ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE, INFLUENCE OFremain within the political orbit of the English royal
court. In the early decades, a fairly rapid superimpo-
sition of English political overlordship had been
established in the southeast, central, and northeast of
Ireland which demarcated a zone of Anglicization,
the visible impact of which is still evidenced on the
landscape by the surviving mottes and baileys and
stone castles that were erected.
A slower transformation followed of the social,
economic, and ethnic landscape of significant parts
of the country and the creation of communities that
remained self-consciously English. English settle-
ment was concentrated in the physically better-
endowed lands of the south and east as well as in
the port towns. Invasion and colonization are differ-
ent if often sequential processes. Invasion typically
involves the establishment of lordly or royal control
and the imposition of a new aristocracy. Certainly,
a new French-speaking aristocracy was installed in
Ireland, the more important of whom continued to
hold lands on both sides of the Irish Sea. Colonization
involves settlement of the land and dispossession of
the previous occupiers. Claims for a substantial
peasant migration in the train of the new aristocracy
have frequently been made, though it remains
largely undocumented and impressionistic, and the
numbers and density of actual settlers are very dif-
ficult to estimate. The establishment of so-called
rural boroughs as a spur to colonization, where some
of the tenants of a private lord were granted the
privilege of holding their plots by the preferential
legal and economic status of burgage tenure sug-
gests that, in reality, there were difficulties in
attracting settlers to Ireland. Even in the densest
areas of English settlement, there were natural
impediments to the process of colonization in the
mountainous terrain, woodlands and bogland, and
the Irish population survived on these less fertile
lands retaining its essentially Gaelic character and
remaining as pockets of colonial weakness. It
proved difficult to maintain or give permanent effect
to the colonizing impetus.
The high-point of English colonial initiative had
been reached by the mid-thirteenth century, after
which a combination of unfavorable political and eco-
nomic circumstances ensured the so-called Gaelic
revival. A steady colonial retreat occurred even in core
regions such as the Wexford area, where the first set-
tlers had established themselves, and where the town
was exhibiting signs of urban decline already by the
end of the thirteenth century. A critical turning-point
in a process of de-colonization and loss of English
governmental control was reached with the outbreak
of plague in 1348. A distinctive “Anglo-Irish” political
identity emerged out of the peculiar strains of perennial
insecurity experienced by the colonial ruling elite in
Ireland, coupled with a sense of its neglect, disregard
and misunderstanding by the English crown, while
culturally it formed an intermediate grouping charac-
terized by varying degrees of Gaelicization or assim-
ilation. Tensions between the English born in Ireland
and the English of England who were sent recurrently
as administrators remained constant. An English inva-
sion there may have been in the twelfth century, but a
conquest of Ireland was never achieved. In reality, the
greater part of Ireland did not experience thoroughgo-
ing Anglicization, and on the eve of the Tudor planta-
tions English governmental control had shrunk to the
defensive area known as the Pale, the colonial hinter-
land of Dublin.
MARIE THERESE FLANAGANReferences and Further Reading
Cosgrove, Art, ed. A New History of Ireland. Vol. 2, Medieval
Ireland, 1169–1534. Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press, 1987.
Revised edition, 1993.
Davies, R. R. Domination and conquest: The experience of
Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 1100–1330. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Duffy, S. Ireland in the Middle Ages. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1997.
Flanagan, Marie Therese. Irish Society, Anglo-Norman Settlers,
Angevin Kingship: Interactions in Ireland in the late 12th
century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
Lydon, J. The Lordship of Ireland in the Middle Ages.Rev. ed.
Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003.
Smith, B. Colonisation and Conquest in Medieval Ireland: The
English in Louth, 1170–1330. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1999.
See alsoCastles; Connacht; Courcy, John de;
Giraldus Cambrensis; Henry II; John; Lacy, Hugh
de; Mac Murchada, Diarmait; Mide; Motte-and-
Baileys; Pale, The; Strongbow; Ua Conchobair,
Ruaidrí; UlaidAnglo-Normans: See also Military Service, Anglo-
Norman; Society, Functioning of; Society, Grades
of Anglo-NormanANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE,
INFLUENCE OF
Despite geographical proximity and periods of close
cultural ties, evidence of such influence on Irish liter-
ature is surprisingly scarce. Several reasons for this
can be suggested at least for the seventh and early
eighth centuries. During that period the Anglo-Saxons
were much more likely to have been the recipients than
the donors of influence. Ireland sent Christian mission-
aries to England in the seventh century who introduced
Latin literacy and Irish script, while also providing