poorly equipped to deal with invasions by sea.10 As a result, native Irish kings were completely unable to deal with a Norman invasion by sea in the late twelfth century, which also introduced to Ireland the practice of feudalism. This was a Latin legal system under which land was assigned to individuals purely on the basis of royal decrees. For four centuries, this new, centralised legal and political order would coexist alongside a native Irish society characterised by local dynastic kingdoms.
The Normans created new, fortified town walls and castles to subjugate local populations while also encouraging native Irish chieftains to act as mercenaries in Anglo-Scottish wars.11 Through such military expeditions, the Irish learnt new methods of horsemanship, archery and shipbuilding, while fortified stone dwellings, akin to tower homes rather than castles, became more common. Ulster soldiers who fought as part of Edward I’s invasion of western Scotland (1296–1304) were able to re-establish themselves as local Scottish lords, in the process making the west coast of Scotland and the Kingdom of the Isles nominally safe for the Norman kings of England while also being considered an acceptable arrangement by opposing Scottish kings.12 This allowed many Irish chieftains to occupy a secure middle ground in Norman society that seemed to guarantee political stability. As a result, many reacted unfavourably when Donal O’Neill, calling himself ‘King of Ulster and, by hereditary right, true heir of the whole of Ireland’, supported the Scottish Bruce dynasty when it defied secular and clerical rulers by launching a major, albeit unsuccessful, invasion of Ireland (1315–18). This campaign claimed that the Irish and Scottish nations were one, that both aspired that ‘God willing, our nation may be restored to her former liberty’, while O’Neill would defend his actions by sending a remonstrance to Pope John XXII, in which he accused the Normans of England of inherent treachery and argued that it was the Irish alone who had ‘eminently endowed the Irish church’.13
A desire to emphasise an inheritance to rule that predated Norman times surfaced across Irish-speaking society during the fourteenth century, including in Scotland and the Kingdom of the Isles, which retained its own coronation rites, bishop and legal system, including a record-keeper and weights-and-measures officer.14 Gaelic chieftains also expected none but their own family members to hold high ecclesiastical office. This was a cause of tension because in the eyes of the diocesan church, which was urban and Latin speaking, Gaeilge speakers’ sense of values was less Christian than the new Norman settlers.15 Particularly in the northern half of the country, Irish society was predominantly rural, nomadic and caste-based, and dealt not in currency but exclusively in goods and even (in the post-Viking age) people.16 It has been suggested that the closest international parallel with Irish society at this time can actually be found in Japan, where a similar bardic, as well as military-chieftain, culture existed, and ‘constant feuding between the clans … was not the ideal circumstance for traders and merchants’.17
Although Irish music and culture partly became a tool of Christian expression, reputedly at English insistence, churchmen condemned the arts of poetry and music that, in Irish society, were not used for mere artistic or entertainment purposes. Instead, they were used to celebrate the status of an Irish bardic tradition as the supposed custodian of literally all values, learning and sense of history, dating back to the earliest times.18 A native style of music, played on bagpipes or the wire-strung harp, existed to accompany such recitations, but this musical art form was ‘not merely not European’ but was ‘quite remote from it’, being ‘closer to some forms of Oriental music’, practiced from the Middle to Far East, in its combined use of grace notes, improvisation and historical storytelling.19 Irish culture became self-referential and historicist to a high degree because of the absence of an Irish-speaking population abroad with which to engage in cultural exchanges, except in Scotland. Critically, however, this link with Scotland began to decline during the later fourteenth century. Continental political ties developed among the Scottish nobility through their intermarriage with the French during the Anglo-French wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but no corresponding development took place within Ireland. Instead, intermarriage between Irish and old Norman families created a greater degree of insularity within Irish society, as did a growing religious use, by the fifteenth century, of Irish rather than Latin as the language of communication.20
The Irish adapted to urban, or Latin, culture better in the southern half of the island. By the fourteenth century, Gaeilge-speaking Irish noble families acted alongside the Normans as traders in several port towns along the southern coastline of Ireland. Reflecting Anglo-Norman ties with Calais and the European lowlands, these Irish families traded materials and foodstuffs, such as hides and fish, with Belgium, France and Spain and, soon thereafter, also made inroads via Bristol into business life in Wales and England. The English Crown, however, viewed the Irish as inherently disloyal, as well as inhabitants of a different domain, and so responded with discriminatory legislation.21 Under the Statute of Kilkenny, written in French during 1366 (English would not become the language of England until the fifteenth century), the King’s subjects were forbidden to trade or intermarry with the Irish, to use the Irish language or to recognise Irish law. Contact with Irish musicians, poets and singers – each of whom occupied royal court status within Gaeilge-speaking Irish society – were also forbidden ‘in view of the danger of espionage’.22 On the whole, however, trade and commerce served to strengthen Anglo-Irish links because the overseas trade of Dublin in particular was confined to the Irish Sea, involved more imports than exports and attempted to regulate other urban trade within Ireland.23
The pivotal role of bankers and a mercantile–military elite in fifteenth-century Europe impacted on Ireland during the dynasty of the Tudors, a family of Welsh origins that put an end to Norman rule in England in 1485 and allowed private commercial enterprise to become a feature of government.24 The Tudors reinvented Anglo-Irish relations by refusing to recognise the historic Kingdom of the Isles and making parliamentary government (which had hitherto met rarely in either England or Ireland) an instrument of English power by ruling that all Irish parliaments must be perpetually subordinate to the English parliament. The motive of the Tudor policy of ‘leaving the great Irish families undisturbed as long as they acknowledged the royal authority in church and state’ (a policy often termed ‘surrender and re-grant’) was primarily financial, but it served to undermine Gaelic Irish society quickly, most notably in Ulster.25 Amidst opposition, some of the northern O’Neills accepted Tudor titles and developed a familiarity with London court society primarily because the traditional O’Neill claim to kingship was not only in the process of being outlawed but also faced a new military opposition from loyal Scottish lords.26 This soon created an Irish determination to look to the European continent for alternative allies. The emergence of Scottish dynastic ties to England and France coincided with the creation of Scottish cities and universities during the fifteenth century, but attempts to found a university in Ireland, during 1320 and 1464, had failed, while Irish students were often not welcome in England.27 The exclusion of Ireland from the continental intellectual renaissance marked primarily by the late medieval creation of the university had caused
