The arrival of the Black Death in Ireland in 1348-50 swung the balance further in favour of the Irish. The disease spread along the main trade routes and positively flourished in the unhygienic and crowded medieval towns. The highly urbanised English were therefore hit hard, and around 40 per cent of them died, while the more numerous rural Irish were largely spared. These losses could not be made up by immigration. to the Black Death, England had a labour shortage and wages were rising fast. Faced with physical insecurity in Ireland and new economic opportunities in England, many English colonists voted with their feet and left. Military pressure and depopulation were not the only problems faced by the settlers: there was also the more insidious threat of assimilation with the Irish. The colonists clung tenaciously to their English identity (they would never have described themselves, as they usually are today, as ‘Anglo-Irish’), but intermarriage with Irish families and the multitude of everyday contacts with the Irish meant that they were gradually becoming Gaelicised. In 1366 the English government in Dublin introduced the Statutes of Kilkenny in a desperate attempt to keep the English in Ireland distinct from the Irish. The most important measure was the requirement for all those living in the English colony to use only the English language, English personal names and English law. Even horses had to be ridden in the English way (the Irish did not use stirrups). Intermarriage was outlawed, as was keeping an Irish concubine. Irish priests could not serve in the colony, nor could Irish monks enter monasteries there. Playing Irish sports and keeping Irish minstrels and kerns (Irish mercenaries) were banned, so too was selling arms and horses to the Irish. Taken together, these measures vividly illustrate the extent of Irish influence on the colonists and, in fact, colonists who visited England were, much to their annoyance, often taken for Irishmen. Other measures in the statutes provided for maintaining a permanent stance of military readiness and for avoiding unnecessary wars. The English clearly felt themselves to be under siege.
By the end of the fifteenth century the area obedient to the English crown had shrunk back to the Pale, the thoroughly Anglicised area that approximated roughly to the counties of Dublin, Meath and Louth. Even the Pale was not secure, however, as it was regularly raided for ‘black rent’ by the MacMurroughs of Leinster. Outside the Pale, the great Anglo-Irish magnate families of the Butlers of Ormond and the Fitzgeralds of Kildare and Desmond ruled most of the south in semi-independence at ‘the king’s command’. Some Anglo-Irish baronial families, like the Berminghams and the MacWilliam Burkes, had been completely assimilated to Gaelic culture, while even the nominally loyal Butlers and Fitzgeralds had adopted a highly Gaelicised lifestyle and were bilingual. It was beginning to look as if the English colony might go the same way as the Ostman towns.
The decline of the English colony was matched by increasing Irish self-confidence. This found expression in a vigorous resurgence of Gaelic culture, led by a number of learned families, each with its own hereditary specialism in poetry, medicine, law, history or music. Traditional inauguration rites, abandoned after the Anglo-Norman invasion, were revived and carried out at ancient centres like the Navan that had been associated with kingship since prehistoric times. Traditional provincial overlordships were also rebuilt, for example by the MacMurroughs in Leinster and the O’Neills in Ulster. However, if Irish kingship had survived the Anglo-Norman invasion, its institutional and ideological foundations had withered. Although poets might still address them by the traditional royal title of n, Gaelic rulers of late medieval Ireland no longer saw themselves as kings but as lords much like the great Anglo-Irish magnate families: their kingdoms had become landed estates and their subjects had become tenants who paid rent which the lords used to hire professional armies of kerns and galloglasses to make war on their enemies, Irish as well as English. In truth, Irish kings had become little more than warlords. This essentially limited concept of their sovereignty was a weakness that a stronger English government could exploit. Whatever the reality on the ground, the king of England was still internationally recognised as the legal overlord of Ireland.
World History
