MARCH LAWlords who, by residing in England or on their property
in the land of peace, had abandoned their lands in the
marches with the result that the marches were
destroyed and laid waste. Other contemporary evi-
dence is more positive, however. In particular, the
agreements between de Geneville and his leading ten-
ants concerning the division of prey taken in the
marches show that at least some resident lords were
active in the defense of their marches.
Those parts of the marches at the very edge of the
English settlement in Ireland must always have been
subject to depredations by the native Irish. However,
the retreat of the English colony in the face of the
Gaelic Revival, brought the edges of the settlement
closer to Dublin, whose rhetoric concerning march
areas became more insistent as the fourteenth century
progressed. The Gaelic Revival not only affected the
boundaries of the marches, but also their ethnic com-
position: the Gaelic population increased considerably,
although Anglo-Irish continued to live in the difficult
environment of the march. But this recovery of land
was not met with an adoption of the Anglo-Irish ter-
minology by the Irish: government records might
record reference by an Irish lord to “his marches,” but
the terms remained absent from the Gaelic annals
themselves.
BETH HARTLAND
References and Further Reading
Davies, R. R. “Frontier Arrangements in Fragmented Societies:
Ireland and Wales.” In Medieval Frontier Societies, edited
by Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay, pp. 77–100. Oxford,
1989.
Frame, Robin. “Military Service in the Lordship of Ireland,
1290–1360: Institutions and Society on the Anglo-Gaelic
Frontier.” In Robin Frame, Ireland and Britain 1170–1450,
pp. 279–299. London, 1998.
Lydon, James, ed. Law and Disorder in Thirteenth-Century
Ireland: the Dublin Parliament of 1297. Dublin, 1997.
Smith, Brendan. “The Concept of the March in Medieval
Ireland: The Case of Uriel.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish
Academy88, sec. C (1988): 258–269.
See alsoCentral Government; Gaelic Revival;
Local Government; March Law
MARCH LAW
“March law” was a term used in medieval Ireland to
refer to the customs and practices of dispute settle-
ment at a local level in the “marches,” the shifting
and undefined border areas between the more set-
tled areas of English colonization, which continued
to acknowledge the overall control of the English
crown and to be governed by the Common Law, and
those areas controlled by Irish rulers owing little or
no allegiance to the English crown and which followed
Brehon law. It was the subject of fierce condemnation
by Richard fitz Ralph as archbishop of Armagh
(1347–1369). He described it as the “law of the devil”
in so far as it sanctioned the killing and despoiling
of the native Irish by the Anglo-Irish of County
Louth. The Irish parliament and Dublin administra-
tion were increasingly concerned in the middle years
of the fourteenth century with the extension of the
use of the “law of the March” to disputes within the
Anglo-Irish community itself, which should have
been determined in accordance with the Common
Law. Legislation of 1351 imposed a penalty of
imprisonment and ransom (fine) for its use in such
disputes, and a further mandate of 1360 threatened
the loss of life and members for the same offense.
Chapter four of the Statute of Kilkenny (1366)
increased the penalties to imprisonment and convic-
tion as a traitor. However, none of these statutes
attempted to proscribe its use in its proper context.
The legislation suggests that the Irish “law of the
March” possessed two particular features. One was
the use of private, unauthorized, and unlimited dis-
traint (seizure of animals and other movables and
perhaps also persons) accompanied by the use or
threat of force against those against whom the dis-
trainor had a claim or grievance. This would then
normally be met by a counter-distraint by the persons
distrained who now had their own grievance. The
second was the use of “parleys,” discussions under a
temporary truce between the two disputing parties
(perhaps with the aid of mediators) in an attempt to
resolve their disputes. Historians have sometimes
written as though “March law” covers various other
observable legal phenomena in the later medieval
Irish lordship which may reflect Irish influence, such
as the imposition of collective responsibility for crim-
inal offenses on families, the practice of ransoming
rather than hanging Irish offenders, and even changes
in inheritance practice, but there seems to be no con-
temporary warrant for this extension of the term. The
Irish usage of the term seems also to be very different
from its usage in the Marches between England and
Scotland or in the Marcher lordships of Wales. On
the Scottish border it seems to have been used for the
body of law that helped resolve disputes between
inhabitants from either side of a relatively stable and
fixed border and was enforced by the Wardens of the
Scottish March. In Wales it was generally used to
refer to the laws and customs of the individual
Marcher lordships within Wales, which might differ
considerably from Marcher lordship to Marcher lord-
ship and were subject to the ultimate control of the
Lord of that Marcher lordship.
PAUL BRAND