The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (10 page)

As Henry’s reign continued, the pendulum would swing back: in 1166 MacMurrough’s enemies launched a joint attack, taking him by surprise; he was driven from Meath, repudiated by the Norse of Dublin and forced to seek refuge in his own fastness of Leinster. Yet even here he would not be secure: his allies rejected him and he fled Ireland barely in time to save his life, taking ship for Bristol. He had been humiliated – and, already desperate to regain his lands, he turned now towards Europe for succour.

Much of the story of these times has come down to us courtesy of Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales, 1146–23) – clergyman, writer, traveller and observer of this complicated contemporary cultural scene. Giraldus is an ambivalent figure in Irish history: his portraits of the country are among the earliest comprehensive accounts that have survived, but they are far from objective and as a result make for bracing reading. He was himself partly of Norman stock, partly of Welsh; he was a fervent supporter of the Anglo-Norman newcomers to the Irish political scene; and he makes no bones of his opinions. ‘I have been at pains,’ he declares, ‘to unfold clearly the story of the subjugation of the Irish people, and of the taming of the ferocity of a very barbarous nation in these our own times.’
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He writes scathingly of the barbarity and uncouthness of the Irish: their refusal to mine or till the soil correctly or to trade as they ought to trade, their cunning and violent ways, their lack of honesty. He does remark on their fine stature and their way with music – but in general, compliments are thin on the ground. These harsh portrayals may, however, be seen as carrying a little less weight when one remembers that he was equally scornful in his attitudes towards the Welsh, the English and even, on occasion, the Normans themselves. Endlessly curious and probing, fascinated with every detail of language and culture, partial, political, ‘self-admiring, highly critical of others and therefore quarrelsome and a mean enemy’, Giraldus is a gripping but dangerous guide through this early period in the story of Ireland.
²

In his account written seventeen years after Dermot MacMurrough’s death, Giraldus describes him as one who ‘preferred to be feared by all rather than loved…. He was inimical towards his own people and hated by others. All men’s hands were against him and he was hostile to all men.’
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Giraldus was certainly no admirer of MacMurrough: such descriptions have, as a result, done much to establish the Leinsterman’s poor reputation in Irish history. Not even Giraldus, however, could fully encapsulate the complexities of MacMurrough’s personality. Here was a foster-child of common birth, who rose to power in his own right; a man who curried favour with a foreign king, but who was very far from standing in awe of the noblemen of his native Ireland: ‘from his earliest youth and his first taking of the kingship,’ Giraldus notes disapprovingly, ‘he oppressed his nobles, and raged against the chief men of his kingdom with a tyranny grievous and impossible to bear’, on one occasion blinding and killing seventeen noblemen of Leinster. He ‘loved the generous, he hated the mean’, and yet was as bloodthirsty and violent as they make them.
⁴

Giraldus was quite correct: those who stood in MacMurrough’s way tended to pay a heavy price, with massacre joining ritual blinding as his favourite means of laying down the law. And, while he had lavished financial favours upon the Church in Leinster, not even its representatives were immune from his violence. Take, for example, the scene in 1132 at Kildare – at this time, the effective capital of Leinster. A rival dynasty had appointed their candidate, Mór, as abbess of the influential monastery, in the process thoroughly upsetting MacMurrough’s political machinations. Rather than agonize unduly on his next move, however, he moved swiftly, ordering the abbess to be abducted by his men and raped: Mór, divested brutally of her virginity, was in the process disqualified from her position. MacMurrough now completed the job to his satisfaction: the abbess’s house was burned, many of her followers were killed – and a MacMurrough appointee was installed in the post in her stead. In another episode, he had seized Tiernan O’Rourke’s wife Dervorgilla – although the records imply that she was a willing refugee from an ugly and loveless marriage – and kept her at his headquarters at Ferns for a year before sending her home. It was an act calculated to humiliate and weaken his adversary. Such was MacMurrough’s style, rooted in a political climate that was positively Sicilian in its intensity and nastiness. His special hatred of Dublin, for example, can be explained by the fact that its people had murdered his father and buried him in the court of their assembly hall in the company of a dead dog – a potent and humiliating mark of disrespect. As MacMurrough did, so had he been done by.

