Top Ten Things You Didn’t Know about the Norman Invasion of Ireland
Ireland was the first foreign shore where English adventurers landed with the aim of
conquest in the mid-12th century.
The Emerald Isle would prove infuriatingly unruly and their people almost impossible
to govern.
Battles, blood feuds, wars and rebellions raged almost constantly for eight centuries
as the would-be conquerors and independent-minded native populace fought for supremacy.
Less well known than the conquest of 1066, the First Crusade or even the Norman subjugation
of Southern Italy, the Invasion of Ireland is arguably more important as it was from
their experiences in subduing the island that the British imperial war machine learned the
lessons that would see them conquer the largest empire that the world has ever seen.
The invaders were invited to go to Ireland.
Ireland was not one country in the 12th century but was made up of around 150 kingdoms.
Each king vied for military supremacy over his neighbours and the most powerful of them
then fought to be recognised as ruler of one of five provincial territories: Leinster,
Ulster, Munster, Connacht and Meath.
Just to confuse matters, these provincial kings then contended to be recognised by his
peers as High King of Ireland.
In 1166, the loser of one of these wars, Dermot MacMurrough, King of Leinster, was exiled
from Ireland by the High King, Rory O’Connor of Connacht.
Dermot fled to France where he begged assistance from King Henry II of England.
Henry was unwilling to help.
Dermot returned to England and was able to secure the employment of several Norman knights
who would accompany Dermot back to Ireland and help him to reclaim his throne.
In return Dermot promised to give these mercenaries 200,000 acres of land and lordship over the
town of Wexford.
Most of the knights that went with Dermot to Ireland in 1169 were members of the same
family.
Amongst the first Norman men to agree to help Dermot MacMurrough was David FitzGerald, the
Bishop of St David’s Cathedral in Wales.
While his father had been one of the Norman invaders of Wales, his mother was a famous
beauty named Princess Nest.
She was the daughter of the last King of Deheubarth, a conquered Welsh kingdom.
Bishop David’s younger brother, Maurice FitzGerald, and his six sons would all play
leading roles in the invasion as would Bishop David’s own illegitimate son, Miles FitzBishop.
The bishop’s other nephews, Meiler FitzHenry, Robert de Barri and Walter de Ridlesford would
also make their names in battle in Ireland.
However, none of these bevy of kinsmen had the experience to lead the bishop’s army.
For that role the bishop looked to his half-brother.
But there was a small problem:
The leader of the Norman mercenaries was sprung from prison to take part in the invasion of
1169.
In 1164, a Welsh chieftain, Rhys of Deheubarth, launched an attacked on the Norman-held province
of Ceredigion in Wales.
Aberteifi Castle (modern Cardigan) was held by a famous knight called Robert FitzStephen.
He was another son of Princess Nest and a half-brother of Bishop David of St David’s.
Facing annihilation by the Welsh army, FitzStephen’s knights betrayed him, opening the gates of
the castle to Rhys and allowing their captain to be captured.
He would spend the next three years in a Welsh dungeon.
During this time Rhys, who was FitzStephen’s maternal first cousin, tried to convince him
to abandon his loyalty to the King of England and help him free Wales from her Norman invaders.
FitzStephen refused.
Languishing in confinement, FitzStephen’s brothers finally were able to free him by
promising Rhys that he would not stay in Wales and fight him but would travel to Ireland
with Dermot MacMurrough and settle on the lands that he would conquer there.
The invasion army was tiny Far from being a vast, over-powering invasion
by thousands of knights led by the King of England, the invasion of Ireland was initially
conducted by just 400 men.
Thanks to the recollections of Giraldus Cambrensis, a Norman monk working in 1185 – and yes,
another kinsman of the invaders – we know that the first expedition under Robert FitzStephen
in May 1169 had only 50 of what we would recognise as knights today.
The rest of this motley band were made up of apprentice knights and esquires, infantry
and archers.
