‘A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.’ Such was the epitaph, so Ralph of Diss tells us, inscribed upon the tomb of King Henry II of England in 1189.Footnote 1 It consciously evokes Alexander the Great, renowned in the middle ages for his empire building. Henry’s elegist considered it a fitting tribute to a king who added overlordship of lands such as Brittany, Toulouse, Scotland and Ireland to an already-impressive Angevin empire that included England and roughly two-thirds of France.Footnote 2 Gerald of Wales made the imperial comparison explicit, calling Henry ‘our Alexander of the West’ who extended his arm ‘from the Pyrenees to the westernmost limits of the northern ocean’.Footnote 3 In his vernacular history of the Normans (written for Henry), Wace likewise boasted that Henry ruled ‘between Spain and Scotland, from shore to shore’.Footnote 4 Henry’s acquisition of Ireland in 1171 was thus one small step towards consolidating his position as the pre-eminent power in the west. It not only turned the Irish Sea into a ‘second Angevin lake’,Footnote 5 but also gave Henry command of northern Europe’s Atlantic shore from the Bay of Biscay to the North Channel. Despite these contemporary characterisations, and the clear benefits that Ireland brought him, most historians tend to portray Henry as a reluctant overlord of Ireland, only roused to action when a handful of his vassals threatened to create an independent powerbase under Richard fitz Gilbert (better known today as Strongbow) on the island.Footnote 6 As Nicholas Vincent declares in The Cambridge History of Ireland, ‘this “invasion” of 1171 was a reaction to circumstances rather than a spontaneous bid for empire’.Footnote 7
The problem with this interpretation is that it sets up a false dichotomy between empire-building and opportunism. Empires – ancient, medieval, and modern – often expanded as chance allowed, relying upon pre-existing ideologies or creating ex post facto justifications as needed.Footnote 8 In other words, the timing of Henry’s expedition in 1171 may have been fortuitous, but luck favours the provident. Rather than stumbling into a conquest he had not looked for, Henry had already worked for well over a decade to harness rising (or resurgent) feelings of religious and cultural superiority that empowered conquests such as his throughout Europe.Footnote 9 Indeed, William of Newburgh tells us that Henry had been ‘indignant’ at Strongbow, ‘for having achieved so great an enterprise [in Ireland], not only without consulting him, but even in defiance of him, and because he [Strongbow] attributed to himself the glory of so noble an acquisition, which ought to have been ascribed to the king, as his superior’.Footnote 10 Once Henry finally assumed control over Ireland, he had a ready supply of clerics standing by to justify his intervention.Footnote 11 For instance, Ralph of Diss argued that Henry went to provide the public order and authority that war-torn Ireland sorely lacked.Footnote 12 As we shall see, this focus on internecine strife was to be a common theme in both Latin and vernacular depictions of the Irish, a focus which has also found its way into some modern scholarship.Footnote 13 Moreover, Gerald of Wales claimed that his infamous works, containing ex post facto justifications for the English conquest, were written at Henry’s suggestion.Footnote 14 As Martin Aurell writes, ‘au service de leur maître, [les penseurs de la cour] font de la propagande’.Footnote 15 Henry had the will and the means to make an English conquest of Ireland politically acceptable to Europe’s ecclesiastical and princely elite. Failure to understand the role of politics and propaganda in Henry’s conquest risks underestimating his ambition, and presenting a false impression of contemporary attitudes towards Ireland and the Irish.
I
Before the Norman conquest of England in 1066, Ireland was situated in the same socio-political arena as Britain.Footnote 16 Early British and Anglo-Saxon kings allied themselves with their Irish counterparts, and often employed Irish mercenaries in their campaigns against one another. Indeed, the first English invasion of Ireland seems to have occurred in 684, as part of the Northumbrian king Ecgfrith’s attempts to consolidate his hold over the Irish of Dál Riata (in modern-day Scotland). According to Bede, the Northumbrians went to Ireland and ‘wretchedly devastated a harmless race that had always been most friendly to the English’.Footnote 17 That invasion left little lasting legacy, but the very fact that an English king attacked Ireland to influence events in Scotland, reinforces the interconnectedness of early medieval Britain and Ireland.
Once much of northern and eastern England came under Scandinavian control, it was linked to a western maritime network that included the Ostman (Viking) cities in Ireland: Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick. After the restoration of Anglo-Saxon rule in England under Edward the Confessor in 1042, Ireland was used as a place of refuge and recruitment by Edward’s enemies: the sons of Earl Godwin of Mercia, Harold and Leofwine (1051–2), and Earl Ælfgar of East Anglia (1055).Footnote 18 The Scandinavian maritime network also proved durable, so that fleets from Dublin aided the Norwegian invasions of England in 1058 (which included Earl Ælfgar) and in September 1066.Footnote 19 The patron of all of these eleventh-century dissidents was the powerful king of Leinster, Diarmait mac Máel na mBó (d.1072), who, from 1052, controlled Dublin as well as Leinster. Following the Norman victory at Hastings in October 1066, Diarmait once again gave refuge to the family of King Harold Godwinson and aided their unsuccessful invasions of England in 1068 and 1069.Footnote 20 Given the willingness of the king of Leinster to provide support to English dissidents, it is little wonder that the Anglo Saxon Chronicle assumes an unrealised desire on William the Conqueror’s part to subdue Ireland.Footnote 21 Moreover, Gerald of Wales alleges that the Conqueror’s son, King William Rufus, boasted on a trip to St David’s in Wales that he would build a pontoon bridge across the sea in order to conquer Ireland.Footnote 22 The Normans’ failure to follow through on either ambition meant that Ireland remained a thorn in England’s side for much of the next century. The island served as a place of mercenary recruitment and refuge for Arnulf de Montgomery in 1102.Footnote 23 Henry fitz Empress also used Irish mercenaries when fighting King Stephen in the 1140s.Footnote 24 Once Henry became king in 1154, he continued to employ forces from Ireland.Footnote 25 Henry’s bloodless assumption of lordship over Ireland in 1171–2 was therefore the culmination of centuries of political interaction between Britain and Ireland. At a stroke the English king had cut off the western escape route for English political fugitives. He had also outflanked the Welsh princes, and restricted their supply of Irish mercenaries. In short, controlling Ireland made the king of England master of the Irish Sea littoral.
