Before we consider the castles of the new, English lordships in Ireland, we must glance at the process of their establishment there. Initially, there were the mercenaries recruited by Diarmait Mac Murchada after he left Ireland in 1166, and returned in the following year. The pace quickened in 1169, and a new element was introduced when Richard fitz Gilbert (Strongbow), later Earl of Strigoil and Pembroke, also came over, and married Diarmait’s daughter, in 1170. In 1171 Diarmait died, to be succeeded by Richard, but then Henry II also came to Ireland. The king of England was now overtly involved: Henry brought over other men, and made wider grants outside Leinster. It became posible to think, as Giraldus Cambrensis did, of the occupation of the whole of Ireland by English lords under the English king.
Over the next forty years, much of southern and eastern Ireland was seized by English lords. Henry granted the kingdom of Meath to Hugh de Lacy, who proceeded, especially after 1177, to organise what was something of a power vacuum. Early in 1177 John de Courcy was invited into the kingdom of Ulster, where, after four or five years marked by hard fighting for his small force, he succeeded in becoming accepted as in effect the successor king. In the same year Henry granted the kingdom of Cork to Robert fitz Stephen and Miles de Cogan, who won it with the help of Domnaill Ua Briain, king of Thomond. By 1185, when Henry’s youngest son, John, first came to Ireland as its lord, he set about defining the boundary of his own lands in Waterford, set between Cork and south Leinster, and then made grants to the north and west of it, towards the town of Limerick (see Fig. 4).
It was not until the death of Domnaill Ua Briain, king of Thomond, in 1194, that these grants were followed up. A number of major lordships in Tipperary, held by Theobald Walter, William de Burgh and Philip de Worcester, resulted. In 1199 John made a further series of grants in Munster, splitting up what is now the county of Limerick among a number of lords. Similarly, to the north, the death of Murchad Ua Cerbaill, king of Argialla, was followed by grants to Bertram de Verdon and Roger or Gilbert Pippard, establishing English ‘Oriel’
Figure 4 Map of the principal lordships in Ireland, c. 1185
(the anglicisation of Argialla), now County Louth. In 1185 Domnaill Mac Gillapadraig, the last effective king of Ossory, died. By 1207, when William the Marshal came over to Leinster, which was his by right of marrying Richard fitz Gilbert’s daughter and heiress, he was able to make Kilkenny, formerly the centre of Ossory, the chief place of his Earldom of Leinster.
John, king of England since 1199, never forgot Ireland. In 1210 he returned, partly in pursuit of William de Braose, but also to stamp his power on the land. He went a long way to making the royal power effective in Ireland, establishing the basis of its later administration. From the year after his campaign, the Exchequer year 1211-12, survives the only Pipe Roll from Ireland to escape the
Vicissitudes of time (Davies and Quinn, 1941). It provides a benchmark of English lordship in Ireland, similar to Domesday in England. By then, the English had seized all the good, corn-growing land of Ireland south and east of a line from Cork to Limerick and Dundalk. North of it there was the English outpost of Ulster, while within it were numbers of areas where the land was still to all intents and purposes Irish (Fig. 5).
It is worth emphasising a number of points in this story. First, the progress of the English was remarkably rapid. In forty years they had occupied a much greater area of land than they had conquered in a century of warfare in Wales.
Second, this was not an even process, but a staccato one. The occupation or seizure of an Irish kingdom was usually preceded either by an invitation to intervene (Leinster, Ulster), the death of a strong king and a resultant succession dispute (Munster, Argialla, Ossory) or a straightforward power vacuum, as in Meath. There is no sign either of a planned programme of conquest or indeed of any long-term resistance by the Irish, after the initial battle, or battles, for each kingdom. Third, the beneficiaries of these lordships were not by and large the original soldiers from south Wales, but men who came to Ireland with Henry II and John, men with court connections at the highest level (Phillips, 1984, 97-8). Either they, or their close relatives, were men of wide experience, far beyond that of the Norman lordships of south Wales. These new lords were coming into a land where there was no settled tradition of strong secular centres of power and administration on the lines they knew from England. One of their first needs was to establish these, which would become their baronial capita.
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