Though not a very big army by the standards of the day, all had grown up as professional
soldiers within the feudal system and were veterans of the Welsh conflict.
Conversely, those they would face were principally farmers or tradesmen who could not replicate
the Normans disciplined tactics and strategies.
It was this edge, rather than superiority of numbers, that would allow FitzStephen to
carry the day in battle and to help Dermot retake his throne.
The second expedition to Ireland under Raymond de Carew, yet another nephew of Bishop David’s,
landed in May 1170 with just 120 men.
They were attacked by an army of between 2,000 and 4,000 Vikings from Waterford City.
Despite being outnumbered by at least 20 to 1 it was the Normans who were able to emerge
victorious at the Battle of Baginbun.
The Normans initially fought against the Vikings rather than the Irish
In the eighth century Ireland, like England, was subject to a series of raids by Vikings
from Scandinavia.
Soon the raiders had begun founding forts where they could settle and trade in commodities
such as animal skins and slaves.
Many of these grew to be major port-cities and include some of the country’s biggest
cities: Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, Cork and Limerick.
The people of these towns called themselves Ostmen – ‘East Men’ – and intermarried
with the native Irish over the ensuing three centuries.
As a consequence, they became embroiled in the politics and infighting amongst the many
nations of Ireland but remained somewhat distinct from the Gael.
Alongside the King of Leinster, Dermot MacMurrough, Robert FitzStephen captured the Ostman town
of Wexford in 1169 while his nephew, Raymond de Carew, fought Ireland’s version of the
Battle of Hastings at Baginbun against the Vikings of Waterford in 1170.
Raymond served the famous baron, Strongbow, and together they captured Waterford and Dublin
from the Ostmen.
In 1171, they also defeated an alliance of Viking chieftains from Orkney, the Hebrides
and the Isle of Man who wanted to recapture Dublin.
The most famous name to emerge from the invasion was Strongbow – but he was never actually
called that name The third expedition to Ireland landed at
Passage East in County Waterford on 23rd August 1170 with 1,200 men in around a dozen ships.
They were led by a knight called Richard de Clare.
He was Lord of Chepstow Castle in Wales and was a great baron with a noble lineage equal
to that of King Henry II.
Today, Richard de Clare is known by the daunting sobriquet of Strongbow and there is even a
well-known cider that shares that name in recognition of Richard’s great deeds.
However, it is now believed that he was never known by that name and that it only became
attached to him due to a mistranslation of a Latin document.
In the 12th century, Chepstow where Richard de Clare had his principal residence was at
the centre of a lordship known as Striguil.
This name probably derives from a Welsh word meaning ‘a bend in the river’ but was
misidentified by a researcher as the nickname ‘Strongbow’ in the centuries following
the conquest.
The King of England tried to prevent the invasion from happening
Richard de Clare and King Henry II did not get on.
Richard had backed a rival for the throne in 1154 and he had lost the Earldom of Pembroke
as a result of Henry’s victory.
By 1170, Richard was suffering from severe financial hardships due to his banishment
from the royal court.
That was when Dermot MacMurrough, the King of Leinster, came to him asking for his help
to claim the High Kingship of Ireland.
Richard agreed as long as Dermot promised to give him his daughter in marriage and to
make him heir to his Kingdom.
Henry, already embroiled in a war against King Louis of France and an argument with
the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, considered the idea of Richard de Clare as
King in Ireland with horror and had his government place a ban on him leaving Wales.
Richard ignored the command and, within a month of landing in Ireland in August 1170,
had captured the island’s two largest cities, Waterford and Dublin, and had married Dermot’s
daughter, Aoife.
Furious, Henry decided to up the ante, imposing trade and travel restrictions on Ireland and
warning that any Norman warrior that had not returned to Wales by Easter 1171 would face
outlawry and forfeiture of their lands.
When this also proved ineffective in stopping the conquest, King Henry declared his own
intent to raise an army and cross the Irish Sea to force Richard’s submission.
However, there was another reason for the invasion:
The murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket led to the King of England’s direct involvement
in Ireland.
