The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (14 page)

This feeling found its clearest expression in what might be called the first formal articulation of Irish alienation from English rule. Written in about 1318 from King Donal O’Neill in Ulster to Pope John XXII, the
Remonstrance of the Princes
expresses the rising sense of grievance and outrage felt by the Irish against the English community in the country.

There is no hope whatever of our having peace with them. For such is their arrogance and excessive lust to lord it over us and so great is our due and natural desire to throw off the unbearable yoke of their slavery and to recover our inheritance wickedly seized upon by them, that as there has not been hitherto, there cannot now be, or ever henceforth be established, sincere good will between them and us in this life. For we have such a natural hostility to each other arising from the mutual, malignant and incessant slaying of fathers, brothers, nephews and other near relatives and friends that we can have no inclination to reciprocal friendship in our time or that of our sons….
¹

The
Remonstrance
is a powerful statement of Irish cultural identity. Far from being a piece of proto-nationalist propaganda, though, it does not overtly reject the English right to rule Ireland. Instead, it internationalizes its focus by referencing the original papal decision to grant the rule of Ireland to the English Crown; a copy of
Laudabiliter
was even included in the dispatch to clarify the point. The pope gave Ireland to the English, the
Remonstrance
argues, on the understanding that the country would be governed well and with justice; and the Irish were willing to become loyal vassals of the Crown on the same basis.

The Crown, however, never kept its side of the bargain:

Their regular clergy dogmatically assert that it is no more a sin to kill an Irishman than a dog or any brute…. They have striven with all their might and with every treacherous artifice in their power, to wipe our nation out entirely and utterly to extirpate it…. In order to shake off the hard and intolerable yoke of their slavery and to recover our ancient liberty…we are compelled to wage deadly war with them…rather than to bear like women their atrocious outrages.

Equally, the Remonstrance was not antipathetic to the English
per se
. Rather, its grievances were directed towards those colonists who had crossed the sea and settled as an Anglo-Irish ‘middle nation’ in Ireland, in the process taking the best land and reducing the Gaelic economy to near destitution.

In rejecting as legally void the English authority over Ireland, O’Neill was naturally asserting his own claim to the country based on his lineage. But he also had a larger political agenda: rather than press this claim in his own right, he wanted to pass his notional throne on to another claimant, Edward Bruce (
c
.1280–1318), the brother of King Robert Bruce of Scotland (1274–1329). By 1318, in fact, Edward had already been involved in Ireland for several years, having landed at the head of a Scottish army on the Antrim coast in the spring of 1315. For O’Neill, the invitation made political sense: in offering the throne of Ireland to Edward, he could protect his own local interests in Ulster from a host of rivals; his calculations followed a time-honoured Gaelic model of placing local needs and local power structures first and foremost.

Scottish intervention in Irish affairs was by now commonplace. The Norse city-state of Dublin had had strong and enduring ties with the Norse of Scotland; later, the new English colonial authorities in Ireland had become accustomed to playing their part in the wars with the Scots; mercenaries from Scotland were long-established players on the Irish military scene; and at this very time, Robert Bruce himself had married an Ulster noblewoman. Fresh from an indecisive victory over the English at Bannockburn in June 1314, Bruce understood the importance of Ireland to the future of Scotland. At best, he could safely install Edward on the Irish throne, wrest the country from its English orbit and secure a valuable ally to the west. Even if the conquest of Ireland could not in the end be accomplished, he might hope for a secure base along the eastern seaboard of Ulster and control of the northern half of the Irish Sea. At worst, it would distract the English on his southern border by opening up a second, expensive flank in the battle; and it would disrupt the flow of Irish manpower and grain that hitherto had helped to maintain the wars between England and Scotland.