Key to understanding Henry’s success is the recognition that, in G. H. Orpen’s words, ‘Henry had long cast hungry eyes towards Ireland.’Footnote 26 Henry first formulated his plans during the negotiated beginnings of the Angevin empire. In the space of three years, from 1151 to 1154, Henry had been recognised as ruler of Normandy, Greater Anjou, Aquitaine (in right of his wife, Eleanor), and England. Along the way, he had made a number of enemies, not least his middle brother Geoffrey. In 1152, Geoffrey made a bid to become count of Anjou himself, and, we are told, even attempted to kidnap Eleanor to secure Aquitaine.Footnote 27 Henry defeated his brother, but compensated Geoffrey for his loss by installing him as count of Nantes in Brittany.Footnote 28 Nantes was therefore acquired as an appanage for Henry’s younger brother. That same year, Henry supported his vassal, Conan, earl of Richmond, in his bid to become duke of Brittany (centred on Rennes). Control of Brittany had been a long-held ambition of the Normans, so by placing Geoffrey in Nantes and Conan in Rennes, Henry was able to place Brittany under his lordship. In 1166, the same year that the exiled king of Leinster, Diarmait Mac Murchada, sought Henry’s support in Ireland, Henry eventually secured the entire duchy of Brittany for his son Geoffrey. Through his assertive diplomacy, Henry thus used his brother, vassal and son to draw the semi-independent duchy of Brittany into the Angevin empire.Footnote 29
In the meantime, it appears that Henry intended to use his younger brother, William, to harness Ireland as well. Robert de Torigny reports under 1155:
About the feast of St Michael [29 September] Henry, king of the English held a council at Winchester, at which he deliberated with his advisors about the conquest of the kingdom of Ireland and the grant of it to his brother William; but since his mother the empress opposed it the expedition was postponed for the time being.Footnote 30
William, who was at the council, eventually had to make do with land in England.Footnote 31 Historians have tended to be dismissive of Henry’s early plans for Ireland,Footnote 32 but the evidence points to a plan formulated in 1155 which was temporarily shelved after it was already well-developed. Indeed, a Flemish commentator claimed that Henry had gone so far as to assemble an invasion army, which he instead redirected to France the following year. Under 1156, he writes: ‘Henry the younger, king of England, turned against the French king a large and well-equipped army that he had prepared to lead to into Ireland in order to subjugate it to his lordship, and, with the advice of bishops and men of religion, to establish his brother as king for that island.’Footnote 33 Ten days after the Winchester council, on 9 October 1155, Henry dispatched emissaries to the new pope, Adrian IV, to discuss ‘difficult royal matters’.Footnote 34 Looking back from 1159, John of Salisbury (who might have been part of that mission) relates:
At my entreaties, Pope Adrian IV had granted and given Ireland to the illustrious Henry II, king of the English to be held by hereditary right, as his letter testifies to this day ... He sent also by me a golden ring set with a fine emerald by which investiture of right to rule in Ireland should be made, and that same ring was ordered to be and is still in the public treasury of the king.Footnote 35
Although John of Salisbury seems to have been guilty of ‘considerable verbal economy’, amplifying the nature and conditions of Adrian’s supposed concession in Laudabiliter,Footnote 36 it appears that the argument for Henry’s invasion continued to be made even after the Winchester council, and, if we trust the Flemish chronicler, that an army may even have been assembled for the purpose.
The timing of Henry’s planned invasion is also instructive. The council of Winchester met nine months after Henry’s coronation. This was almost two years before he attempted to recover England’s northern counties from the Scots or invaded Wales in 1157,Footnote 37 and four years before he launched an expedition to secure his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine’s rights to Toulouse in 1159.Footnote 38 It may be that Henry thought William’s appanage more important than recovering lands for himself or his wife, but the time was also ripe for an Irish expedition. Rees Davies has argued convincingly that the idea of a single British-Isles monarchy was current in the mid-twelfth century.Footnote 39 That idea owed much to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s phenomenally-successful Historia Regum Britanniae (composed c.1136), which, among other things, claimed that King Arthur conquered and ruled Ireland from Britain.Footnote 40 In 1155, the Norman historian and poet Wace completed his French translation (and modification) of the Historia for Henry’s court, the Roman de Brut.Footnote 41 Although Martin Aurell has shown that there is very little evidence for Henry’s use of Arthurian propaganda,Footnote 42 by 1155 the new king of England would nevertheless have been well aware of Ireland’s strategic value and his (supposedly) historical right over the island.
However, while Gerald of Wales later drew upon Geoffrey of Monmouth when writing in the 1180s, most contemporary clerical justifications focused (perhaps predictably) upon the Irish church. The grounds for a religious intervention in Ireland were laid by 1150, when Bernard of Clairvaux produced his Life and death of St Malachy.Footnote 43 As bishop of Connor, archbishop of Armagh and papal legate, Malachy was perhaps the doyen of twelfth-century Irish church reform. Bernard’s Life was informed by the progressive Irish clerics who entreated him to write it, and, unsurprisingly, the Ireland it describes is one in desperate need of reform:
[Malachy] understood that he had been sent not to men, but to beasts. Never before had he known the like, in whatever depth of barbarism; never had he found men so shameless in their customs, so uncivilised in their ways, so godless in religion, so barbarous in their law, so obstinate as regards instruction, so foul in their lives. They were Christians in name, pagans in fact.Footnote 44
Bernard’s description was not meant to be a faithful representation of contemporary Irish society, but rather formed part of a didactic presentation of Malachy’s mission. Nevertheless, Bernard’s St Malachy was widely read within the church, and, although Bernard envisioned a native process of reform guided from Rome, his ideas helped to shape the clerical opinion of Ireland into which Henry tapped on the eve of his planned invasion in 1155.
