The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (11 page)

Reform, of course, was already being implemented in Ireland, rippling out from St Malachy’s seat of power at Armagh and demonstrating in the process that powerful elements in the Irish Church in these years were by no means averse to further changes. Resistance to tithe had still to be overcome, however, and some elements of a modern ecclesiastical administrative system remained absent: while Ireland now had a network of dioceses, for example, it did not possess a system of parishes, as in England and across western Christendom. In any case, if
Laudabiliter
is to be believed, Pope Adrian knew exactly what he wanted: ‘for the purpose of enlarging the borders of the Church, setting bounds to the progress of wickedness, reforming evil manners, planting virtue, and increasing the Christian religion,’ Henry II was ordered to enter Ireland, ‘and take possession of that island…’. This, then, was the state of affairs when Dermot MacMurrough arrived in Aquitaine.

MacMurrough, understanding the mindset of his putative new allies as he did, imagined that he could tempt them easily with what must be a tantalizing prospect: acres of lush land in Ireland for the taking. He and his entourage, therefore, made their way to west Wales in order to recruit assistance from the colonial barons of Pembrokeshire, who were hard pressed in the face of persistent native Welsh unrest and revolt. This was a promising prospect: surely the colonists would happily trade their unprofitable situation in Wales for a brighter future in Ireland. Yet MacMurrough’s blandishments did not at first fall upon eager ears. While his quest appeared reasonable enough – it was not unusual for such emissaries to seek the help of mercenaries in this way – the colonial barons were obliged to weigh up their prospects carefully: their present situation may have been vexing, but the prospect of future riches in Ireland was doubtful, prey as it was to a host of incalculable factors. In the end, though, MacMurrough found his man.

Richard de Clare (1130–76), the second Earl of Pembroke and a man of restless ambition, was a French-speaking aristocrat of substantial wealth, dynamism and clout, with great landholdings and local roots in Wales but a power base in England. He was not French but neither was he explicitly English; and he was certainly not Welsh. He and his fellow colonists were referred to as Anglo-Normans, and were the product of a long and complicated mingling of cultures and histories. In the middle of the twelfth century Pembrokeshire was already ‘Little England beyond Wales’, its population a multilingual and heady mix of English and Norman landowners, Flemish workers and artisans, and the remnants of a native population dispossessed of their lands. The region was blessed with fertile farmland and superb natural anchorages; and it was a natural jumping-off point for any voyage to Ireland.

De Clare – better known in Irish history as Strongbow – decided to take MacMurrough up on his offer of land in exchange for men. The latter was doubtless pleased to have at last established an alliance of sorts; Strongbow no doubt hoped the arrangement would deal with certain difficulties of his own. In the bitter English struggle for the throne between Stephen and Matilda he had backed the former and, although he had subsequently come to terms with the victorious Henry and pledged loyalty to him, bad blood remained. The king had consistently withheld the royal patronage required at that time to guarantee prosperity. Yet despite his position Strongbow drove a hard bargain, for he insisted on the hand of MacMurrough’s daughter Aoife in marriage – and thus the kingship of Leinster itself on MacMurrough’s death. This was problematic, for such a deal assumed the existence of primogeniture in matters of inheritance. This was a principle then beginning to gain acceptance across western Europe, but it remained quite alien in Irish law. Nevertheless the deal was duly agreed: MacMurrough was signing over lands that were not legally his to bestow.

In August 1167, MacMurrough sailed from Milford Haven in the company of a small band of Norman-Welsh soldiers – in effect, the first Anglo-Norman military landings on the Irish coast. He re-established himself easily enough at Ferns. Rory O’Connor and Tiernan O’Rourke came down from the north and assaulted his position; perceiving his present military weakness, however, they merely extracted a tribute of gold in recompense for the taking of Dervorgilla years before; and set about more conflicts of their own in other parts of Ireland. They even agreed, before departing, that MacMurrough could once more take the title of King of Leinster. In the aftermath of this attack, MacMurrough settled down at Ferns to await the coming of his new allies from across the sea. He would, as it turned out, have to endure a fretful two-year delay before his saviours arrived.

