GAELICIZATIONsocieties across Europe where central government was
weak and distant.
Legislation Against Gaelicization
Nevertheless, statutes of Anglo-Irish parliaments from
1297 onward contain repeated complaints that certain
Englishmen within the lordship of Ireland had become
“degenerate” (in Latin,
degeneres
), that is, that they
abandoned the characteristics of their own people and
adopted those of their Gaelic Irish neighbors. Such
laws focus on language and dress; alliance with Gaelic
Irish families through intermarriage, fosterage, and
gossiprid; patronage of Irish poets and musicians; and
the exaction of forced hospitality by Anglo-Irish mag-
nates, for the support of their household retinues and
troops, from Anglo-Irish neighbors who were not
legally their tenants. This was a custom based on the
Gaelic lord’s prerogative of “guesting” (
coinnmheadh
)
at his subjects’ expense, known to the Anglo-Irish as
“coyne and livery” or “coigny.”
Only the famous Statutes of Kilkenny, drawn up in
1366 during the viceroyalty of Prince Lionel of Clarence,
attacked the Irish language itself, and decreed that
landowners of English descent who could speak only
Irish should be forced to learn and use the English
language on pain of forfeiting their estates. This was
exceptional, and may be related to the simultaneous
promotion of the English language as against the use
of French in England at the height of the Hundred Years
War. Normally, parliamentary legislation dealt only
with aspects of Gaelicization perceived as threatening
the peace of the colony. Even after 1366, Anglo-Irish
nobles were permitted to intermarry with the families
of Gaelic magnates, and send their children to be fos-
tered with them if they obtained royal license to do so,
and the connection was officially considered to pro-
mote, rather than threaten, the precarious peace
between what were called the “English lieges of our
lord the king” and the “wild Irish.” Similarly, barons
were permitted to exact “coyne,” or the billeting of
their armed retinues, from tenants living on their own
estates. Irish harpers and musicians were to be
excluded from Anglo-Irish banquets because they
might act as spies. Irish chaplains who knew no English
were not to officiate in parishes occupied by the colo-
nists, because they could not hear confessions and min-
ister to their flock adequately. Wearing Irish dress was
said in the thirteenth century to expose an Englishman
raiding his neighbor’s lands to increased risk of being
killed in mistake for an Irishman, since the penalty for
killing an Englishman was death, while killing an Irish-
man incurred only a financial penalty, in line with
native Irish law. In the late fifteenth century, merchants
speaking Irish and wearing Irish dress in the small
market towns of Meath were seen by parliament as
symptoms of economic decline in that area.The Anglo-Irish Nobility
and Bardic Poetry
Parliamentary legislation chiefly expressed the view of
the English-speaking burgesses of the towns, together
with knights of the shire from those Irish counties
closest to the site of a particular parliament, whether
held in Dublin, Kilkenny, or Trim, and the administra-
tors on the King’s Council, many of them English born.
Another primary source for the study of this subject
is Irish bardic poetry commissioned and, in some
cases, actually composed by the frontier barons them-
selves. Some thirty-eight Irish poems are ascribed to
the third earl of Desmond, Gerald “the Rhymer”
FitzGerald (d. 1398), mostly about love or personal
matters, but some expressing his close friendship for
the Mac Carthaig (Mac Carthy) lords of Muskerry, and
alleging, however disingenuously, that he attacks his
Irish friends only from fear that otherwise he would
be imprisoned in London by the King of the Saxons.
A bardic poem to Edmund Butler, sixth Lord Dunboyne
(
fl.
1445), declares that his right to rule his estates
derives from his royal Irish descent through his Ua
Briain (O’Brien) mother as well as his Butler father.
These poems partly support the caution expressed by
Ellis and Frame, in that they contain no rejection of
the English king’s authority during the medieval
period, but with the Reformation and Tudor reconquest
of the sixteenth century, the tone changes. A poem to
the rebel James fitz Maurice FitzGerald (d. 1578)
describes the Geraldines as descendants of Greeks,
who will ally with the Irish to resist the English forces.
Poems by another rebel, William Nugent, younger
brother of the baron of Slane, express the cultural
alienation he felt while a student at Oxford in the
later sixteenth century, and the large collection of
poems addressed to Theobald Viscount Dillon and his
seventeenth-century descendants frequently repeats
the preposterous fiction that the Anglo-Irish Dillons
are descended in direct male line from the ancient Irish
dynasty of the Uí Néill.Family Structure
Marriage between families of English and Irish descent
affected family structure, with legal implications. The
first generation of Anglo-Norman barons had promptly
intermarried with Irish royal dynasties, and as Seán
Duffy has pointed out, in the thirteenth century, when
the influence of the English colony was at its height,