Here, Marie Therese Flanagan’s interpretation of Pope Adrian IV’s response to Henry, the bull Laudabiliter, should be addressed. In 1989, Flanagan argued that Laudabiliter, which (perhaps predictably in a papal document) was concerned primarily with religious reform in Ireland, indicated that the true driving force behind the planned invasion was an imperialist archbishopric of Canterbury eager to have its province expanded to include Ireland.Footnote 45 Certainly the previous century had witnessed a degree of intervention by Canterbury into Irish ecclesiastical matters, including the consecration of several bishops of the eastward-looking Ostman cities of Dublin and Limerick. These small gains were threatened by the advance of a native-Irish reform movement, which had by 1152 created a clear diocesan structure under the four archbishops of Armagh, Dublin, Cashel, and Tuam.Footnote 46 Flanagan argued that from this point the best way for Canterbury to achieve spiritual control over Ireland was to support, and then mirror, the English king’s political control there. Consequently, Canterbury laid the self-interested ideological foundations for Henry’s eventual rule. By Flanagan’s reckoning, the 1155 council at Winchester aimed to secure papal approval, because at its heart the English invasion of Ireland involved the subordination of the Irish church to Canterbury. Flanagan’s reconstruction is a fine exercise in revisionist history, but went too far.Footnote 47 None of the extant sources for the council of Winchester, including Torigny, the Flemish chronicler, and a charter of the count of Eu dated ‘at Winchester in the year in which a conquest of Ireland was discussed’,Footnote 48 give any hint of a Canterbury-led plot. Instead, they, and the wider context, suggest that Henry was the aggressor, and that he was only dissuaded when his mother argued that he should delay the enterprise to a more opportune time.Footnote 49 The founder of the Angevin empire did not need Canterbury to guide his ambition to Ireland.
Something of the strength of that ambition has been uncovered by Anne Duggan through her comprehensive analysis of Laudabiliter.Footnote 50 The original papal bull was deposited for safekeeping in the royal treasury at Winchester, and eventually lost. The earliest version that survives today is that preserved by Gerald of Wales in his history of the conquest of Ireland, Expugnatio Hibernica (‘The Conquest of Ireland’).Footnote 51 Gerald’s version has always been taken as a faithful reproduction of the original, since it matches later surviving versions of the document. However, Duggan has used detailed textual evidence to show that Gerald’s version was the source for all of the surviving examples of the document.Footnote 52 Gerald originally named his work Historia Vaticanalis (‘the Prophetic History’), and Duggan convincingly argues that Gerald falsified the text of Laudabiliter in an attempt to present the conquest of Ireland as the culmination of a chain of events already prophesied.Footnote 53 Instead of the supportive document preserved today, Duggan contends that the original text of Laudabiliter was most likely similar to the text of Pope Adrian’s later 1159 bull Satis Laudabiliter. This second bull argued against a joint Franco–English crusade in Spain, unless King Henry II and King Louis VII of France were invited by the church, princes and people of the area. Consequently, Duggan argues, we must assume that the unedited Irish Laudabiliter had granted Henry nothing. Instead, in the subjunctive mood, it laid out the conditions on which any English intervention in Ireland might in some circumstances be carried out. Pope Adrian thought Henry ‘to be very hasty in the arrangement of this particular exploit’, and gave only a conditional consent. Duggan reconstructs the original text as follows:
Add to this, that it would seem to be neither wise nor safe to enter a foreign land without first seeking the advice of the princes and people of the area ... Wherefore, since we love your honour and advancement with the whole force of our mind and wish you to begin nothing of this kind unless compelled by reasonable cause, we urge your highness by these letters, first to examine and ponder the needs of the area with the aid of the princes of that realm, and carefully seek out the will both of its Church and of its princes and people, and take their advice, as is fitting. If, when you have done this, you see that the region is in immediate need, and its Church advises it, and the princes of the area have themselves also requested your highness’s aid and given their advice, you can then go forward in the matter according to their request and advice, and fulfil your laudable desire, supported by divine protection.Footnote 54
Once Henry had invaded, he should ‘take particular care to instruct that people [the Irish] in right behaviour, and ... strive to ensure that the Church there may be enhanced, that the Christian religion may be planted and grow’.Footnote 55
This reconstruction of the ‘unedited’ Laudabiliter fits quite well with the course of Henry’s eventual involvement in Ireland. For instance, Gervase of Canterbury reports that in going to Ireland in 1171, Henry was in part responding to the call of the Irish to be defended against the original invaders under Strongbow.Footnote 56 Once in Ireland, Henry II not only received the voluntary submission of its English settlers, but also nearly every native Irish king. Although (or perhaps because) he was stigmatised by the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket the previous year,Footnote 57 Henry also made a great show of his Christian mission in Ireland. Nicholas Vincent has shown that it was while in Ireland that Henry first adopted the title ‘Dei Gratia rex’ (‘King by God’s Grace’) for his outgoing correspondence.Footnote 58 Coupling function to form, Henry called for a reforming council of the Irish church, which met at Cashel under the presidency of the papal legate in 1171/2. The council’s decrees are preserved in Gerald of Wales’s Expugnatio Hibernica, wherein he claims that ‘the statutes of the council were subscribed to and approved on the authority of the king’s majesty’.Footnote 59 Henry certainly had agents in attendance at the council, but his role in approving the decrees is far from certain, especially given Gerald’s willingness to manipulate his evidence (as with Laudabiliter).Footnote 60 Nevertheless, Henry then sent one of those agents, Ralph, archdeacon of Llandaff, as part of a delegation to Pope Alexander III with the news of his success.Footnote 61 The people, princes, and church of Ireland all could be said to have accepted Henry’s lordship.
