Reasons for leaving: The effect of conflict on English landholding in late thirteenth-century Leinster (original) (raw)
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“To Serve Well and Faithfully”: The Agents of English Aristocratic Rule in Leinster, c.1272-c.1315
2003
The period between the early 1270s and ca. 1315 was a turning point in the history of the English lordship of Ireland. It was during these years that the balance of power between the English settlers in Ireland (the Anglo-Irish) and the Gaelic Irish began to change, the balance starting to tip in favor of the native Irish who consequently began to encroach on the Anglo-Irish settlements. As far as landholding in Ireland by lords based in England is concerned, the period has been seen as a critical one that led to changes in how English lords viewed their lands in Ireland, and in their capacity to administer and defend these lands from a distance. This is a view that can be challenged in various ways, and in this paper a prosopographical approach to the study of the men who administered the Irish estates of four major English lords in the province of Leinster in this period is employed. This demonstrates that these English lords maintained a close interest in their Irish lands throughout the period, taking care to employ experienced and trustworthy men as seneschals whenever possible, and to keep a close eye on the activities of these seneschals through the agency of council members, attorneys , auditors, and messengers. It concludes that English lordship in Ireland was clearly still a viable option for the lords of the substantial liberties of Leinster in this period, and that the employment of Anglo-Irish knights , particularly as seneschals, was integral to this success, bringing as they did military and political advantages to the administrations they headed.
History: the Journal of the Historical Association, 2023
Over the last number of decades, the relationship between king and magnate in medieval Ireland has been prominent in scholarship, but less attention has been given to the tenantry below. Drawing on a range of sources from chancery material to chronicle evidence, this article analyses one such tenantry community, the 'barons of Leinster'. During the first half of the thirteenth century, the Marshal lords of Leinster clashed with royal authorities in Ireland on three occasions, and in these circumstances, the tenants of Leinster had to choose between their king and their lord. For the lords of Leinster, the support of their tenantry was not to be presumed, and hence they had to relentlessly compete for the allegiance of their tenantry with the other lords in Ireland and the king of England. This essay argues that status and marital ties influenced tenantry allegiance in Ireland, in particular that assimilation into a new lord's household was more important for the lesser tenantry who held land in both Ireland and Wales than for the great landed barons who also benefited from royal patronage. Hence, this study contributes to the rich ongoing discussion on the importance and role of tenantry communities in the Plantagenet dominions. 1 'his sworn men and knights, in whom he trusted'.
Peter Crooks (ed.), Government, war and society in medieval Ireland: essays by Edmund Curtis, A.J. Otway-Ruthven and James Lydon (Four Courts: Dublin, 2008), pp 353–75
Factionalism and noble power in English Ireland, c.1361–1423
This thesis offers a reappraisal of noble power and political culture in the English colony in Ireland in the late middle ages. It seeks to move beyond narrowly-conceived studies of the colony's chief governors and institutional apparatus, which remain historiographical staples for this period. Implicit in such writings is the assumption that a firm central authority provided by the king was preferable to 'unruly' aristocratic power. This thesis is an attempt to interrogate that assumption by closely examining one 'negative' trait particularly associated with the English lords of late medieval Ireland:
Gaelic lordly Settlement in 13th and 14th Century Ireland
Universitetet i Bergen eBooks, 2005
Gaelic lordly Settlement in 13th and 14th Century Ireland Introduction The arrival of the Anglo-Normans to Ireland in 1169 and over the subsequent decades was not like the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. Large areas of Ireland remained under the control of indigenous Irish lords and princes throughout the high medieval period right down to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These areas of indigenous Irish or Gaelic-Irish control included not only regions of the island unsuitable for intensive arable cultivation, but also agriculturally-fertile districts that were controlled by strong rulers able to withstand the military advances of the Anglo-Normans. This is in direct contrast to England, where the native Saxon aristocracy was more or less completely replaced as a landowning