Three ships sailed from Pembrokeshire in the spring of 1169, landing on 1 May between Wexford and Waterford, at what was then Bannow Island; the channel dividing the island from the mainland has since silted up. MacMurrough quickly came down from Ferns to join them and this combined force attacked Wexford, forcing the town to surrender on 5 May. The civic leaders acknowledged MacMurrough’s overlordship; and MacMurrough in his turn showed his
bona fide
s by giving control of the town and its harbour to the newcomers. MacMurrough was clawing back the prestige he had lost; and the Anglo-Normans were secure in their new Wexford base.

In the months that followed, Anglo-Norman ships ploughing the waters from Pembrokeshire and anchoring in the now friendly port of Wexford would become a common sight – and yet the next wave of landings was momentous. In May 1170, an advance force landed on the rocky and easily defensible headland at Baginbun, east of Waterford. It was a modest contingent – a ship or two, containing one hundred-odd men – yet adequate for the job in hand. Additional forces came out from Wexford to meet them; a fort was established on the headland; and cattle – not the invaders’ cattle and thus a potent provocation – were rounded up and driven on to the headland too, thus guaranteeing a food supply. The intention of the supremely organized Anglo-Norman force at Baginbun could not have been clearer: Wexford had been secured and Waterford would be next. So the Norse of Waterford, in alliance with local Irish rulers, put together a force with the aim of overwhelming the newcomers and driving them back into the sea.

The Irish and Norse substantially outnumbered the small Anglo-Norman force. But this did not avail them, for the newcomers boasted superior weaponry and strategic skills: their archers, for example, rained death upon the Norse and Irish from above. They were able even to deploy the stolen cattle to deadly advantage: as the disorderly mass of Norse and Irish soldiers advanced towards the Anglo-Norman stockade, the panicked beasts were driven through its gates into their midst, trampling and killing many and causing chaos; and at this point, the Anglo-Normans advanced with deadly efficiency and routed their enemies. Within a short time, it is estimated that, of the Norse-Irish force of a thousand men, half were dead – and a mass of executions followed, in contravention of the usual contemporary European rules of war. The captives had their legs broken and were beheaded, and one source describes a certain Alice of Abergavenny, a camp follower who carried out many of the decapitations (though probably not the seventy of lore) in retaliation for the death of her lover in the battle. The bodies were then thrown over the cliffs into the sea.

This was a suitably arresting curtain-raiser for the sack of Waterford that summer. Strongbow himself now decided to join the action and made his way to Milford Haven, raising a substantial expeditionary force as he went. As he was about to set sail, however, word came through from Henry: the king – perturbed, maybe, at the notion of a potentially autonomous kingdom being established in Ireland – had forbidden the force to depart. But Strongbow could not now back down without fatally losing face. He sailed from Milford Haven on 23 August 1170, established himself at the river crossing at Passage, below Waterford, and arrived at the walls of the city on 25 August. Waterford’s Norse rulers were not prepared to surrender; and their resolve to hold out could only have been strengthened by the news of the bloody violence at Baginbun a few months previously. However, the city walls were breached rapidly and, after a period of intense street fighting, Waterford fell that same day. ‘A great slaughter of the foreigners at Port Láirge by the overseas fleet’ was how the
Annals of Innisfallen
records the siege and battle, implying that the conflict had nothing to do with the Irish themselves.
⁷
The truth, of course, was very different.

That the sack of Waterford still resonates in the annals of Irish history is in part due to the work of the nineteenth-century Irish painter Daniel Maclise, whose vast canvas of
The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife
(1854) hangs today in the National Gallery of Ireland. This painting portrays the couple in front of a throng of pseudo-Graeco-Roman divinities; stacks of corpses lie piled all about and the streets of the city run red with blood. Aoife and her female companions are lit sharply and glaringly, while Strong-bow and his knights stand in deep shadow. The painting exemplifies the extent to which a representation of a historical event can be interpreted in fundamentally different ways. In the nationalist tradition, the painting is a moving evocation of complete subjugation – the forced marriage of England and Ireland. This interpretation, however, ignores the fact that Maclise himself was a Unionist and that his painting was designed to celebrate the vigour of the British Empire in all its Victorian might.