When news arrived from Ireland, Pope Alexander III was in a difficult position. Henry had not yet been absolved of his part in the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in December 1170, yet Alexander needed his support against a rival pope (Calixtus III) supported by Emperor Frederic Barbarossa.Footnote 62 Moreover, Alexander had also been sent letters of support for Henry from the legate and a section of the Irish episcopate. As a result, Alexander signalled his approval of Henry’s takeover in three letters: to Henry, the Irish prelates, and the Irish kings and princes.Footnote 63 In his letter to Henry, Alexander wrote:
By frequent report and trustworthy evidence and with much joy, we have been assured how that, like a pious king and magnificent prince, you have wonderfully and gloriously triumphed over that people of Ireland, who, ignoring the fear of God, in unbridled fashion at random wander through the steeps of vice, and have renounced all reverence for the Christian faith and virtue, and who destroy themselves in mutual slaughter, … [you] have extended the power of your majesty over that same people, a race uncivilised and undisciplined. For, while we for the present omit other monstrous abuses which the same race, neglecting the observances of the Christian faith, irreverently practice ... [as the legate and Irish prelates] have made known to us in their letters ... it appears that the aforesaid people, as perhaps has more fully come to your knowledge, marry their stepmothers and are not ashamed to have children with them; a man will live with his brother’s wife while the brother is still alive; one man will live in concubinage with two sisters; and many of them, putting away the mother, will marry the daughters.
And all from time to time eat meat in Lent; nor do they pay tithes, or respect as they ought the churches of God and ecclesiastical persons.
… We understand that you, collecting your splendid naval and land forces, have set your mind upon subjugating that people to your lordship and, by Divine grace, extirpating the filthiness of such abomination …Footnote 64
Pope Alexander’s letter mirrors some of Laudabiliter’s language, but its focus is on the Irish defects reported by reform-minded Irish prelates themselves, and King Henry’s role in correcting them. The connection between Christian reform and public order is clear. In his other letters, Alexander enjoined the Irish prelates and kings to ‘assist the abovesaid king, so great a man and so devout a son of the Church, to maintain and preserve that land and to extirpate the filthiness of such great abominations’. If any of the Irish who had submitted to Henry should thereafter resist his rule in Ireland, then the prelates were to lay ecclesiastical censure upon them.Footnote 65 The language of Alexander’s letter is characteristic of late twelfth-century descriptions of the Irish. The Irish were an anarchic people whose very souls were in danger because of their vices. As far as the pope was concerned, Henry’s rule would help save them.
II
Henry II thus rode a rising tide of anti-Irish propaganda, some of it emanating from reform-minded clergy in Ireland, to secure support for his conquest of Ireland. However, while Henry’s actions must be seen in the context of centuries of Anglo–Irish interaction, they also had a wider setting: the social and cultural upheaval of twelfth-century Europe. This period has been variously characterised as one of renaissance, reformation, crisis, and revolution, in which ‘good’ custom was codified and incorporated into new models of society, while ‘bad’ custom was rooted out and replaced with ‘reason’ and ‘truth’.Footnote 66 Roman law mixed with canon law to form the basis for twelfth-century legal reforms, and ancient modes of logic and classification helped twelfth-century Europeans to build new structures into their changing society. Freed from a neat division of the world into ‘Christians’ and ‘non-Christians’, schoolmen constructed more complex, but even more rigid, taxonomies.Footnote 67 Thus, medieval Europe could reconstruct its shaken identity by more clearly defining what it was and was not.
In places like the British Isles, Germany and the Baltic, clerical writers used their knowledge of classical literature and patristic texts to construct images of their neighbours as stereotyped ‘barbarians’. For instance, Diarmuid Scully has shown the similarity of Bernard of Clairvaux’s depiction of the Irish to that of classical authors such as Solinus, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus and Jerome.Footnote 68 These descriptions of Irish barbarity had all but vanished upon Ireland’s conversion to Christianity in the fifth century, but quickly returned in the twelfth with the renaissance of classical learning and a firmer definition of reformed Christianity. In the early days of the conquest, Gerald of Wales frequently used classical wonder stories from writers such as Ovid to illustrate his negative points about the Irish, and modelled his descriptions of the English invaders on other writers such as Suetonius.Footnote 69 Furthermore, Gerald and his fellow ecclesiastics, Adam of Bremen (on the Scandinavians) and Helmold of Bosau (on the Slavs), composed remarkably similar portraits of their subject societies.Footnote 70 In this way, the Christian Irish could be located in the same cultural category as the pagan Wends and Pomeranians. They were all ‘barbarian’ societies, lacking centralised public authority and a reformed moral code. As a result of this tendency towards classical allusion, it is often difficult to know how much credence to give twelfth-century depictions of these peripheral societies.
A useful comparison might be made with the twelfth-century inquisitors who collected testimonies from individuals holding non-standard Christian beliefs. As with their contemporaries describing ‘barbarian’ societies, inquisitors were likely to seek to understand people they labelled ‘heretics’ in terms of the literature they knew, in this instance the writings of the fourth-century church fathers who had refuted the heresies of their day. For instance, William of Newburgh drew heavily upon the descriptions of early Christian heresy by Augustine, Jerome and Isidore when constructing his own depiction of the Cathar heresy in the 1160s.Footnote 71 Indeed, it has even been claimed that the supposedly united and highly-organised Cathar church found, among other places, in Toulouse, was in fact a figment of these churchmen’s overly-referential imaginations.Footnote 72 Whether or not one accepts that verdict, in both instances, barbarian and heretic, it at least seems clear that individual differences and subtle nuances were elided in these clerics’ efforts to understand their world through reference to ancient learning and through increasingly-rigid classification.
The Normans appear to have been precocious in this regard. Writing in the 1070s, William of Poitiers was clearly influenced by classical distinctions between civilisation and barbarism, particularly as found in Sallust, as he characterised the neighbouring Bretons as ‘a polygamous, war-like, barbarian people who devotes itself chiefly to arms and horses, and very little to the cultivation of fields or the improvement of customs’.Footnote 73 Over half a century later, William of Malmesbury was one of the earliest English writers to apply this method of classification to the peoples of Britain and Ireland.Footnote 74 In about 1126, William contrasted barbarous Ireland with the civilised societies of England and France:
What would Ireland be worth without the goods that come in by sea from England? The soil of Ireland produces nothing good, because of the poverty, or rather, the ignorance of the cultivators, but engenders a rural, dirty crowd of Irishmen outside the cities; the English and French, with their more civilised way of life, inhabit commercial cities.Footnote 75
William was perhaps the first off the mark in England, but others soon followed. For instance, writing in the 1180s, Gerald of Wales stated of the Irish:
They are a wild and inhospitable people. The live on beasts only, and live like beasts. They have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral living.