Amongst the most infamous deeds of King Henry II, and the one for which he is best known,
is for his part in the murder of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in December
1170.
What is less well-known is that this act led directly to England’s direct involvement
in Irish affairs.
All Christendom was affronted when four of Henry’s knights killed Becket before the
High Altar of England’s most holy site.
Everyone expected the most severe punishment to be doled out by the Pope.
Excommunication and Interdict over his lands would mean that no subject of the crown would
receive communion or extreme unction putting their souls at risk.
To the medieval mind there was no great penalty.
Henry realised that if the Pope’s representatives could not find him they could not pass sentence
and so he crossed from France to England, ordering all the ports shut, and then proceeded
into Wales with his army.
On 17th October 1171 Henry landed in County Waterford with over 4,000 men and toured the
country, accepting the submission and surrender of all the Norman barons and Gaelic kings.
Keeping Dublin, Waterford and Wexford for himself, King Henry then began granting out
portions of Ireland to his followers.
He also made sure to bring about reforms in the Celtic Church, bringing them in line with
the Catholic Church in Rome including the methods by which the Irish would begin sending
their tithes to Rome for the first time.
It was this act – in addition to an act of public contrition – that saw the Pope
forgive Henry of the murder of Becket and grant him Lordship over Ireland.
The Celtic Church decreed that the Norman Invasion was God’s judgement on the Irish
for the ungodly practice of slavery.
Until the arrival of the Normans in 1169, Ireland was a slave state.
Almost every facet of life relied upon or was influenced by the practice.
Dublin was well-known as one of the largest slave markets in Europe and many of those
unfortunates who ended up as slaves came from England and Wales.
However, starting soon after the conquest of England the Normans began to end the practice,
freeing the slaves and granting them small portions of land as serfs.
Quite why this happened is not fully understood.
It may have been due to the influence of the Church and their abhorrence of slavery, and
it may have been for practical purposes.
A slave requires feeding, clothing, housing and protection while a serf is expected to
provide all those things for himself.
A serf is also obliged to farm the land and give over most of his produce to his lord,
keeping only part back for himself and his family.
The Celtic Church, still reeling from the destruction of the Norman invasion, tried
to make sense of what had happened and, at a meeting in 1171, decreed that the Normans
were God’s instrument for showing the Irish the wickedness of their ways, particularly
for the cruel practice of enslaving his fellow man.
At several points during the invasion it seemed very likely that the Irish would defeat the
Normans and send them back to England.
There was no point when the Norman Invasion of Ireland looked secure.
Even four hundred years later, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the government
couldn’t really be sure that their laws would be respected even twenty miles from
the walls of Dublin.
The rest of Ireland was ‘Beyond the Pale’ as the famous idiom goes.
But the invasion itself was balanced on a knife edge and relied on several strokes of
good fortune to give the Normans victory in battle.
At the Battle of Baginbun in 1170 a chance stampede by a herd of cattle disrupted the
Waterford Vikings and allowed Raymond de Carew to win.
Raymond was reputedly only able to find a way into Dublin that same year because part
of the defences was set on fire by a lightning strike.
In 1171, an alliance of Vikings were too impatient to await the arrival of their ally, the High
King of Ireland, and attacked Dublin without his help only to be utterly routed.
And even when the High King had the Normans surrounded, starving and outnumbered soon
afterwards, they somehow managed to defeat him, launching a surprise sortie from the
city while he was swimming in the River Liffey and enjoying the summer sunshine.
The last High King of Ireland was forced to run from the invaders, naked as the day he
was born.
The Irish and Ostmen could not match the Normans in warfare but they did have something far
more irresistible: an ancient and superior culture.
By 1366, the English government produced laws decreeing that the descendants of the Norman
invaders had to arrest their descent into barbarism and again follow English practices
rather than those of the Irish.
For two hundred years after their conquest the Normans had already become ‘more Irish
than the Irish themselves’.