“unofficial” practices. Such attempts bred hostility
between the “English of Ireland” and the “English of
England,” and it soon became clear that it was easier
to rule through the nobility rather than against them.
By the late fifteenth century, the magnates were strik-
ingly independent, but they were also buttresses of
English lordship. The fourth earl of Ormond (d. 1452),
who served several times as the king’s lieutenant in
Ireland, promulgated private ordinances for the gover-
nance of his lordship. These ordinances intertwined
different legal traditions—common, march, and bre-
hon law—and are an indication of his extraordinary
independence and self-confidence. A famous and pos-
sibly apocryphal story about Gerald FitzGerald, the
Great Earl of Kildare (d. 1513), like all great clichés,
conveys a basic truth: in 1496, on being told up that
all Ireland could not control the Great Earl, King
Henry VII (1485–1509) reputedly replied: “Then, in
good faith, shall this Earl rule all Ireland.”
The practices described above are often ascribed to
“Gaelicization,” the process common to border societ-
ies in which the settlers adopted many of the customs
of the indigenous population. In Ireland this involved
abandoning common law and the English inheritance
system. But points of divergence ought not to be
stressed alone. Although it is a less familiar concept
to Irish historians, both Gaelic and colonial societies
were operating in ways similar to “bastard feudal”
England, where each lord had a private affinity of
retainers who served him in peace and war. Even the
custom of designating the leaders of “Gaelicized” lin-
eages as “chiefs of their nations” and allowing them
to discipline their own extended families is reminiscent
of the claim by English lords that they should be
allowed to discipline their own retainers. What is more,
in England and Ireland alike, “bastard feudal” prac-
tices were condemned by royal administrators. Later
medieval Ireland, in other words, was not a totally alien
society. When viewed solely from a royal standpoint,
it is revealed in too negative a light. The shifting pol-
itics may have been difficult to follow and some social
practices unconventional, yet others must have been
familiar. Although royal authority retreated in the later
middle ages, the magnate power that took its place was
not negative. Indeed it was the resident nobility’s resil-
ience that maintained nominal English control over
much of Ireland into the early modern period.
PETER CROOKS
References and Further Reading
Curtis, Edmund. “The Clan System among the English Settlers
in Ireland.” English Historical Review 15 (1910): 116–120.
———. “The ‘Bonnaght’ of Ulster” Hermathena: A Series of
Papers on Literature, Science and Philosophy by Members
of Trinity College, Dublin 46 (1931): 87–105.
Davies, R.R. “Lordship or Colony?” In The English in Medieval
Ireland, edited by James Lydon, 142–60. Dublin, Royal Irish
Academy, 1984.
Empey, C.A., and Katherine Simms. “The Ordinances of the
White Earl and the Problem of Coign in the Later Middle
Ages,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 75 section
C (1975), 161–187.
Frame, Robin. “Power and Society in the Lordship of Ireland,
1272—1377.” Past and Present: A Journal of Historical
Studies 76 (August 1977): 3–33.
———. Colonial Ireland, 1170–1370. Dublin: Helicon Ltd,
1981.
———. English Lordship in Ireland, 1318–1361. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1982.
———. “War and Peace in the Medieval Lordship of Ireland.”
In The English in Medieval Ireland, edited by James Lydon,
118–41. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1984.
Hicks, Michael. Bastard Feudalism. Essex: Longman, 1995.
Otway-Ruthven, A.J. “Knight Service in Ireland.” Journal of
the Royal Society of Antiquaries 89 (1959): 1–15.
———. “Royal Service in Ireland.” Journal of the Royal Society
of Antiquaries 98 (1968): 37–46.
Reynolds, Susan. Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence
Reconsidered. Oxford: University Press, 1994.
Simms, Katharine. The Changing Political Structure of Gaelic
Ireland in the Later Middle Ages. Woodbridge: The Boydell
Press, 1987; reprinted 2000.
See also Brehon Law; Central Government;
Chief Governors; Common Law; Courts;
Feudalism; Gaelicization; Henry II; Local
Government; Lordship of Ireland; Manorialism;
March Law; Pale, The; Parliament; Society,
Grades of Anglo-NormanSOCIETY, FUNCTIONING OF GAELIC
The study of Gaelic Irish society has suffered in the
past from an exaggerated belief in the degree of con-
tinuity in its laws and institutions, a belief which has
been aided by the fact that—thanks to the survival of
the early Irish law-tracts—we know more of the details
of its functioning in the seventh and eighth centuries
than in the fourteenth and fifteenth. Even here there is
a danger of mistaking the ideals of the jurists who
compiled the law-tracts for the actual condition of the
society in which they lived. An extreme form of this
belief in continuity has imagined Gaelic Irish society
as imprisoned in a web of immutable law and custom.
However, quite apart from the constant changes in
local power structures caused by the proliferation of
the ruling lineages, medieval Irish society experienced
two periods of traumatic shock separated by one of
intense political change. Following the devastating
Viking slave-raids of the ninth and tenth centuries, the
old polity, based on the autonomous petty kingdom
(tuath) and on the increasingly powerful and equally
autonomous ecclesiastical establishments, gave way to
one of the regional dynasties whose kings imposed their
rule on the local kinglet (rí tuaithe) and introduced newSOCIETY, FUNCTIONING OF ANGLO-NORMAN