Irish Nationality

								

was in the air. Every landless man was looking to make his fortune.
Every baron desired, like his viking forefathers, a land where he
could live out of reach of the king's long arm. They had marked out
Ireland as their natural prey--"a land very rich in plunder, and famed
for the good temperature of the air, the fruitfulness of the soil, the
pleasant and commodious seats for habitation, and safe and large ports
and havens lying open for traffic." Norman barons were among the
enemy at the battle of Clontarf in 1014. The same year that Ireland
saw the last of the Scandinavian sea kings (1103) she saw the first of
the Norman invaders prying out the country for a kingdom. William
Rufus (1087-1100) had fetched from Ireland great oaks to roof his Hall
at Westminster, and planned the conquest of an island so desirable. A
greater empire-maker, Henry II, lord of a vast seacoast from the Forth
to the Pyrenees, holding both sides of the Channel, needed Ireland to
round off his dominions and give him command of the traffic from his
English ports across the Irish Sea, from his ports of the Loire and
the Garonne over the Gaulish sea. The trade was well worth the
venture.
Norman and French barons, with Welsh followers, and Flemings from
Pembroke, led the invasion that began in 1169. They were men trained
to war, with armour and weapons unknown to the Irish. But they owed no
small part of their military successes in Ireland to a policy of
craft. If the Irish fought hard to defend the lands they held in civil
tenure, the churches had no great strength, and the seizing of a
church estate led to no immediate rising out of the country. The
settled plan of the Normans, therefore, was to descend on defenceless
church lands, and turn them into Norman strongholds; in reply to
complaints, they pleaded that the churches were used by the hostile
Irish as storing places for their goods. Their occupation gave the
Normans a great military advantage, for once the churches were
fortified and garrisoned with Norman skill the reduction of the
surrounding country became much easier. The Irish during this period
sometimes plundered church lands, but did not occupy, annex, or
fortify them. The invaders meanwhile spread over the country. French
and Welsh and Flemings have left their mark in every part of Ireland,
by Christian names, by names of places and families, and by loan-words
taken into Irish from the French. The English who came over went
chiefly to the towns, many of them to Dublin through the Bristol
trade. Henry II himself crossed in 1171 with a great fleet and army to
over-awe his too-independent barons as well as the Irish, and from the
wooden palace set up for him in Dublin demanded a general oath of
allegiance. The Normans took the oath, with some churchmen and
half-a-dozen Irish chiefs.
In Henry's view this oath was a confession that the Irish knew
themselves conquered; and that the chief renounced the tribal system,