and governing class by the conquering Normans. Ireland's experience during this period bears close similarity to that of Wales, a country which also saw the large-scale survival of native Welsh princedoms alongside Norman lordships. Certain historians have argued in the past that anything up to three-quarters of the island of Ireland was under direct Anglo-Norman control by ca. 1250. Theoretically this would have left only one quarter of the country under the direct rule of native Irish princes and lords, although, technically, even these men owed allegiance to the English king as lord of Ireland. The regions of Ireland that saw undisputed Irish princely and lordly survival included most of the province of Ulster west of the River Bann, much of eastern and northeast Connacht and large parts of west Munster (O'Conor 1998:73). It is now becoming clear, however, that actual Anglo-Norman settlement on the ground in many of the areas that they did control, as opposed to just political overlordship, seems to have been far less intensive than many historians have argued for in the past. Many Irish lords within areas conquered and controlled by the Anglo-Normans, such as much of Connacht, Munster and the bogland and mountain zones of the Anglo-Norman lordships of Meath and Leinster, were not dispossessed of their lands, or at least were left with a substantial proportion of their old possessions
English Ireland may not have been set apart entirely from political developments in late-medieval Europe, but neither were its politics without their own distinctive flavour. Two of the most familiar structural features of Irish politics in the centuries after the English invasion are the island’s status as a lordship separate from, but dependent upon, the English Crown; and the division of the island into two peoples. Historians seek to understand and explain dependency and division by describing Ireland as a classic colonial situation. The problem with the colonial paradigm is not that it is wrong, but that, by itself, it explains too much and too little. What is most interesting about Ireland as a specimen of European political ideas in action is that the characteristics of dependency and division sat awkwardly – indeed, sat increasingly awkwardly – in the evolving thought-world of late-medieval Europe. This was the era when the ‘state’ was emerging as something more than an idea and was beginning to coalesce with conceptions of nationhood. As Andrea Ruddick has shown, the kingdom of England was being conceptualized in the late Middle Ages as a defined physical space that supplied the homeland of a distinct people. How, then, was one to define the status of those of the king’s English lieges who resided outside the realm yet claimed the liberties of freeborn Englishmen as their birth right? Since the king could not perform his office in person, how much of his sovereign authority devolved upon his representative in Ireland, who took an oath of office based upon the coronation oath? What were the king’s duties, whether of care or correction, towards the native inhabitants of Ireland whom the settlers had displaced and disenfranchised? And finally – a question prior to all of these – by what right did the monarch of England claim to rule Ireland in the first place?
'Irishmen and Islesmen in the kingdoms of Dublin and Man, 1052-1171', Ériu, 43 (1992), 93-133
The period between the battle of Clontarf and the Anglo-Norman invasion remains one of the most neglected in Ireland's history. Too late for the students of early Ireland, who often see Brian Boruma's death in 1014 as a convenient end-point, and too early for the later medievalists for whom the cataclysmic events of the late 1160s form a natural point of departure, it has fallen between both stools. Many aspects of this vital era may be said to have suffered as a result, but some remain more heavily shrouded in obscurity than others. One of the areas in greatest need of elucidation is the nature of the relationship at this point between the Irish and the descendants of those Vikings who had earlier settled both in Ireland and in the islands between it and Britain. This paper can claim to do little more than scratch the surface of the problem, by outlining the connectionprimarily political and military--between the two in the century or so before the fall of Viking Dublin.
A Weed in the Corn: Surrender and Regrant in 16th Century Ireland
(Approved, Unpublished Masters Thesis.) The 16th century was one of rapid change for Ireland due to the encroaching control of the Tudors. Tudor policies rapidly changed the Gaelic way of life, sparking rebellion. These rebellions caused the Tudor government to look to other ways of subjecting the Irish, such as surrender and regrant. By focusing on one family, the O’Neills of Ulster, I propose to demonstrate that before surrender and regrant, the Gaelic lords were able to keep the English primarily located within the Pale.