Episode 34
FEUDAL IRELAND
By the late thirteenth century around two-thirds of Ireland had been conquered by the Normans. The newcomers had taken the most fertile land, and the reason why wild, mountainous country was left to the Gaelic Irish was partly because the land was so unyielding that it was hardly worth the bother of seizing it.
The ‘lordship of Ireland’ was, in practice, the conquered land ruled by the King of England who from the time of King John was also the Lord of Ireland. Over this lordship French feudal law, modified somewhat by English custom, prevailed. Elaborate rules regulated the services to be rendered to a lord, and the duties of a lord to protect those who gave service. At the top were the great lords who gave military service to the crown in return for their estates. For example, Hugh de Lacy, Lord of Meath, had to provide fifty knights to Henry II. These barons sublet much of their land to ‘free tenants’ who had to provide military service as rent. These men in turn would sublet to humbler individuals who paid money or labour service for their farms. In the most densely settled manors the native Irish were forced out. Generally, however, Irish farmers were allowed to stay on, provided they accepted a reduced status in society—indeed, Hugh de Lacy offered free cows to Irish farmers to come back to the lands he had conquered in Meath. These Irish, equivalent to villeins and serfs in England, were known as ‘betaghs’ from the Irish word for a food-rendering client, biatach.
A manor was the lord’s estate. A 1304 survey of the manor of Cloncurry, Co. Kildare, showed that there were: 43 free tenants; 112 burgesses holding two ploughlands—that is, about 600 acres—for 112 shillings a year; 40 farmers renting anything from twenty acres to half an acre; 63 betaghs holding thirty-four and a half acres between them; and 24 cottars paying between 2d and 4d a year for their little plots. Some lesser tenants paid rent in the form of free labour, but at Cloncurry the manor depended on paid service:
The weeding of an acre costs one penny and the cost of mowing, tying and stooking in the field of an acre of wheat is 10 pence, and of an acre of oats is 8 pence, and the cost of carting and stacking in the haggard and the thatching of the stack is 3 pence per acre. And the cost of threshing a crannock of oats is 2 pence. And 5 crannocks of wheat and of oats can be winnowed for one penny.... And each driver and carter gets for his wages 6 shillings and the sower gets the same as the bird-scarer.
Fragments from manorial account books for Grangegorman and Old Ross include incidental expenses such as 15d for a vet—described as ‘a certain medical man’; 3½d for sulphur and 21d for butter to heal the sore necks of oxen; and 1½d a day to a man to make holes in four thousand shingles destined for the granary roof.
The inclusion in placids of the element ‘grange’ provides a clue that the newcomers placed a greater emphasis than before on the cultivation of corn. Certainly the Irish grew a great deal of corn, but the Normans wanted to increase output for export—they knew that there was a good market for it particularly in the cloth-making areas of Flanders. In this they were helped by a distinct improvement in the weather in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Wheat became a more popular crop. On the larger manors there were now eight oxen in a plough team, which was reckoned to be able to plough twenty-five acres in a season.
The lord’s personal farm, which supplied his household, retainers and visitors, was a compact estate known as the demesne. All the rest of the manor was cultivated in large, open fields, where tenants held strips in each to take their share of good and bad soil. One man in Rathcoole, Co. Dublin, had twenty-six acres of arable land widely scattered about in no fewer than twenty strips. The open fields, by agreement, followed a three-course rotation of crops: winter corn, spring corn, and fallow—in other words, a third of the land was left uncultivated in rotation to allow it to recover fertility. The main income of manors still depended on domestic stock, however. The most significant change was the growing emphasis on sheep to provide wool for sale to the Frescobaldi, the Bardi and the Ricardi, great Italian wool merchants from Lucca and Florence.
In the lordship of Ireland the growth in profits and population had been spectacular during the thirteenth century. There was little indication that the ensuing century would be marked by a succession of disasters which came close to destroying it.
Episode 35
‘A GREAT AFFLICTION BEFELL THE COUNTRY’
The first entry in the Annals of Connacht is for the year 1224:
A heavy and terrible shower fell in part of Connacht this year which brought about disease and very great sickness among the cows and beasts of those regions.... Nor was it strange that these portentous things should happen in Connacht at that time, for a great affliction befell the country then, the loss of Cathal Crobhderg son of Turlough O’Connor, King of Connacht; the king most feared and dreaded on every hand in Ireland; the king who carried out most plunderings against the Foreigners and Gaels who opposed him; the king who was the fiercest and harshest towards his enemies that ever lived; the king who most blinded, killed and mutilated rebellious and disaffected subjects ...
... and so on and so on. What the annalist did not know was that Cathal Crobhderg was the last great Gaelic king ever to rule in Ireland. Cathal had survived because he was careful to make arrangements with the English kings and royal governors, pay annual rent to the crown, and obtain papal approval for his authority. Hugh, his heir by feudal law, lacked his father’s wisdom, and soon he was in conflict with relatives and neighbouring barons alike. The full-scale Norman conquest of Connacht ensued.