While man usually progresses from the woods to the fields, and from fields to settlements and communities of citizens, this people despises work on the land, has little use for the money-making of towns, condemns the rights and privileges of citizenship, and desires neither to abandon, nor lose respect for, the life which it has been accustomed to lead in the woods and countryside.Footnote 76
This sense of progress from barbarism to civilisation had been evident in the works of Greek and Roman writers, and was picked up in the late-eleventh century by Adam of Bremen, who suggested that pre-Christian Saxons had once behaved exactly as the pagan Slavs and Swedes he observed around him.Footnote 77 Writing in the 1190s, William of Newburgh similarly compared the politically-fragmented and war-torn Ireland of his day to a comparable state out of which England had since progressed.Footnote 78
Gerald of Wales’s theory of cultural progression was more pronounced than Adam of Bremen’s or William of Malmesbury’s, and a more general hardening of attitudes seems to be discernible as the twelfth century wore on. This, John Gillingham claims, is even exemplified in the writing of one man, Orderic Vitalis, whose sympathy towards the Welsh and Scots in the 1120s turned into outright hostility and condescension in the 1140s.Footnote 79 Similarly, the English monk John of Worcester was initially sympathetic to the Welsh, whom he saw as defending their native land against Norman aggression, but became hostile and condescending to them by the late 1130s.Footnote 80 In the late 1140s, the author of the Gesta Stephani likewise called the Welsh a ‘barbaric people’ of ‘an animal type’, characterised by ‘untamed savagery’.Footnote 81 Bernard of Clairvaux’s depiction of the Irish (mentioned above) shows that this was not just an English or Norman trend, and suggests that Europe’s intellectual elite would have been increasingly receptive to Henry II’s professed reforming mission in Ireland.
Interestingly, R. I. Moore argues for a trend in the pursuit of heresy following a similar timeline, and involving some of the same writers. According to Moore, in the early-twelfth century, chroniclers, including Guibert of Nogent and Orderic Vitalis, showed little (if any) concern for non-standard teachings in the church. However, buoyed by the Second Lateran Council of 1139, preachers such as Peter the Venerable and Bernard of Clairvaux stridently attacked religious deviants. To Moore, the council of Tours in 1163 was the culmination of Europe’s hostility towards those holding non-standard beliefs.Footnote 82 It was no longer enough to quash heresy as it appeared, ecclesiastical and secular rulers were enjoined to root out and destroy it.
Whether or not one agrees that such attitudes were qualitatively different from what had come before, evolving theories of Christian love and violence meant that their consequences almost certainly were. From the end of the tenth century, the Peace and Truce of God movements had reintroduced Augustinian theories of just war to authorise killing in defence of the weak and innocent.Footnote 83 From Pope Urban II’s calling of the First Crusade in 1095, complex theological arguments were marshalled which sanctified the killing of non-believers.Footnote 84 By the mid-twelfth century, intellectuals had moved beyond infidels. The collection of canon law known as Gratian’s Decretum reasoned that the killing of Christian heretics was an act of love (caritas), since it was designed to correct those in error.Footnote 85 Just as a father used physical force to correct his son, or a master his servant, so a Christian could attack those engaged in offensive beliefs or practices. Moreover, Ivo of Chartres concluded in his Panormia that love demanded that men prevent their neighbours from doing evil, and that it was a sin for Christians not to persecute those who performed evil deeds.Footnote 86 As a sermon to the crusaders at the siege of Lisbon (many of whom were English) claimed in 1147: ‘since it is just to punish murderers and sacrilegious men and poisoners, the shedding of their blood is not murder … he who puts wicked men to death is a servant of the Lord’.Footnote 87
This evolving attitude towards the correction of sin provides the intellectual context for papal approval of Henry II’s Irish endeavour. Indeed, it has been argued that twelfth-century commentators such as Gerald of Wales seem to have been influenced in their writing on Ireland by the tradition of crusader narratives detailing and justifying conquests in the Holy Land.Footnote 88 Although the Irish were not considered infidels or heretics, the incoming English still used religious correction to justify their conquests. Moreover, the distinction was not always so clear. Both Strongbow and Henry II introduced the Knights Templar and Hospitaller to Ireland, and these military orders played a significant role in English expansion on the island.Footnote 89 Writing in the early thirteenth century, the English clerk, Gervase of Tilbury (a scholastic of the same circle as Gerald of Wales), presented the English conquest of Ireland as a near-crusade: a process of forced conversion of the almost-pagan Irish.Footnote 90 Well over a century later, in about 1331, the English colonists of Ireland even wrote to Pope John XXII asking that a crusade be called against the Irish. They recited the terms of Adrian’s bull Laudabiliter (as found in Gerald of Wales), invoked theories of just war, and claimed that ‘in that same land of Ireland, heresy and dissension have arisen and are spreading among the Irish, a sacrilegious and ungovernable people, hostile to God and humanity’.Footnote 91 The pope denied their request, but it was repeated again a century later.Footnote 92 If the English were never quite elevated to the status of crusaders in Ireland, their conquest was at least carried out in a spirit of religious correction that condoned deadly force in pursuit of its objective.
