SOCIETY, FUNCTIONING OF ANGLO-NORMANearl of Louth (d. 1329). The marriages of minor heirs
were also arranged by the Crown, and in the later
Middle Ages, the king employed this right to bind the
nobility of England and Ireland together. The young
fourth earl of Kildare (d. 1390) was present at the siege
of Calais in 1347, and Edward III took the opportunity
to marry him to the daughter of one of his knights,
Sir Bartholomew de Burghersh.
Although primogeniture had advantages in terms of
settling succession disputes, in an Irish context it
sometimes had serious drawbacks. Besides the vulner-
ability caused by minorities, there was a risk that an
estate could be fractured if a male line of heirs failed.
This happened dramatically in the mid-thirteenth cen-
tury. Five successive sons of William Marshal (d. 1219)
died childless with the result that the great lordship of
Leinster was divided between his five daughters.
Meath was similarly divided at the death of the heirless
Walter de Lacy in 1241. There were further subdivi-
sions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the
splintered estates that resulted were of little interest to
the absentee English nobles to whom they descended.
Their neglect was a source of considerable weakness
in the lordship. It was the risk of division that led to
the practice of granting estates in “tail male.” This
practice—employed in the cases of the earldoms cre-
ated in the early fourteenth century and also used
extensively among the lesser nobility—meant that an
estate always descended to the nearest male relative
and so could not suffer fracture between heiresses.
Magnate Power
Irish historians assessing the lordship of Ireland have
long tracked the growth of royal lordship to about the
year 1300 and have thereafter bemoaned the general
decline that saw the contraction of royal authority to
the Pale by the later fifteenth century. However, equat-
ing royal lordship and an efficient administration with
a successful society can be perilous in a frontier region
like Ireland. The work of Robin Frame is particularly
important in this regard. He has reminded us that
although royal authority was theoretically extensive by
the end of the thirteenth century, “the areas with which
the administration was closely involved were probably
less securely held and less prosperous than they had
been sixty years earlier, when royal government was
simpler and less intrusive, and the large, undivided
lordships of Leinster and Meath still existed” (Frame
1981).
For all the crown’s complicated administrative
machinery, the resident magnates themselves remained
of prime importance. How they exercised power, both
officially and unofficially, reveals some important
points of divergence from England. Although an
English earl might take his title from a region in which
he held lands, those lands were not usually geograph-
ically consolidated. He would usually hold manors
scattered across several counties, which ensured that
the county or shire court remained the primary focus
of local jurisdiction. Ireland was different. Lands were
held in large blocks, which gave their lords a territorial
dominance highly unusual in England. Moreover, from
the start of the conquest, grants were often made of
liberty jurisdiction. This meant that the king delegated
royal authority to the lord within the bounds of the
liberty or franchise, except for four pleas reserved to
the crown: arson, rape, forestall (highway robbery),
and treasure trove. Leinster, Meath, and Ulster were
liberties in the thirteenth century, and in the fourteenth
century the earls of Kildare, Ormond, and Desmond each
held a former county as a liberty (Kildare, Tipperary,
and Kerry respectively). Even when the liberty of
Kildare was suppressed in 1345, never to be restored,
the county of Kildare effectively remained under the
control of the local earl.
This official policy—although often decried by later
historians as spelling the ruin of royal government (see
Feudalism)—in fact ensured the strength of English
lordship in much of Ireland at moments when direct
royal aid could not be forthcoming because of preoc-
cupations elsewhere. This is true both in the early
stages of the conquest and in the fifteenth century when
the three resident earls dominated much of Ireland.
Particularly in the later middle ages, however, less
official methods of maintaining power became com-
mon. In England, since the time of the early Norman
kings, private war had been prohibited. For the nobility
of Ireland defending territories on the march (or fron-
tier) with the hostile native Irish, that prohibition was
impracticable. Although it horrified English adminis-
trators, private armies were common and were often
billeted on the countryside (see Coyne and Livery). A
famous case is the force controlled by the first earl of
Desmond known as “MacThomas’s rout.” It should not
be imagined that these private forces were perpetually
inimical to the native Irish. In fact, since the earliest
points of the conquest when the native Irish recruited
Anglo-Norman knights, there had been alliances
between the two nations. By the fourteenth century,
these arrangements were often standardized, such as
the “bonnaght” of Ulster (the 345 Gaelic satellites, or
troops, that the northern chieftains owed the earl of
Ulster), or the agreements of retinue made between the
earls of Ormond and his neighboring Gaelic chiefs in
the 1350s.
In the first half of the fourteenth century, royal
administrators endeavored on several occasions to
bring the Irish magnates under control and curb their