In 1235 a great invasion force was put together by a Co. Tipperary baron, Richard de Burgo. The war was taken to the Atlantic Ocean, and naval engagements involving O’Flahertys and O’Malleys were at their fiercest around the numerous islands of Clew Bay. After ravaging Murrisk and Achill Island in north Mayo, the invaders advanced northwards and inland to make an assault on the island fortress of the Rock on Lough Key in Roscommon, as the Annals of Connacht relate:
Then a fleet of ships with galleries and siege-engines came to the lake, and they mounted a catapult on a small platform and many stones were hurled by it into the Rock. And since they could not take it by this means they made numerous vessels out of the houses of Ardcarne, collected all the fuel of the district and putting it on board these rafts set it alight. They bound empty barrels about these rafts to keep them afloat, and sent one of their larger ships, protected by a roof of planking, to tow the rafts to the Rock and so set it afire.
But the people in the fortress were seized with fear and came out, and the Royal Governor put in a garrison of armed and armoured Foreigners, well furnished with food and drink. They left the people of Connacht without food or clothing or cattle.
Though the O’Connors and their allies were able to recover the Rock for a time, their power was broken. The five cantreds or baronies nearest Athlone were reserved for King Henry III, but Richard de Burgo became the Lord of Connacht and the possessor of twenty-five cantreds. He built a great castle at Loughrea in east Galway and made it his principal manor. His allies included members of the FitzGerald and de Lacy families who acquired much of the land of Co. Sligo. Even the remote Erris peninsula fell to the Barrett family. Maurice FitzGerald founded Sligo town; and, around another de Burgo castle, the town of Galway began to grow, attracting Anglo-Norman merchant families, the fourteen most prominent becoming known as the ‘Tribes of Galway’.
In a desperate attempt to halt the Norman expansion, a famous agreement was made at Caoluisce, that is Belleek in Co. Fermanagh, in 1258. There Hugh O’Connor of Connacht and Tadhg O’Brien of Thomond ‘gave the kingship of the Gaels of Ireland to Brian O’Neill’. Brian was a descendant of what had been the most powerful dynasty in Ireland at the time of St Patrick, the Uí Néill, the descendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages. At one time the Uí Néill had ruled Meath and all of Ulster west of the River Bann. Now Brian, as King of Tír Eóghain, made a determined bid to revive the old glory days. In 1260, with a great Gaelic
coalition behind him, Brian advanced into the earldom of Ulster to do battle with the foreigners:
Hugh O’Connor went to join Brian O’Neill in the North, taking many of the chief men of Connacht with him. O’Neill and the chief men of Cenél Eóghain went, together with Hugh O’Connor, to Downpatrick to attack the Foreigners, and the Foreigners of that place defeated them both. Brian O’Neill, king of the Gaels of Ireland, was killed.
The death of Brian at the Battle of Downpatrick, along with dozens of high-born Gaelic commanders, seemed to end all hope of halting further conquest, but already some Gaelic rulers were beginning to recover lost territory—a process rapidly hastened by the invasion of Edward Bruce and the Scots.
Episode 36
EDWARD BRUCE ‘CAUSED THE WHOLE OF IRELAND TO TREMBLE’
One reason why the lordship of Ireland was gravely weakened in the final decades of the thirteenth century was that Edward I waged endless wars. While he campaigned in Gascony, fought the Scots and conquered north Wales, encircling it with great castles, the king had constantly called his Irish vassals to his side, imposed heavy emergency war taxes on them, seized grain without paying for it, and even had sections of his Welsh castles prefabricated in Dublin and shipped across the Irish Sea to Anglesey.
His son, Edward II, was then ignominiously routed by the Scots at Bannockburn in 1314. Robert Bruce, the victor, knew that the English king had drawn heavily on his Irish lordship to prosecute the war, and was determined to destroy it. King Robert knew Ireland well: he had taken refuge on Rathlin in 1294 and 1306, and in 1302 he had married Elizabeth, daughter of Richard de Burgo, the ‘Red Earl’ of Ulster and Lord of Connacht.
It was to his brother Edward that Robert Bruce entrusted the invasion of Ireland. A formidable Scots expeditionary force disembarked at Larne on 26 May 1315:
Edward came to Ireland, landing on the coast of north Ulster with the men of three hundred ships, and his warlike slaughtering army caused the whole of Ireland to tremble, both Gael and Foreigner. He began by harrying the choicest part of Ulster, burning Rathmore in Moylinny, and Dundalk, and killing their inhabitants. He then burned Ardee and took the hostages and lordship of the whole province without opposition, and all the Gaels of Ireland called him King of Ireland.
When news of the landing of the Scots arrived, the royal governor, Edmund Butler, was in Munster and the Red Earl was in Connacht attending to his vast estates there. Butler advanced northwards to defend Dublin, while de Burgo made his way to meet the Scots head on:
He brought together a great army from all sides to Roscommon at first, marching thence to Athlone and obliquely through Meath, their numbers being about twenty battalions; and this time the Foreigners spared not saint or shrine, however sacred, nor churchmen or laymen or sanctuary, but went wasting and ravaging across Ireland from the Shannon in the south to Coleraine and Inishowen in the north.... Now Edward and his army threw down the bridge of Coleraine to hinder the earl; and he followed them up and encamped opposite Edward; and between them they left neither wood nor lea nor corn nor crop nor stead nor barn, but fired and burnt them all.