III
The argument so far has focused predominantly upon the attitudes of clerical elites. Their work is by far the most prominent in the historiography, and it was almost certainly designed to inform international opinion. For instance, Gerald of Wales’s work on Ireland survives in an unusually large number of twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuscripts, which suggests its relative popularity. A number were illustrated, presumably to bring the wonders of Ireland to life for his audience.Footnote 93 Gerald even claimed to have widely publicised his Topographia Hibernica through public readings (and free dinners) to the poor (pauperes), the learned doctors, and the students, soldiers and townsfolk at Oxford in 1189.Footnote 94 Yet Gerald’s self-promotion should not lead us to conclude that his arguments were found to be persuasive, or that his viewpoints were universally held.Footnote 95 Without the systems of recruitment, transportation, and colonisation found in other areas of European expansion,Footnote 96 or the widespread preaching that drummed up support for the Crusades, there is little positive proof that the settlers who travelled to Ireland were exposed to, let alone agreed with, the hostile clerical attitudes profiled above. Writing in the 1170s, William of Canterbury reported a number of miracles associated with St Thomas Becket involving soldiers, who, returning from Ireland, thought that their expedition had simply advanced the tyranny against which St Thomas had fought.Footnote 97 Even more convincingly, Gerald of Wales’s strident demand that ‘the envious and thoughtless end their vociferous complaints that the kings of England hold Ireland unlawfully’, suggests a significant backlash against the English invasion that his work sought to rebut.Footnote 98
The problem with accepting William of Malmesbury, Bernard of Clairvaux or Gerald of Wales as representatives of contemporary attitudes towards the Irish is that they all wrote for a limited audience. Gerald later complained that even the dedicatees of his Topographia Hibernica (Henry II) and Expugnatio Hibernica (Richard I) never paid much attention to them.Footnote 99 Writing a new dedication of his Expugnatio Hibernica to (the comparatively well-read) King John in 1210, Gerald suggested that his Latin limited his appeal: ‘the fruit of this labour, so far as it can be understood, should indeed be brought to general attention, but because I have not been able [to have it translated into French] I am not appreciated, as princes today are less scholarly.’Footnote 100 As Gerald suggested, to analyse the attitudes of the ‘less-scholarly’ princes and secular lords, it is necessary to consult the vernacular works produced for them. This approach recognises that the twelfth century witnessed more than the renaissance of classical learning. This was also the age of the miles litteratus, and ‘the vernacularisation of culture’.Footnote 101 Focusing on Britain, John Gillingham argues that the contemporary French works of Jordan Fantosme, Chrétien de Troyes and Guillaume le Clerc reinforce the general feeling of hostile condescension towards the Welsh and Scots one finds in Latin works.Footnote 102 This is correct to a point, but is also problematic. Upon closer inspection, vernacular works of history and literature seem not to paint such a stark picture of pastoral barbarism. They certainly do not share the clerical preoccupation with Christian observance, a prerequisite for intellectual slippage into Crusade mentalities. A brief, and by no means exhaustive, treatment of those works should illustrate the point.
To begin with Gillingham’s example: Jordan Fantosme’s verse chronicle was an account of Henry II’s victory over his son in the revolt of 1173–4, which Jordan presented as a victory of the English over invading foreigners.Footnote 103 Written for Henry’s own court, it was shot through with national sentiment, and almost certainly incorporated stereotypes current at, or at least recognisable to, that court. For instance, Jordan had an overconfident Norman countess declare: ‘the English are great boasters, but poor fighters;/ they are better at quaffing great tankards and guzzling’,Footnote 104 which conformed to the popular French stereotype of ‘the drunk Englishman’.Footnote 105 English prowess was nevertheless proved throughout the rest of the chronicle, including during a battle in which a multitude of English knights each thought themselves ‘the equal of a Welsh king’.Footnote 106 As one might expect of a partisan military chronicle, Jordan was hostile to Henry’s enemies. This included both the invading Scots and Flemings, who were accused of deplorable acts of violence,Footnote 107 and whose homelands, Scotland and Flanders, were described as ‘savage’ countries.Footnote 108 The question is whether Jordan’s similar (though not identical) treatment of the predominantly-pastoral Scots and the predominantly-agrarian and urban Flemings can be said to support the cultural taxonomies one finds in clerical works above.Footnote 109 Placed in context, it seems most likely that, for Jordan, ‘enemy’ was more important than ‘barbarian’.
For Ireland, the verse chronicle composed at the end of the twelfth century, La Geste des Engleis en Yrlande (also known as The song of Dermot and the earl), is the most useful vernacular source.Footnote 110 Based, in part, on the testimony of Diarmait Mac Murchada’s official, Maurice Regan, it was written from the perspective of the initial English adventurers by a man at home in late twelfth-century Ireland.Footnote 111 Similar to Jordan’s chronicle, members of its audience may have participated in the events it describes. Revealingly, the author of the Geste did not deride the Irish as stereotyped barbarians, or reach for religious justifications for conquest. Instead, he framed the invasion in more mundane terms, as a war between a legitimate king (Diarmait Mac Murchada) and his rebellious vassals. This was a common enough portrayal of rebellion.Footnote 112 In this case, the Irish who opposed Diarmait and his English recruits were ‘traitors’ who had broken their oaths of loyalty to their legitimate king. By contrast, King Diarmait was called ‘a noble king, who was so renowned’, and ‘the mighty king, who was so liberal and courtly’. Faced with rebellion from his own vassals, he was enjoined to seek vengeance on his ‘mortal enemies’ who had betrayed him.Footnote 113 The Geste therefore justified the invasion, not as a reforming mission, but as a more specific judicial exercise. In this, the Irish were treated no worse than any other rebellious population. Indeed, the author of the Geste even called a force of English settlers ‘Irish’ when they returned to England to help defeat the earl of Leicester during the revolt of 1173–4.Footnote 114 The author of the near-contemporary biography of William Marshal, whose chief source, John of Earley, spent considerable time in Ireland,Footnote 115 took a similar approach, presenting Ireland as part of the same socio-political arena as England. He wrote in glowing terms about William’s half-Irish wife, Isabella, and reserved his criticism for those traitors, more often English than Irish, in revolt against his hero there.Footnote 116 The anonymous Flemish author of the Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d’Angleterre was either on King John’s 1210 expedition to Ireland or received detailed information from someone who was.Footnote 117 Like Gerald of Wales and authors of contemporary fiction (discussed below), he presented Ireland as a land of marvels. However, he said very little to suggest Irish barbarism, beyond the king of Tir Eógain’s greed and the Irish population’s general unfamiliarity with saddles.Footnote 118
