A group composed of the Angles, the original inhabitants of southeast Britain, and the Normans of France, who wanted to gain control over territory that now consists of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.
In 1066 the Normans invaded England and within a century gained control of the southeastern portion of the island. Over time they expanded their authority. They did so by organizing military forces to move into Wales that prevailed on the field of battle against the native Welsh. Although there had always been battles among competing groups, the invasion by the Anglo-Normans signalled something new in Wales: the rise to power of a foreign group. One annalist complained about “the tyranny, injustice, violence and oppression” wrought by the invaders, who seemed eager to force the local residents to flee from their ancestral lands. At the same time that they were imposing their will on the native Welsh, the Anglo-Normans moved north into Scotland, but the native Scots proved more resistant. Still, over time Scotland, too, became part of the political orbit of the Anglo-Normans, although resistance to their control continued for centuries.
In the mid-12th century the Anglo-Normans set their sites on Ireland. They did so with the blessings of Pope Hadrian IV (who, as it happened, was the only English-born pope ever), who in 1155 gave to King Henry II of England the title of king of Ireland. The pope ordered the king to “proclaim the truths of the Christian religion to a rude and ignorant people, and to root out the growth of vice from the field of the Lord.” That mission must have seemed odd to the native Irish, who for centuries had inhabited “the isle of the saints” and were long known for their commitment to Christianity.
In the years after Hadrian’s command the English organized an attempted seizure of Ireland. They benefited at first when one Irish king, Dermot MacMurrough (Diarmaid Mac Murchadha) invited Richard Strongbow (Strigul de Clare), one of Henry’s knights, to come to Ireland to help him gain control over the entire island. Strongbow agreed, though the Anglo-Normans from the start believed that they crossed the Irish Sea not to help a native Irish lord claim control of the island but, instead, to gain possession of it for themselves. They also believed that the native Irish would welcome the invaders who possessed, so the Anglo-Normans thought, a superior culture that would attract any man or woman eager to escape the grasp of the primitive chiefs who claimed parts of Ireland before the invaders arrived.
The Anglo-Normans proceeded to cross the Irish Sea, but this mission proved more problematic than the conquest of Wales. In some places the invaders again destroyed local communities and did so with little concern for the human victims of their assault. In their attack on Waterford, along the southeast coast of Ireland, the Anglo-Normans catapulted Irish men and women—the living and the dead— over the city’s walls.
The Anglo-Normans did not continue on their murderous assaults. In Ireland they found that local elites were willing to make alliances, some of which led to offers to marry into Irish families. Soon a new elite came into being in parts of Ireland, an aristocracy that could claim direct ties to Britain but that retained ties to Irish lands and, quite often, the peasants who rented farms on their estates. To solidify their position, they went on a torrid building campaign and erected strong castles across Ireland, many of which survive today. The castles often had stone walls three to four feet thick, with narrow windows and trap doors that those inside could use to launch arrows or pots of boiling water on any invaders who happened to get over the stone walls, which castle builders always constructed as their first line of defense against potential enemies. These castles dominated a landscape in which the vast majority of the rural Irish population continued to live in small wattle and daub huts with thatched roofs.
Over time the Anglo-Normans took on a new identity and became known to the natives as the “Old English.” Rather than converting the native Irish to English ways, these people tended instead to live like the Irish themselves. They did so despite the fact that English policy makers tried, time and again, to figure out ways to bring Ireland under their control. In 1366 the English passed the so-called Kilkenny Statutes, a series of apartheid-like laws that attempted to prohibit the Old English from speaking Irish or marrying into Irish families, but the need for such laws suggested that the Anglo-Normans had, in fact, already failed; rather than trying to convert the native Irish to their ways, they instead resorted to trying to stop Britons from living like the Irish.
From the 12th century to the 16th century the English tried to build on the initial success of the Anglo-Normans in Ireland, but that original group’s identity had become submerged over time, and so did their hopes of conquering Ireland with the same success they had found in Wales. In the mid-16th century the English Queen Elizabeth I undertook a new campaign, characterized by large-scale transplantation of English colonists, murderous assault, and terrorism.
Historians study the experience of the Anglo-Normans in Wales and Ireland to better understand the deep background to the English colonization of North America and as a reminder that the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere were not the first peoples whom the English (and their ancestors) had hoped to subdue.
Further reading: R. R. Davies, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, 1100-1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990); Liam De Paor, The Peoples of Ireland: From Prehistory to Modern Times (London: Hutchinson, 1986).
World History