The two armies finally met in battle by the Kellswater at Connor. There on 10 September the Scots spearmen completely overwhelmed the earl’s feudal host.
Close to Connor, the royal castle of Carrickfergus held out. The garrison was reduced to eating hides as the Scots attempted to starve the castle into submission. A parley was arranged in June 1316; the defenders then treacherously seized the Scots negotiators, and later eight of these men were killed and eaten by the garrison. After a siege lasting more than a year Carrickfergus surrendered to Bruce in September 1316.
Meanwhile Edward Bruce was sweeping all before him: he defeated de Lacys in Meath in December 1315, before crushing the royal governor’s army at Ardscull, Co. Kildare, in January. On 1 May 1316 Edward had himself crowned King of Ireland at Dundalk, and his brother, King Robert, joined him in December. After inflicting another defeat on the Red Earl, the two brothers advanced on Dublin. The frantic citizens demolished St Saviour’s Priory and brought its stone across the River Liffey to build a wall along the quays. Further supplies of stone were obtained from St Mary’s Abbey, where the citizens had locked up the Red Earl after he had taken refuge in the city, just in case he would be tempted to join King Robert, his daughter’s husband. The bridge of Dublin was torn down, and, by direction of the mayor, dwellings outside the walls were set on fire. Lacking siege-engines and seeing the desperate measures taken, the Scots turned back.
The Bruce invasion was beginning to fail. Above all, the Scots were being weakened by hunger as a terrible famine took hold in the country. The Bruce brothers rampaged across the country, plundering as far south as Limerick. There was little left to seize during a winter that was even harsher than the one before it. The Laud Annals assert that
[The Scots] were so destroyed with hunger that they raised the bodies of the dead from the cemeteries ... and their women devoured their own children from hunger.... They were reduced to eating each one another, so that out of 10,000 there remained only about 300 who escaped the vengeance of God.
Hunger was to stalk the land many times in the decades that followed the failure of this great Scottish enterprise.
Episode 37
‘FAMINE FILLED THE COUNTRY’
In July 1318 John of Athy, admiral of Edward II’s fleet, captured Thomas Dun, who had organised transportation for the Scots across the North Channel. His supply lines cut, Edward Bruce, who had invaded Ireland three years before, was now on the defensive. His brother, King Robert of Scotland, left Ireland shortly after a newly appointed royal governor, Roger Mortimer, arrived with a substantial force from England. Edward marched south from Ulster, only to meet a formidable army under the command of John de Bermingham at the hill of Faughart near Dundalk. There Edward Bruce, who had crowned himself King of Ireland only a few miles away two years before, was defeated and killed. Not only the English rejoiced at his death: the Annals of Connacht contain this arresting entry for the year 1318:
Edward Bruce, he who was the common ruin of the Gaels and Foreigners of Ireland, was by the Foreigners of Ireland killed at Dundalk by dint of fierce fighting.... And never was there a better deed done for the Irish than this, since the beginning of the world and the banishing of the Formorians from Ireland. For in this Bruce’s time, for three years and a half, falsehood and famine and homicide filled the country, and undoubtedly men ate each other in Ireland.
The Bruce invasion had led to the devastation of much of the island, but it was the English colony there that had suffered most. In more senses than one, the climate of the times was to accelerate the contraction of the lordship of Ireland in the fourteenth century. A steady deterioration of the weather across the northern hemisphere brought in its wake a succession of poor harvests and outbreaks of disease among grazing animals. Norse settlers, for example, were forced by starvation to abandon Greenland to the Inuit. Reports of cannibalism in Europe were made with greater regularity. Was this global cooling the result of volcanic eruptions in Iceland? We cannot be certain. Dendrochronological data—that is, the interpretation of oak-tree growth-rings—demonstrate a general lowering of summer temperatures. What is evident is the proliferation of reports, from a wide variety of sources, telling of hunger and disease. These sources include the Annals of Connacht:
1317:
Great famine this year throughout Ireland.
1318:
Snow the like of which had not been seen for many a long year.
1322:
Great cattle-plague throughout Ireland, the like of which had never been known before.
1324:
The same cattle-plague was in all Ireland this year. It was called the Mael Domnaig.
1325:
The cattle-plague throughout Ireland still.
1327:
A great and widespread visitation of the smallpox throughout Ireland this year, which carried off both lowly and great.
1328:
Much thunder and lightning this year, whereby much of the fruit and produce of all Ireland was ruined, and the corn grew up white and blind.... A great and intolerable wind this summer, with scarcity of food and clothing.... A general visitation of the sickness called slaedan [influenza] throughout Ireland. It lasted three or four days with each person whom it attacked, and it was next to death for him.
1335:
Heavy snow in the spring, which killed most of the small birds of all Ireland.
1338:
Nearly all the sheep in Ireland died this year.
A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process Page 11