Yet the material point is how Strongbow and his men regarded both the events at Waterford and the marriage itself. They saw their expedition as the beginning of a land grab: this, after all, was the reason they had come to Ireland in the first place. The taking of Waterford was instrumental to these plans, for it enabled them to upgrade their status in Irish affairs: no longer a peripheral force, they were now a significant power and one that would be able – up to a point – to control its own destiny. Similarly, the marriage of Strongbow to Aoife raised the possibility of a new bloodline, a new dynastic order in the land – a shocking change in such a conservative and tightly regulated society: ‘and Dermot gave [Strongbow] his own daughter,’ noted the
Annals of Loch Cé
with shrill outrage, ‘and a part of his patrimony; and Saxon Foreigners have been in Erinn since then’.
⁸
This was a situation pregnant with the potential for yet greater Anglo-Norman influence in Ireland – though it did not as yet signify a done deed. The next move must be the capture of Dublin.

Strategically situated, wealthy and confident, Dublin remained the key to Ireland; and MacMurrough himself had long understood that his rule in Leinster could never be properly secure without control of the city too. It is at this point that MacMurrough – who had not even been present at the capture of Waterford, so rapid had been the advance and onslaught of Strongbow – came into his own. The Hiberno-Norse rulers of Dublin might have felt relatively confident that they could withstand the Anglo-Norman onslaught: the city’s defences were stout, and the overland route from Waterford and the southeast was squeezed between the sea and the granite mass of the Wicklow mountains, which were considered impassable to any substantial army. Nevertheless, they knew what had happened at Waterford and hastily sent word to Rory O’Connor, requesting aid. It was forthcoming: O’Connor could see as clearly as everyone else that these new arrivals presented an imminent threat if he did not act. O’Connor’s army – very large, if perhaps not quite as large as Giraldus subsequently claimed – gathered at Clondalkin, southwest of Dublin, to await the enemy.

As it turned out, both O’Connor’s army and the men of Dublin had not accounted for the local knowledge of MacMurrough and his men. Rather than march along the coast, as had been anticipated, the combined force of MacMurrough and Strongbow traced a path through the mountains and so came down upon Dublin unawares. Seeing that they were suddenly cut off from their allies in the city and sensing defeat in the air, O’Connor’s army melted away; a few days later, with negotiations over the fate of the city still ongoing, the Anglo-Normans launched a sudden attack, took the city walls and streamed into Dublin. Asculph, the last Norse ruler of the city, fled rather ingloriously in a ship made ready for just such an eventuality; and Strongbow seized control on 21 September 1170. In the aftermath of the taking of the city, he and MacMurrough set out to press home their advantage in a campaign across Meath and into O’Rourke’s territory in Breifne, burning and destroying as they went. O’Connor’s army withdrew across the Shannon into his native Connacht and the year ended as well as it could have done for Strongbow. In the spring of 1171 MacMurrough died unexpectedly at Ferns, ‘without the body of Christ’, as the
Annals of Ulster
thundered, ‘without penitence, without making a will, through the merits of Colum Cille and Finnen and the saints whose churches he had spoiled’.
⁹
Strongbow was now King of Leinster.

But his position, though strong, was far from unassailable. The Hiberno-Norse launched a counter-attack on Dublin shortly after MacMurrough’s death, gathering in a fleet of over sixty ships at the mouth of the river Liffey. Giraldus describes the Norse as ‘warlike figures, clad in mail in every part of their body after the Danish manner. Some wore long coats of mail, others iron plates skilfully knitted together, and they had round, red shields protected by iron round the edge.’
¹⁰
For some time the outcome of the battle rested on a knife edge – but these warriors, ‘whose iron will matched their armour’, were repulsed in the end and Asculph, who had returned with his fleet to reclaim the city, was captured and beheaded.

This attack on Dublin – formidable though it was – represented only the preamble to a larger assault that summer, in which Irish armies took up their stations north, south and west of the city and Norse fleets blockaded the harbour. There followed a prolonged process of attrition: O’Connor sent word that the Anglo-Normans might keep Dublin, Wexford and Waterford but would have to relinquish Leinster and their other territorial gains – and there is little doubt that at that moment he was in a position to make such a favourable deal with the newcomers. But Strongbow would have the last word: an Anglo-Norman sortie was sent out in stealth from Dublin and attacked one of the Irish encampments at Finglas, northwest of the city. In the slaughter that followed, over a thousand Irish soldiers were killed, though O’Connor himself escaped and fled westward. This, his last throw of the dice, had been unsuccessful: the protracted siege was broken; the remaining Irish armies dispersed once again to their own territories; and Strongbow himself hastened south to relieve an attack on Wexford.