The Scottish invasion of Ireland was particularly savage. Having pacified much of eastern Ulster and created a safe Irish base, Edward led his men south, the intention being not to capture and subdue the fortified bases of Leinster but to burn communities, lay waste to the countryside and create anarchy for the Dublin government. It was, from their point of view, a sensible strategy – the Scots had besieged the castle at Carrickfergus at the heart of their Ulster base for over a year before finally capturing it, and they had presumably learned a lesson or two in the process – and it worked too: the rich farmland of Leinster provided the economic pulse of the lordship and the Scots’ depredations did indeed create economic turmoil. But it was unfortunate for the invaders – not to mention the civilian population of Ireland – that the three-year campaign in the country coincided with a Europe-wide famine. While the Scottish troops might be able to seize what provisions they could find, a succession of bitter winters and cold, stormy summers meant that there was simply no food to be had.

Ultimately, Edward Bruce’s campaign failed because, in spite of the Crown’s increasingly tenuous hold over Ireland, the authorities’ control of Dublin was never seriously compromised. In 1317 the Scots briefly threatened to take the city, and the authorities responded by setting fire to the northwestern suburbs in an effort to hamper the advance; this strategy worked, even if in the process the fire spread and burned down much of the centre of the city. Nor did the Irish come together in an alliance against the Crown; and the Anglo-Irish barons, rooted in their own cultural identity, saw clearly that the English connection offered more than a Scottish one ever could. Edward withdrew once more into Ulster and, on 14 October 1318, he was killed in battle near Dundalk; parts of his dismembered body were brought to Dublin as evidence of his death.

The invasion was eventually stemmed, then, but at great cost. The slowness of the Dublin authorities in meeting and defeating the Scots was evidence of their own underlying military and fiscal weakness; and their sluggish and limited response to the destruction wrought by the Scottish armies exposed further what was clearly the threadbare nature of the English presence in Ireland. Put frankly, governance of much of Ireland was increasingly beyond the administration’s strength. Vast tracts of countryside lay wasted following the Scottish campaigns, and would remain unproductive in the decades ahead. The castles, keeps and fortifications built during the thirteenth century were decaying; on the eve of the Scottish onslaught long sections of the walls of Dublin were crumbling; highways, causeways and bridges were increasingly in a state of ruin. The story was the same in towns across the east and south of Ireland. The treasury in Dublin simply did not have the funds to undertake the necessary repairs. The countryside was depopulating too: in these years, many of the smaller communities established in the first years of the lordship vanished from the records for ever; and the English government, involved now in expensive and debilitating war with France, was in no position to invest attention, much less hard cash, in its Irish colony. And, to complete this litany of woe, outbreaks of smallpox and influenza swept through Ireland in the 1320s.

The arrival of the Black Death in Ireland, although it did not mark the culmination of these misfortunes, certainly added to them. The disease had first arrived in southern Europe in the spring of 1348, coming to Sicily from the Black Sea aboard Genoese trading vessels: following long-established trading routes, it had then spread with terrifying speed across the continent. It was first recorded in Ireland in the late summer at the eastern ports of Drogheda, Howth and Dalkey – ferried on ships from Chester and Bristol, maybe, or from France on vessels carrying wine to the Irish market. At Kilkenny, Friar Clyn recorded the frightful impact of the plague before himself being struck down:

More people in the world have died in such a short time of plague than has been heard of since the beginning of time…. The pestilence was so contagious that whosoever touched the sick and the dead was immediately infected and died, so that penitent and confessor were carried to the grave…that pestilence deprived of human inhabitants villages and cities, so that there was scarcely found a man to dwell therein…. Many died of boils and abscesses and pustules which erupted on their shins or under their armpits; others died frantic with pain in their head and others spitting blood…this plague was at its height in Kilkenny during Lent; for on the sixth day of March eight of the Friars Preachers died. There was hardly a house in which only one had died, but as a rule man and wife with their children and all the family went the common way of death
.
²

The Irish chronicles give the plague only glancing mentions. Its effects on the society of Gaelic Ireland remain elusive; but it is clear that its impact was much greater on the crowded and urban world of Anglo–Ireland. It is estimated that the population of Dublin – approximately twenty-five thousand before the onset of the plague – shrank by more than half in its immediate aftermath, and had fallen to less than five thousand a century later.
³