In the traditional telling of the tale, MacMurrough is uniquely wicked and treacherous: the forerunner of every back-stabbing sucker-up to the English that has ever roamed the pages of Irish history. But in seeking the help of the powerful, he was merely doing what ambitious or desperate chieftains have always done. The crucial difference in this case was that he was asking for assistance from what was – in spite of recent disputes over the English succession and in spite of occasional reverses in policy and arms – the most organized and brutal expansionist power in western Europe. It was not a connection to be exploited carelessly.

Henry II had inherited an English kingdom that had already been in Norman hands for over a century. Its ruling class was cultured: its members may have been descended from Vikings who once ravaged western Europe, but they were now part of a sophisticated French-speaking community. This was a paradoxical society: a world of sword and blood and shocking brutality, but one too of legal and architectural advances, of chivalry and courtly love. England, moreover, was but one component in a wider civilization: that loose entity that historians have named in retrospect the Angevin (Plantagenet) Empire. This was not a state in any modern sense of the word, but rather a jigsaw of kingdoms and duchies that stretched from southern Scotland to the south coast of England and from Normandy itself along the Atlantic seaboard of France to the Pyrenees. These lands were bound together not by a cohesive government or administration or civil service but rather by force of arms and by the fealty of a host of local rulers to Henry Plantagenet himself, the French-speaking and French-based ruler of a conglomeration that dominated northwestern Europe.

Norman civilization was defined by a hunger for land – just as their Viking ancestors had exploded out of Scandinavia to wreak havoc across Europe, so too the Normans began fanning out across the continent centuries later, establishing kingdoms in Sicily and southern Italy and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as in France and Britain. This movement was part of a wider trend, brought about in part by the climatic event called the Medieval Warm Period that spans several centuries at the end of the first millennium. Temperatures rose during this era, agriculture flourished and populations exploded; from Russia, Poland and the Balkans through Germany to France, people were on the move searching for new homes and new sources of food. It was inevitable that, as they pressed from their own territories into those of their neighbours, tensions would be inflamed and blood spilled. And it is against such large tapestries – spanning cultural development, climatic conditions and politics – that the first Anglo-Norman incursion into Ireland must be viewed. It was not a unique or even especially remarkable event, simply one that ties Ireland directly into the experience of the European mainstream.

MacMurrough, his wife, his daughter Aoife and a handful of supporters landed at Bristol in the summer of 1166. The party then made its way across the Channel to Normandy and from there travelled southwest to the court of Henry II in Aquitaine; and here MacMurrough offered Henry homage and fealty.
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The Norman verse poem entitled
The Song of Dermot and the Earl
describes the explicitly feudal nature of the contract between the two. Dermot addresses Henry:

Henceforth all the days of my life

On condition that you be my helper

So that I do not lose everything

You I shall acknowledge as sire and lord.
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In exchange for an army, in other words, MacMurrough would give land. Henry had by now been on the throne for twelve years, and he was a match in cunning and ruthlessness for the Irish chieftain who came seeking his help. Though doubtless pleased to accept MacMurrough’s fealty, Henry was still cautious about becoming directly involved in what might prove to be a risky Irish adventure. So he prepared to enter the debate by proxy, providing MacMurrough with a letter authorizing his subjects to enter the fray. This in itself was more than enough to raise an army, and a well-pleased MacMurrough left France for England, intent on mustering a force as soon as possible.

Henry had engineered a situation that suited him well. He was a leader with restless and acquisitive knights to satisfy – and one, moreover, whose authority rested on fragile foundations. The Angevin Empire was certainly a power to be reckoned with in Europe, but it was also subject to continual pressure on its borders. In the north, Scotland could be handled by treaty and diplomacy, but Wales had proved impossible to pacify completely, its colonists increasingly pinned down in the chains of castles and fortresses that pockmarked the mountainous terrain. In the east, the ascendant French monarchy had designs on Normandy and Anjou; and in the south, the papacy represented another, highly potent, focus of political power. Henry would attempt to deal with this last problem by bringing the English Church to heel: the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket – that turbulent priest who refused to bend his will to that of the king – would be murdered in his own cathedral in 1170. In this wide geopolitical context, then, the presence of a still-autonomous Ireland on the empire’s northwestern wing was a threat and an irritant: Henry wanted to secure the unruly flanks of his own realm; and he wanted to achieve this by bringing these flanks once and for all within his own sphere of influence.

