many parts of the island neither the terrain nor political conditions encouraged patient tillage, but the English view of the Irish as semi-nomadic herdsmen and barbarians was a travesty. Corn was cultivated where the land suited. Yet those crops were often laid waste and burnt in the raids between Irish lords; incendiary methods which were indigenous but would be adopted by the English in time.

Every observer noted the transient nature of Irish society: the scattered
settlements, houses which were easily erected and as easily abandoned, fields with temporary fences, the mobility of the great cattle herds which were the movable wealth of the lords and their dependants, and which could be driven to places of safety, or raided by enemies. Such transience was conducive to the growth of neither wealth nor population. The economy of Gaelic Ireland was primarily one of subsistence, and while coinage was known and used it was not central to its system of exchange. Taxation was exacted in the form of food and billeting of troops. There were probably less than half a million people in later medieval Ireland, and the population, unlike that of England, was not set to recover in the course of the sixteenth century. Much of the island was impenetrable and inaccessible; not only because of the difficulties of the terrain, the lack of roads and bridges and maps, but because of the dangers of ambush and attack unless travellers had the protection of the lord through whose territory they ventured. The lords themselves rode with armed bands.

To the English governors, Gaelic Ireland was ‘the land of war’ and the Irish were ‘Irish enemies’. This was not because there was a state of open war, but because of the radical estrangement between the Gaelic Irish, beyond the Pale, and the English of Ireland, the Englishry, who lived in the ‘land of peace’, where English laws, civility and customs were preserved. The English lordship in Ireland had, by Henry VII’s accession, contracted to the coastal plain between Dublin and Dundalk – the four loyal (or half-loyal) counties of Dublin, Kildare, Louth and Meath – plus the towns of Drogheda, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Galway and the royal fortress of Carrickfergus in the north-east. In the late fifteenth century a Pale was established, as in Calais, ringed around with a system of dykes and castles. In Dublin the institutions of English central and local government, and the concepts of authority which underlay them, were replicated: there was a Parliament, there was the king’s Irish Council, there were the four courts of King’s Bench, Chancery, Exchequer and Common Pleas. The law here was the common law; the language English, albeit of an archaic kind.