When one turns to vernacular fiction, statements about the Welsh, Scots and Irish tend to be situated in literary contexts that make their use as corroborative evidence for clerical opinions even more problematic.Footnote 119 For instance, (as Gillingham points out) in Chrétien de Troyes’s Le conte du Graal (Perceval), one of King Arthur’s knights is made to say that ‘all Welshmen are by nature more stupid than beasts in the field’.Footnote 120 This, however, is part of a complex scene in which the reader is introduced to the story’s hero Perceval as an innocent and uncultured youth (whom the knight claims ‘is just like a beast’).Footnote 121 Naturally, it transpires that the knight was wrong, and Perceval ‘le Galois’ (‘the Welshman’) sets out to become a knight, performs tasks for King Arthur, and ends up leading the quest for the Holy Grail.Footnote 122 So, while Chretien certainly gives voice to the contemporary perception of the Welsh as uncultured barbarians, he also distances himself from that opinion and, after a number of jokes at his expense, eventually excuses Perceval his initial naiveté. Throughout the rest of Le conte du Graal (Perceval), and indeed throughout its parody, Guillaume le Clerc’s Le roman de Fergus, the land beyond the borders of Logres/England (whether Wales or Scotland) is treated as part of the same socio-political sphere as Arthur’s realm, but overlaid with a vague sense of being out of time, with overtones of magic.Footnote 123
Ireland was also part of this Arthurian world. Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace had already introduced the idea of Arthurian domination over Ireland, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, easily-rhymed Ireland (‘Irlande’) featured in a large number of Arthurian verse romances in the century after the English conquest. In general, Ireland was used much like Wales and Scotland: part of the same socio-political world as Logres/England, but still an outlandish place of adventure. The Irish were regular visitors to Arthur’s court, but retained a ‘residual savagery’ and could never be completely subdued.Footnote 124 The difficulty lies in distinguishing between this literary device and genuine reflections of contemporary opinion. As Keith Busby notes, ‘marvellous Ireland had become such an indispensable part of the romance world that it long resisted demythification and continued to exist alongside an island whose actual geography, inhabitants, and customs soon became common knowledge in the kind of social circles which consumed literature and took part in the politics of the new land under ongoing colonisation’.Footnote 125 Audiences were willing to accept the outlandish stories, even though they may have been familiar with the more mundane reality.
IV
The reality of English conquest was quite complex. Having claimed lordship over Ireland, Henry returned to England in 1172, leaving his barons to get on with the job of conquest and settlement. To aid them in their endeavours, and to absolve himself of much of the burden of lordship, Henry granted them a degree of autonomy akin to that enjoyed by the lords of the Welsh march (which a number of them were).Footnote 126 This relative independence not only promoted feelings of honorial solidarity, it also gave lords the flexibility to reach accommodation with the Irish.Footnote 127 Although the very act of conquest implies a disdain for those being conquered, their conduct in this regard suggests that the knights and barons leading the invasion of Ireland held more nuanced attitudes towards the Irish than those preserved by their clerical brethren. Indeed, one of the only contemporary Latin sources to be at all complementary of the Irish, Jocelin of Furness’s Vita Sancti Patricii, was commissioned before 1185 by the new lord of Ulster, John de Courcy.Footnote 128 John joined with the Irish bishop of Down and archbishop of Armagh in promoting the native saint’s cult, so that his own rule might be identified with it. John de Courcy was unique in the level of his engagement with native ideology – he even had coins struck with the name PATRICVS on the reverse – but his pragmatic approach to the Irish was also adopted by other early English settlers. As Gerald of Wales described Hugh de Lacy’s new lordship in Meath:
Hugh went to great trouble to conciliate those [i.e., the Irish] who had been conquered by others and forcibly ejected from their lands, and thus he restored the countryside to its rightful cultivators and brought back cattle to pastures which had formerly been deserted. So when he had won their support, he enticed them to his side still further by his mild rule and by making agreements on which they could rely, and finally, when they had been hemmed in by castles and gradually subdued, he compelled them to obey the laws.Footnote 129
In this passage, Gerald documented what he saw as a civilising process in Meath. The barbarous Irish were gradually convinced to live under laws, a twelfth-century marker of civilisation.Footnote 130 However, the text also shows Hugh de Lacy adapting to his Irish environment in order to secure the workforce necessary to make his new lordship productive.
Lacking effective military support from the English king, the barons of Ireland also needed to define their relations with native dynasties. The major lords of Leinster (Strongbow), Meath (Hugh de Lacy), Ulster (John de Courcy) and Thomond (William de Burgh) all married into neighbouring dynasties, and the children of these mixed marriages played leading roles in the thirteenth-century colony. The same men also imposed their lordship upon neighbouring Irish kingdoms (and sometimes settler lordships), extracting tribute in cattle and assistance in war. Thus, at his death in 1186, the native Irish Annals of Loch Cé remarked that ‘[Hugh de Lacy] was king of Meath, and Bréifne, and Airgialla, and it was to him the tribute of Connacht was paid; and he it was that won all Ireland for the Foreigners’.Footnote 131 Indeed, in the fragmented frontier-zone that much of Ireland became, English lords were just as likely to ally with Irish kings against one another as to present a united front of English versus Irish one might expect from the clerical sources.Footnote 132 This pattern of frontier lordship may even have found its way into the first episodic Arthurian verse romance, Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide, which was possibly commissioned by Henry II and was composed about the time of his expedition to Ireland.Footnote 133 In it, a lord defeated by Erec gives an account of himself:
I am king of this land. My liege men are Irish, and there is not one who does not pay me tribute. And my name is Guivret le Petit. I am very rich and powerful, for in whatever direction you go in this region, there is not a baron whose land borders on mine who disobeys my orders and does not do my bidding. I do not have a single neighbour who does not fear me, however proud or haughty he may make himself out to be.Footnote 134
It seems that English encounters with the Irish were incorporated into vernacular literature from the very moment of invasion.