Once again, the interests of the political and the ecclesiastical coincided. Henry had, in fact, entertained the idea of pulling Ireland into his empire well before the arrival of MacMurrough at his gates. As early as 1155, in fact, at a council at Winchester, the young king had discussed this very possibility. There was a strong clerical body of opinion in favour of such a move: the English Church at Canterbury had been riled by the papal decision three years before that rejected its claims to ecclesiastical control over Ireland; Pope Eugenius III had ruled that Armagh could perfectly well take care of its own affairs. The meeting at Winchester, therefore, had been an opportunity for Canterbury to grasp what it had previously lost. In the event, Henry had set aside the idea of entering the Irish political scene – but only for the moment, and the groundwork for such an intervention had already been laid.

The Plantagenet claim to Ireland was further underscored in the form of
Laudabiliter
, an edict ostensibly issued to Henry II by Pope Adrian IV, who reigned from 1154 to 1159. In twelfth-century Europe, with its united universal Church, the papacy stood at the apex of the feudal power structure: it was, therefore, always a good idea to have the pope on side; and
Laudabiliter
certainly appeared to demonstrate a cordial understanding between the papacy and the Plantagenets. The edict assented to the occupation of Ireland, both for the good of the Irish themselves and in order to reform the Irish Church further and bind it more closely to Rome; as a result, the edict and its contents have always played a fraught role in Irish history. It is accepted nowadays that a papal bull entitled
Laudabiliter
certainly existed and that it was indeed issued on behalf of Adrian. The original contents of the document, however, are much less clear: it is unlikely that they will ever be known for certain, and the text that exists today is probably a concoction of some kind. For one thing, it does not conform to the style of papal records from that period; nor is there any record of such a text in the papal archives. Furthermore, the original text known as
Laudabiliter
comes down to us from Giraldus, who claimed to have copied out the original faithfully: he may well have done so, of course, but as an Anglo-Norman historian and propagandist of note, he had obvious motives for fabrication. Yet the crucial fact is that people at the time believed in
Laudabiliter
: as a text, it generated its own mythology within the medieval period.
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Nobody – not even the Irish themselves – contested the pope’s right to grant possession of Ireland to Henry. In a tradition dating from the time of the fourth-century Emperor Constantine, it was popularly believed that the western islands of Europe were the property of the pope, to bestow on whomsoever he chose. Contemporary opinion was clear: Henry had a papal licence to invade.

The motives and actions of the papacy in this case stemmed from its opinions over the state of the Church in Ireland. Adrian’s predecessors may have been of the opinion that the Irish clergy could be trusted to run their own affairs; but Adrian and his advisers had become convinced that their flock in Ireland had strayed too far from the Roman straight and narrow and required a degree of realignment – and he was prepared to ally himself with the Anglo-Normans in order to bring this realignment about. Adrian would have been influenced, perhaps, by the fact that the system of tithe – ‘Peter’s Pence’, by which taxes went to the Church – was not adhered to in Ireland. His opinions would also have been coloured by scandalous tales that had begun doing the rounds: it was claimed that Ireland, far from being a land of saints and scholars, was in a state of scandalous moral disarray. ‘Never before had he known the like, in whatever depth of barbarism; never had he found men so shameless in regard of morals, so dead in regard to rites, so stubborn in regard of discipline, so unclean in regard of life. They were Christians in name, in fact pagans.’
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Such comments had the effect of spreading throughout Europe the idea that the Irish were little more than barbarians: it was all a far cry from the message disseminated by Colum Cille and Columbanus, and it helped to establish a school of anti-Irish literature that was as influential as it was persistent.