FRENCH WRITING IN IRELAND
dialect of French evolved. This is the French that
came to Ireland with the coming of the Normans.
Unfortunately, the surviving corpus of French in
Ireland is too small to show that a distinctively
Hiberno-Norman dialect of French can be said to
have evolved in its turn.
Anglo-Norman writing is more noted for factual
record than for imaginative fantasy, and the two earli-
est surviving items bear this out. The first is a frag-
mentary chronicle of some three and a half thousand
lines, recounting how Strongbow came to the aid of
Diarmait Mac Murchada and the subsequent political
activities of King Henry II in Ireland. The anonymous
author identifies with the Engleis, the Anglo-Norman
allies of the king of Leinster, and is therefore hostile
to all the other Irishmen who opposed Diarmait. He
describes himself as obtaining his information orally
from a certain Morice Regan, Diarmait’s interpreter.
This is possibly the only case on record from medieval
Ireland of a French speaker in contact with an Irish
speaker. The author may well have been a French-
speaking Welsh Norman like many of the invaders
themselves or a second-generation Irish Norman. The
fragment begins with the abduction of Derbforgaill and
breaks off at the siege of Limerick in 1175. The author
gives a detailed account of names and events, and his
chronicle is a primary source for the history of Ireland
in the twelfth century.
In the late thirteenth century the Dominican Jofroi
of Waterford cowrote a French adaptation of the
pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum. However,
he has no other surviving connection with Ireland
beyond his name. It appears from an allusion in his
work that he was based in Paris and he wrote in an
eastern French dialect.
The second surviving French work definitely pro-
duced in Ireland is on a very unusual theme. It records
in verse the Walling of New Ross in 1265. This anon-
ymous poem of some two hundred lines, perhaps the
work of an itinerant Franciscan, celebrates the com-
munal effort of the various trades of the town and
even a contingent of women to build a defensive wall
around it. The immediate reason for the building of
the wall is the fear inspired by the conflict between
Maurice fitzGerald and Walter de Burgh, but the
expressed objective appears to be a desire to defend
this colonial enclave so that no “Ires en Irland” would
dare attack it.
The poem survives in MS BL Harley 913, which
dates from approximately 1330. In the same manu-
script there are two short rhetorical poems in French
by Thomas Fitzgerald, first earl of Desmond. One
begins “Soule su, simple e saunz solas,” the other
“Folie fet qe en force s’afie.” They are entitled ‘prov-
erbs’ but they are in fact literary plays on moral
commonplaces, an unexpected side to the earl’s pre-
occupations.
Less hostile to the native Irish than Harley 913 is
the composite manuscript, Cambridge, Corpus Christi
College MS 405. It was probably made approximately
1327 and contains many items of Irish interest in Latin.
It also includes two Irish works in Anglo-Norman
verse. The first is a summary of world geography based
on Honorius of Autun, rendered into French rhyming
couplets by the otherwise-unknown Perot de Garbalei
or Garbally. The second is by Adam of Ross, possibly
a Cistercian, who composed a verse version of the
legendary infernal vision of St. Paul.
Also in the fourteenth century, Richard Ledrede, the
English Franciscan bishop of Ossory, made an attempt
to impose the sacred on the secular by composing Latin
hymns to the airs of French songs popular in Kilkenny
in his day. The first line of some of these songs are
thus preserved along with Ledrede’s Latin works in
the Red Book of Ossory.
As in England, French was frequently used in
Ireland for legal and administrative purposes. Formal
letters and charters occasionally appear in French. A
notable case is that of the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366.
The purpose of the Statutes was to halt the way the
English colonists were “going native” and adopting
Irish language and customs. Both the English and the
Irish within the “land of peace” were forbidden to
speak “la lang Irroies.” Curiously, by this date there is
no allusion to the use of French itself. It is treated like
Latin, an essentially written language used for admin-
istrative purposes.
EVELYN MULLALLYReferences and Further Reading
Colledge o.s.a., Edmund, ed. The Latin Poems of Richard
Ledrede, O.F.M., Bishop of Ossory 1317− 1360. Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974.
Dean, Ruth J., and Maureen Boulton. Anglo-Norman Literature:
A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts. London: Anglo-Norman
Text Society, 1999.
Hardiman, James. LawsA Statute of the Fortieth Year of King
Edward III: Enacted in a Parliament Held in Kilkenny, A.D.
1367 [Edition and translation of the Statutes of Kilkenny].
Dublin: Irish Archaeological Society, 1843.
Lucas, Angela M. Anglo-Norman Poems of the Middle Ages.
Dublin: Columba Press, 1995. [MS Harley 913 is described
on pages 14−26.]
Monfrin, J. “La Place du Secret des Secrets dans la litterature
franaise medievale.” In Pseudo-Aristotle: The Secret of
Secrets; sources and influences, edited by W. F. Ryan and
C. Schmitt. London: Warburg Institute, 1982. [There is no
published edition of Jofroi’s work.]
Mullally, Evelyn. “Hiberno-Norman Literature and its Public”.
In Settlement and Society in Medieval Ireland: Studies Pre-
sented to F.X. Martin, o.s.a, edited by John Bradley. Ireland:
Boethius Press, 1988.