Ireland and the Irish are much more prominent in the Arthurian romance, Durmart le Galois, which dates to the first half of the thirteenth century. Interestingly, its author, who Busby argues may have been a literate knight rather than a clerk, deals directly with the clerical accusations against the Irish.Footnote 135 The story’s hero, Durmart, is the son of the king of Wales, and after a period of youthful folly, he performs a number of chivalrous deeds in pursuit of the beautiful Irish queen, Fenise. However, Fenise faces rebellion in Ireland by her cousin and vassal, Nogans, who writes to King Arthur, offering him the lordship of Limerick for his help.Footnote 136 Arthur agrees, and is told of Fenise’s religious deviancy as he and Nogans besiege her castle of Limerick. Nogans declares:
Their queen is a lady who does not care for her soul, for she is a foolish unbeliever. She does not wish to listen to the word of God; she hates and despises marriage and the sacrament of holy church. All those who are in there with her are unbelievers; but I tell you that if I could take them by force I would have them burned or hanged or have their limbs torn from their bodies. Those unbelievers and traitors dare not come out.Footnote 137
Believing Nogans, Arthur nevertheless offers to rescue the queen if she recants and accepts the ‘bon loi’. Far from recanting, the queen successfully refutes the allegations, showing that they were lies to begin with.Footnote 138 Nogans flees, and Durmart marries his beloved to become king of Ireland.Footnote 139
Reflecting the views of a literate knight and his largely secular audience, the focus within this text is political and military. The accusation of religious deviancy is only used as an ex post hoc justification for Nogans’s attempted conquest. Ireland is a land apart, but its inhabitants are not stereotyped barbarians. King Arthur thinks lordship over Limerick to be a worthy military objective, and the hero of the story, a knight from Wales, becomes king of Ireland. It may also be significant that Durmart’s arms, gules, two leopards or crowned argent, seem to have been those of Henry II’s son, John, when he was designated king of Ireland in 1177, and of other members of the royal family until 1195.Footnote 140 The historical parallels are clear enough, and identify the Angevin dynasty with the stable rule of Ireland.
Knights from England/Logres also come to the rescue in the mid-thirteenth century Les mervelles de Rigomer, which seems to have been written for the English of Ireland by someone familiar with the topography and political geography of the island.Footnote 141 Although the author followed the literary topos presenting Ireland as a land of adventures and marvels, he also presented as normal the possible marriage of Lancelot to the daughter of the ‘wise and courteous’ Irish king of Desmond. Lancelot could only consider marriage to an Irish princess if Ireland were part of the same socio-political world as Arthur’s court, and, indeed, it transpires that the king of Desmond had travelled to Arthur’s court fourteen years earlier to seek help regaining his kingdom.Footnote 142 His subsequent stable rule in Desmond is contrasted with the near-anarchy of Bréifne (‘a land full of violence. Because of weak lordship’) and Thomond (‘a land, in sum, full of robbery, of thieves and savagery, inhabited by bad people’).Footnote 143 As Busby argues, the common Arthurian emphasis on strong central authority – governance, lordship, and justice – is unusually pronounced in the story, with the suggestion that anarchic regions (such as Bréifne and Thomond, but not Connacht or Desmond) might require intervention from Britain. However, while there is an underlying contrast between Britain and Ireland, and within Ireland between the settled and savage, ‘it is by no means clear that all of the noble and courteous characters are British, nor that all of the many villains of the piece are Irish’.Footnote 144 Irish knights fight with and against the Arthurian knights as the latter seek to liberate Irish knights from their enchanted imprisonment at Rigomer. Although a work of fiction, the Mervelles presents a much more nuanced understanding of the Irish frontier than is found in most Latin works of history.
V
A common element within almost all of the contemporary descriptions of Ireland profiled here, Latin or vernacular, was the need for law and order. Papal approval for Henry II’s conquest of Ireland, however contingent in the case of Adrian IV, hinged on his firm rule allowing the reform of the Irish church to gather pace. Gerald of Wales continued this theme, advocating (and planning) a complete conquest from Britain to subdue the Irish.Footnote 145 The Geste des Engleis en Yrlande characterised English intervention in Ireland as reinstating Diarmait Mac Murchada’s legitimate rule over Leinster, and Henry II’s assumption of lordship as the result of Diarmait’s successor, Strongbow’s invitation.Footnote 146 Arthurian literature likewise portrayed Ireland, or at least parts of it, as a land in need of firm government. In each case, that law and order was to be imposed from Britain.
Despite the diplomatic effort expended to obtain papal sanction for an English invasion of Ireland, and the emphasis on strong and stable rule in nearly every contemporary source, King Henry II failed to secure island-wide control in 1171–2. Desperate to secure absolution for his role in the death of Archbishop Thomas Becket, Henry left Ireland in April 1172 upon hearing of the arrival of papal negotiators in his dominions. This was just before the campaigning season would have allowed him to use his expensive army in Ireland.Footnote 147 Indeed, Gerald of Wales claimed that Henry ‘was particularly grieved at having to take such untimely leave of his Irish dominion, which he had intended to fortify with castles, settle in peace and stability, and altogether to mould to his own design in the coming summer’.Footnote 148 When negotiations with the papal envoys became strained, Henry even threatened to walk out and return to Ireland where he ‘had pressing matters’.Footnote 149 Henry’s failure to return meant that Ireland was a partial conquest, with complex frontier arrangements built upon the precedent of the Welsh march.Footnote 150 This is the reality reflected in Arthurian romance literature, and lamented by Gerald of Wales. However, Henry did not give up hope of securing island-wide dominion in Ireland, and constructed a large western inheritance for his youngest son John. This included the territory of the lapsed earldom of Cornwall (1175), the earldom of Gloucester with its port of Bristol (1176), and Ireland (1177).Footnote 151 John was even given a sword identified as the weapon of Tristan, a Cornish knight whose love affair with the Irish princess Iseult was the subject of a popular cycle of romantic songs in England and Normandy.Footnote 152 Three decades after first earmarking Ireland as an Angevin appanage, in 1185 Henry sent his teenage son to Ireland to be crowned its king.Footnote 153 Henry had spent the past three decades laying the ideological foundations for foreign rule over the Irish. John’s failure to construct an Angevin kingdom of Ireland should not blind us to Henry’s ambition.