Such records as have survived report the gloom of these years in the lordship. By the 1360s Ireland had become a charge on, rather than a net contributor to, the coffers of the English exchequer. A circle of decay set in, as agriculture diminished, government revenues fell away, and the reach and clout of the authorities declined. Dublin itself became increasingly detached from the life of the lordship in Munster and Leinster: it became difficult and dangerous to travel from the city to other parts of Ireland; and such urban centres as Limerick and Cork once more became the
de facto
self-governing city-states that they had been in Norse times.

The situation for the colonists became increasingly straitened. In 1349, the citizens of Carlow are recorded as complaining that their lands were being attacked and plundered to within the shadow of the town walls, and the extinction of the settlement itself seemed likely; in 1388, the people of Cork expressed an identical grievance. It is tempting to see these as ploys designed to extract more money from a reluctant treasury – and, indeed, this was doubtless sometimes the case. But not always: by the 1390s, Carlow had truly been plundered and its people had for the most part fled; security had further deteriorated to such an extent that a strong military escort was needed to venture between one town and another; protection money was paid to the Irish chieftains by those colonists who could afford to do so.

It was not, however, all a tale of woe. These same surviving records, for example, detail an export trade in rude health. Ireland may have been more isolated now than it had been for years, but it was by no means wholly adrift from the shipping lanes, and contact with other parts of Europe continued apace. Trade with England, Scotland and Flanders throve; ships called at Irish ports from as far away as the Baltic, the Mediterranean and Portugal, bringing wine, silks and other luxuries in return for Irish wool, timber, hides, fish and corn – ample evidence that parts of the Irish countryside were productive in spite of the prevailing political uncertainty. There are glimpses of an export trade in linen – that most Irish of products – to the markets of Bristol. Sometimes, indeed, there are even records of investment and new building in the southern and southeastern ports. And, although this export trade slackened gradually – most dramatically in the aftermath of the Black Death – it continued through the course of the fifteenth century, even as the economic and political strength of the lordship continued to wane.

Significantly, one reason for this vitality lies in a measure of cooperation that, at certain times and in certain places, existed between the cultures of Ireland. As central control diminished, for example, it made sound economic sense for the trading ports (that handled the export trade) and the hinterlands (that controlled the supply of raw materials) to come together on occasion to assure the flow of trading goods to their mutual benefit. For all that violence and bloodshed were common features of Irish life, then, it was also true that the Irish and the English settlers would sometimes be obliged – increasingly – to communicate in non-confrontational ways. Collision could not be the norm always and everywhere: notions of cultural exclusiveness and purity could vanish rapidly amid the rough and tumble of everyday life; and for both sides, this slow process of acculturation manifested itself in the adoption of certain customs, forms of dress, food and drink, and language when it was prudent or profitable to do so.

As a result, Irish appointees began to take up positions in the civic administrations of the coastal ports, often to the chagrin of the local grandees; and there were settlers in parts of the countryside who were scarcely distinguishable, in dress or language or manner, from the Irish alongside whom they lived. The great settler families, such as the earls of Ormond in Leinster and of Desmond in Munster and (most influential of them all) the FitzGeralds of Kildare, continued to identify strongly with England and to consider themselves English – legally, indeed, they could have held no place in the English hierarchy in Ireland had they not done so. Yet even these dynasties were, to a greater or lesser extent, partly gaelicized – they belonged to both cultures and to neither.

The Statutes of Kilkenny, formulated by the Irish parliament sitting at Kilkenny in 1367, had been an early response to this blurring of the cultural lines in Ireland. The statutes had themselves been anticipated in previous legislation governing the relations between the Irish and colonists, but the laws enacted at Kilkenny were much more clearly directed, seeking to impose a solution to the problems of the colony in Ireland and stating baldly why stern measures were necessary: