Tag Archives: Dermot MacMurrough

February 3, 2019 · 3:25 pm

Conquest and Ireland’s Great Dance with History

In the scale of iniquities, how does the Norman conquest of Ireland rate? Is it to be regarded as the start of eight hundred years of oppression, culminating in the Great Famine, the nearest we Irish came to annihilation? Was Dermot, as he was damned by generations, truly the fons et origo mali, the source and origin of Ireland’s evil?

Conquest.  Let’s start with that unfashionable word.  It is a word that is not used much today.  It has been consigned to history, like some old habit long in abeyance.  Yet the word is worth ongoing consideration.  Around it pivots the great moral question of history, made pervasive and relevant by the sheer predominance of conquest in the world’s historical narrative.  By what right, by what calculation of cost and benefit to the conqueror and the conquered, could conquest be justified?

By what right do technologically superior nations or more warlike peoples arrive on the shores of less technically or martially enthused ones and take them over, often assisted of course by the diseases they bring?

At base, there is no ‘right’ at issue, merely the reality of power, an elemental capacity to take territory from others, the better to promulgate one’s own species.  Possession of territory is a living imperative for all life.  Evolution is driven by it and so humans are not exempt.

Yet the imperialism of Western Europe sought to justify its expansion in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia by a moral yardstick; sometimes religious, sometimes the more secular but ethically satisfying  ‘progress’.  There were evidently qualms in the minds of conquerers by this need for justification.  So a rationale was not long in the making as a companion to conquest.  The Normans needed to justify their invasion of a fellow christian people.

Irony seems to light a word but irony there was in using Christianity – that mildest and most pacifist of ethe  – to justify Western expansion across the globe.  This was allied with a profound notion that progress was linear, that Western Europe was top of the social evolutionary chain, and that other societies were just a little tardy, a tardiness that benign European rule could correct.

That such correction involved brutality, genocide and exploitation were mere side effects of doing God’s work; no omelettes without broken eggs. More than that, progress was a revelation of God’s divine plan, history the evolution of His intentions for man. Hegel created his philosophical system around this notion and Marx would apply it to economics.  ‘Progress’ had ready-made uses for imperialists and ideologues generally.

Darwin would add another layer to the appreciation of ‘progress’, a scientifically based revelation of immutable laws of nature.  German nationalists seized on this to justify their European war in 1914, as later would Hitler and the fascists; “inferior” peoples must give way to “superior ones.”

Add in Malthusian ideas about other inexorable economic processes that dictated that population always outgrew the means of sustenance (think Ireland), and a healthy dollop of racism, and you have all the ingredients for Hitlerism; by which I mean the early aims of his European war to secure territory and the resources (minerals, oil, grain) for his Third Reich, not the later and consolatory one of genocide.

To reconcile its value system of Christianity and democracy, the modern West needed to establish its right to conquest. The West justified it as the White Man’s burden, the obligation to bring what conquering nations identify as progress – order, Christianity, medicine, economic development, and government. Think that’s passé? Not so, by a long shot.

If you think they’re old ideas, remember the US invasion of Iraq and the ideas of the neoconservative ideologists in Washington that counselled it. Think too of some of the advocacy of Brexiters about the glories of British imperialism only to be regained once free of the EU. Think of American and European populism and its underpinnings of xenophobia and fear.

How much of conquest has to do with the patriarchy? To judge by the number of women leading imperialist ventures over the centuries, evidently everything. It takes a certain male determination to turn Christian precepts – love, compassion, charity, forgiveness, tolerance, turning the other cheek, the almost deliberate antipathy to Roman virtues that glorified conquest and death in battle – into justification for war and expropriation – the classic Roman tropes. The role of the patriarchy in conquest is so pervasive, it defies analysis.  Conquest is a male characteristic.

The conquests of the past and indeed more recently define the very world order of today.  They divide globally the North from the South, organise the voting blocs in the United Nations, define the alliances of powers great and small, and form the foundation for the rules of world trade, deemed free only insofar as the mightiest blocs tolerate it so.

For England and later the British, the conquest of Ireland was a debut for its future global assertions. The moral issues of conquest were played out in Ireland as they would be up to the present day. By what right did Strongbow claim to be heir to the Lordship of Leinster?  Only by a right of marriage in his society that was alien in Ireland. By what right did the Normans hold Dublin, Wexford and Waterford?  By right of successful occupation.  By what right did they seize and settle land?  By Norman and feudal rights, not Gaelic and Brehon ones.

How did the Irish right cede these rights? Through technical inferiority in warfare; through their culture which directed their energies to forms of activity, including regnal wars, that made the island vulnerable; through a distaste for urban concentrations that led to ignore their value as centres of power; through a form of law that was based on tort, on law as a precept for settling relationships not a code for the common good sustained by a state; through a failure to centralise power and impose authority which could have marshalled resistance to the Normans; above all by an insularity and bravado that shielded them from the momentous events in the archipelago and nearby Continental Europe.

The Irish kings were quick to use the Normans in their own local squabbles, much to the advantage of the Normans.  And they were quick to pay homage to Henry II as their king, again one senses because, inter alia, it was better to have a distant king than a local overweening one, all the better to preserve the autonomy of their own little kingdoms (Irish county pride has deep roots!)

If one regards the nation state as the militarisation of society, the garnering of the monopoly of violence to the instruments of government, one can see that its centralised organisation makes it virtually unstoppable in the face of tribal and disparately organised societies.  So Ireland in the 12th century; so later South American, North American, African and Australian indigenous peoples.

If the conquest of Ireland did not achieve the annihilation of the Gaelic Irish – as conquest virtually did in the Americas, for example – that was largely because it unfolded in stages, allowing the natives to learn and adapt.  Geraldus Cambrensis, the Cambro-Norman reporter-cum-historian of the conquest, could see this happening already in the early 1180s.  The Gaelic Irish were learning to counter the Norman advantage in arms.  And as Geraldus wrote with some perspicacity, this meant that complete pacification of the Irish under Norman rule – at least as far west as the Shannon – would be impossible.  The colony would not be secure otherwise, he pointed out.  Indeed, the Gaelic did indeed push the Normans back, so much so that by the 14th century there were real doubts about the very survival of the colony.  The colony survived because it hung on to Dublin and the Pale and in extremis received grudging support from the Crown.

Henry II had at any rate set the template for the conquest; enough resources to maintain suzerainty but never enough to complete the conquest. Even Tudor ferocity would relent and seek to engage local Gaelic loyalty.  The Tudors were motivated more by concerns that Ireland presented an exposed flank to its Continental enemies, primarily Spain and then later France. Like the Normans before them, the New English that arrived in Ireland formed an elite that needed the local Irish to actually farm the land.  Successful plantation of settlers was confined to Ulster.  Irish fertility quickly refilled the demographic slumps from the wars and starvation that dominated the 16th and 17th centuries.

So the Irish never faced such disproportions of technology, way of life and demographics, as say Native Americans did.  Hitler was impressed and inspired by how America cleared out Native Americans, without global opprobrium.  His conquest of Poland, Ukraine and eastern Russia entailed plans of killing 35m to 40m to make way for German settlers.  Only Russian resistance at Leningrad and Stalingrad put paid to this particular dream of conquest and colonisation. Not a hundred years separates us from the frustration of plans of such malignancy.

For all that can be said in mitigation of the Normans and later the New English in not actually wiping out us Irish, there is still something remarkable about our story.  We survived and our particular assemblage of social values and personal orientations endured.   Pre-Norman Gaelic Ireland survived throughout the Middle Ages in all its vital characteristics.  Its aristocracy, and the native courtly culture that went with it, was done in by the Tudors and the Flight of the Earls.  Bereft of its leadership, Gaelic society continued in cultural expression, language, and social mores.  It took the catastrophic Great Famine to really kill of so many of its characteristics, particularly the language.  Besides dealing a near fatal blow to spoken Irish , the Famine also provided an opening for the adoption of a particularly repressive form of Catholicism that came to dominate land, marriage, and society.  The iron triangle of farm, church, and pub defined Ireland until the Celtic Tiger.

That post-Famine, Catholic, rural, patriarchal, heterosexual social order has disintegrated in my lifetime. In its place there is a verve, a creativity, a joie de vivre, yes a bravado and pride, to Ireland today.  Gaelic Ireland has reclaimed its soul with a liberating whiff of pagan hedonism about it. Our great dance with history goes on.

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January 5, 2019 · 1:18 pm

Norman Invasion of Ireland: A Good Word for Strongbow

“I have not thought it part of my duty to pass moral judgements on anybody….To understand an action he must regard it from the point of view of the actor and with reference to the circumstances in which the actor stood.”

Gooddard H. Opren, Preface to Ireland Under the Normans 1169-1333 (1911, 1920)

I’ve written before about Strongbow’s reputation in Ireland.  If it amounts to much – and it doesn’t really – it is a portrait of an indecisive and hesitant man who belatedly joins the invasion a year after its begun, marries the local princess Aoife, and then fades from the scene.

I think this is a misreading.  I’d argue that Strongbow was an archetypal Norman lord, a man who found himself in a very tricky situation and boldly extricated himself.  He showed the qualities that made the Normans such a formidable force from Western Europe to the Middle East – vision, preparedness, calculation, and audacity deployed with great precision.

Strongbow as a sobriquet had nothing to do with bows and arrows: nobles trained as mounted cavalry with lances and swords. It may have been one inherited from his father, Gilbert de Clare, or indeed imposed by posterity, even perhaps a corruption of his seat, Strigoil or Striguil, now Chepstow.

Strongbow’s name was Richard de Clare and his title Earl of Strigoil.  Like his father, he was a marcher lord, meaning that he lived and warred at the borders of the realm, between England and Wales.  Marcher lords enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy, acting as local judicial figures and pretty much at war or at least on guard constantly.  Richard’s domaine Pembrokeshire, southern Wales (Deheubarth to the Welsh).  He craved his father’s title, Earl of Pembroke. In feudal society, an earl was second only to a duke, the highest rank short of royalty.

However, the king, Henry II, was unlikely to grant it to him. Henry II had come to the throne via his mother, the Empress Matilda, Henry I’s daughter.  When Henry I died without a male heir, the crown was contested between Matilda and his nephew, Stephen of Blois.  Matilda had grown up in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor and her heavy German accent and apparent lack of charm didn’t win her many allies, not enough to secure the throne.  Nor could Stephen accrue enough support for an outright win. The ensuring civil war, dubbed the Anarchy by Victorian historians, lasted from virtually the start of Stephen’s reign in 1135 until his death in 1154. By prior agreement, Matilda’s son Henry (Duke of Normandy via his father Geoffrey from whom the Plantagenets descend) assumed the throne on Stephen’s death.

The problem for Strongbow was that his father, Gilbert, had supported Stephen.  Stephen had in fact made Gilbert the First Earl of Pembroke.  Henry II then had two reasons not to recognise Richard as the Second Earl; the earldom had been created by Stephen and had been occupied by those who had sided against his mother.  Henry was not a man likely to admit Strongbow into his favour, though he would tolerate Richard as a marcher lord on the edges of his realm.

Strongbow faced local pressures too.  The Welsh were resurgent under the Lord Rhys (Princess Nest was his aunt), pushing back against the Norman colony.  The threat was serious enough for Henry II to mount several expeditions but the campaign of 1165 ended ignominiously under drenching rain and Welsh aggression.  In a rare military setback, Henry II sued for terms and returned most of Rhys’s territory.  Their compact turned into an alliance with Rhys even being granted the role of Justiciar in 1171, effectively the governor of south Wales.  This was all very bad news for the Cambro-Norman colony.

As the wheel of fortune turned against Strongbow, another local magnate, in Ireland, was in trouble.  Dermot MacMurrough, king of Uí Chinnseallagh (Southern Wexford) and sometime king of Leinster, found himself uncharacteristically isolated when Rory O’Connor became High King of Ireland. Dermot had been allied with his father, the great Turlough Mór O’Connor, but father and son had been at odds.  Dermot’s bitter enemy, Tiernan O’Rourke, allied with Rory, seized his chance and Dermot was sent into exile in 1166. Rory was now in a powerful position and poised to be Ireland’s first High King in more than name only since Brian Ború.  He faced a strategic weakness in that his base in Connaught was on the other side of the island to Dublin, the emergent capital.

Meanwhile Strongbow met with Dermot who bore a letter patent from Henry II approving aid in Dermot’s quest to regain his kingdom. The temptation was as sweet as it was dangerous for Strongbow. Dermot’s offer of fertile land aplenty in Ireland for Strongbow and his men was enticing for a colony under such pressure. Yet Strongbow could not be sure of military success is the wilds of Ireland, however much experience he and his followers had of fighting the Welsh. Nor could he be sure that Henry would tolerate his reach for a new lordship. The costs of failure would likely mean a precipitous fall in status from which recovery would be unlikely under the cold eye of the king. Yet success could also mean the ire of the king, annoyed at Strongbow’s boldness is seeking a virgin lordship beyond his realm.

Clearly, Strongbow could see the possibilities. Leinster, unlike most of Ireland, was well known across the sea, particularly in Wales, Bristol and Chester which traded with the settlements of Wexford, Waterford and Dublin.  While urban settlements were disregarded by the Gaelic Irish and not well fortified, the Normans understood that cities were the key to conquest and sources of revenue to pay for war, debts and trade.

The Norman approach to warfare was in its professionalism formidable: disciplined formations aided by archers and heavy cavalry won engagements decisively; this was  followed by the quick erection of fortifications to hold land seized in battle; and then settle it with followers.

In contrast, the Irish fought wearing little armour, bareback on horses, used darts and stones rather than archery, and moved quickly to raid and return home.

With marriage to Aoife, Strongbow would have a claim under feudal law, to the title of Lord of Leinster. With the Cambro-Norman colony under such pressure, he would likely not be short of followers to enfeoff lands won by the sword.

The sequence of events testifies to Strongbow’s stealthy approach.  Dermot goes back to Ireland first, re-establishes his rule in Uí Chinnseallagh, and raids around Dublin without much response from Rory.  The Cambro-Norman FitzGeralds lead the way in seizing Wexford and then the headland of Baginbun near Waterford.  The forces they bring with them are small but elite and prove devastatingly effectively against the far looser style of Irish warfare.  Risking the ire of Henry II, Strongbow goes ahead with the invasion of his main force and once he lands in Ireland, almost two years after Dermot’s return, his forces lose no time in seizing Waterford and marching on Dublin.  Strongbow clearly knows what he’s about; with these three cities under his control, he is master of Leinster. Once seized, Dublin remains in foreign hands for 750 years, from 1170 until January 1922, with the short exception of Easter week, 1916.

Henry II follows up with his own arrival in Ireland in 1171, accompanied by a mighty force that has more pageantry about it than military intent. Strongbow submits to him and surrenders the cities to the crown: Strongbow can have Leinster but not the means to power in Ireland.  Henry woos the Irish kings who mostly submit to him as their Lord.  Henry imposes his own men in authority over Strongbow, like Hugh de Lacy. In his Connaught fastness, Rory O’Connor holds out until he agrees a treaty with Henry II.  He will be the last Gael to aspire to the kingship of Ireland.

Despite conspiracy theories and beliefs, the Norman invasion was not an ambition of the English crown.  In fact, a proposal to invade Ireland had been put to Henry some years previously and he had passed up on the chance.  When he did come to Ireland, he did so to ensure that Strongbow would not contend to create his own rival kingdom.  He was also ducking the censure of Rome for the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett. Henry II settled with the partial invasion of Ireland he had found there, content to have Irish kings submit to him, and then returned to England and the trials of holding his Angevin domain together.

How does the Norman invasion fit into the broader developments in Europe? It is important to see it in this wider context.

The fall of the Roman Empire and the dissolution of order that came in its wake allowed the Viking age.  Defeat at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 frustrated the creation of a Viking kingdom in Ireland.  The Anglo-Saxon defeat of Harald Hardrada in September 1066 under the leadership of Harold II put paid to the last chance of a new Viking kingdom in England and indeed brought to a close the Viking Age.  The following month, Harold II faced a formidable new foe in the form of the Normans under William the Conqueror at the battle of Hastings.  Norman victory was a pivotal event for it meant that the centre of European influence moved decisively from the north to the south, to Rome, the spiritual and very often political centre of the Normans.  Western Europe and its nation states as we know them began to take shape under the dual influence of kings and popes.

The engagement of Ireland in this wider narrative in Western Europe lurched forward with Strongbow, Henry II and the Normans arrival in Ireland. The partial invasion that followed, often facilitated by rival Irish kings using Normans to sway battles in their favour, created two Irelands, a Norman and  Gaelic.  Their interaction would drive politics until the hammer of the Tudors fell on the island.

Yet this is not the full story.  There were other forces at work in both Ireland and England that were moving to bind Ireland into the revolution and reforms underway in 12th century Europe.  They were driven by a belief that Ireland was violent, unstable and morally degenerate.

Its tempting to think that Dermot McMurrough saw himself as a harbinger of a more Europeanised Ireland, with he as king of Ireland under the benign and somewhat removed suzerainty of Henry II.  Dermot died in Ferns in May 1171, too soon to realise his grander ambitions.   So Strongbow stands alone as the decisive figure whose audacity pivoted Ireland toward England and the mainstream of European developments. Indeed, the Norman colony he founded in Ireland would have its ups and downs but its influence was decisive in shaping our modern history.

Yet its drama conceals the work of those other forces at work which conspired to dramatically change Ireland and its relationship to Europe.  More anon.

 

 

 

 

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December 28, 2018 · 6:39 pm

Princess Nest, Ireland’s Forgotten Mother

Princess Nest?  You’ve probably never heard of her.  So it’s a bold claim to label her one of our forgotten mothers (aren’t they all eventually?) As well as being bold, it probably doesn’t make much sense. How can a woman be mother to a nation?  I’m not saying that she was the only one.  But I do claim that her influence was quite direct and formative in the development of Ireland, through her lineage; how her sons and grandsons changed Ireland during their lifetimes, and how their descendants played critical roles in our history.

So let me explain and if you stick with this, you’ll have earned a little bit of esoterica which might come in useful next year.  Why?  Because next year is the 850th anniversary of the arrival of the Normans in Ireland. And if you’re persuaded, then it won’t be esoterica but an important element in our national story.

When William the Bastard defeated Harold II at the battle of Hastings in 1066, Anglo-Saxon England came to an end as William seized the crown and became William the Conqueror.  His Norman knights swept the old order aside and imposed themselves as feudal overlords of England. Harold’s sons fled to Wexford, bringing with them their father’s battle standard as a gift to their host.

For the Normans, holding land was the basis for their feudal way of life – the manner in which it was held, parcelled out, organised, and inherited.  Each estate was a building block in a hierarchy whose summit was the crown, itself held by men (mostly) who combined in their physical person the actual and symbolic divine right to rule.  Normans coveted land as the sole basis of their social standing. When they could not inherit it, they used their martial prowess to seize it.  After victory in battle, they quickly threw up a temporary fortification (the mote and bailey).  They would then build more permanent fortresses and manors, organising the land, enfeoffing it with supporters, building villages and markets, and generally creating an aristocratic lifestyle and a recognisably medieval way of life. Their non-inheriting sons would in turn be compelled to find new lands to conquer and repeat the pattern.

So it was that after the conquest of England, Norman lords pushed into Wales where they encountered the Celtic Welsh kings. The last independent Welsh king, Rhys ap Tewdwr, of Deheubarth (south Wales, including that long peninsula that reaches toward Ireland), was killed around 1090 in battle by Bernard de Neufmarche –  a marcher (frontier) lord from Normandy.  Deheubarth was then open to the Normans and the lordship of Pembrokeshire was created by the crown.  Rhys’s son, Gruffydd, fled to Ireland where he spent some of his youthful years. He would eventually return to Wales and regain a small foothold in Cantref Mawr, tradition seat of the clan. His son, the Lord Rhys, would emerge as a powerful Welsh leader and put such pressure on the Normans that one Earl of Strigoil would look across the sea to Ireland for fresh lands to seize – he is known to us as Strongbow.

Nest, Rhys’s daughter, probably about 15 years of age at the time, found herself as a prize in the court of William “Rufus” II, William the Conqueror’s heir. There, Princess Nest’s beauty caught the eye of his younger brother Henry, renowned Lothario and later Henry I.  In about 1103, she bore him a son, Henry FitzHenry aka Henry FitzRoy. As princes do with women of no political use, Henry then married her off to Gerald FitzWalter, Constable of Pembroke Castle.  She bore him three sons and two daughters,  Angharad and Gwladys.

At this time, surnames as we know them were forming and her sons were to be known as sons of Gerald – FitzGerald.  Her son, Maurice, would team up with another son of Nest by a subsequent relationship, Robert FitzStephen.  The half-brothers would lead the vanguard of the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 after Dermot MacMurrough, the ousted King of Leinster, solicited the help of Henry II and Strongbow in regaining his kingdom.  In fact, by agreeing to go to Ireland, Robert was released from the captivity of the Lord Rhys, the nephew of Nest – Wales was nothing if not a small world!  Maurice was about 60 at the time, Robert much younger, but both were bereft of opportunities at home.

Promised Wexford and its surrounding lands by Dermot (in contempt of Brehon law), Robert FitzStephen led the first arrivals, landing at Bannow Bay with the clear intention of taking Wexford not only as a prize but as a key beachhead.  With him was Robert de Barry, a grandson of Nest, son of Angharad, Robert FitzStephen’s half-sister. Mark the arrival of the first Barry in Ireland – his brother Philip de Barry would come some years later.  FitzStephen’s main lieutenant was Maurice de Prendergast and both were reinforced by the arrival of Dermot MacMurrough with a force of 500 Irish from his seat at Ferns.  Possibly persuaded to do so by their bishops, the people of Wexford surrendered to Dermot MacMurrough and renewed their vows of allegiance to him.

Alerted to these alarming developments, Rory O’Connor, the High King of Ireland, came to agreement with Dermot that Dermot would reign again as King of Leinster so long as his foreign allies left Ireland.  Shortly thereafter, Maurice FitzGerald arrived with reinforcements but Rory stayed his hand.

In May 1170, Dermot and his Norman allies were joined by another force led by a grandson of Nest, Raymond FitzGerald, known as Raymond le Gros for his stocky build.  Raymond was a son of William FitzGerald (Maurice’s brother); to note, William’s daughter forged the Carew lineage.  Raymond was a young knight in the service of Strongbow and acting as the advance guard of the main force being assembled in Pembroke.

Raymond landed at Baginbun in May 1170 and quickly proved himself a supreme battlefield commander, defeating a local Irish-Norse army sent to expel him from the headland of Baginbun.  Greatly outnumbered, he won a stunning victory, killing about 500 and capturing 70.  Raymond wanted to spare the prisoners but Strongbow’s uncle, Montmorency (evidently along to look after Strongbow’s interests), said clemency was a luxury they couldn’t afford.  All 70 died a brutal death and their bodies were flung into the sea.

By now, the Norman invasion was inexorable and Strongbow landed with his main force at Passage in August 1170, quickly overwhelming Waterford (who had resisted in fear after the massacre at Baginbun), slaughtering a good many, and taking Aoife, daughter of Dermot, as his wife.  Thereby, Strongbow established his claim to the Lordship of Leinster after Dermot either died or became king of Ireland (another promise made ultra vires, as neither feudalism nor English law existed in Ireland).

Milo de Cogan, who arrived with Strongbow, was another grandson of Nest, son of her daughter Gwladys. In September, Milo and Raymond seized Dublin by rudely interrupting the mediation by Archbishop O’Toole between the besieging Strongbow and the Danish King of Dublin, Haskulf. Milo also saved the Norman occupation of Dublin the following spring with a timely sally against a force of mercenary Norse supporting Haskulf’s attempt to retake Dublin.  Haskulf was captured and, in response to his defiant insults to his Norman captors, the Normans cut off his head there and then.  The Danes, or Ostmen, of Dublin were expelled beyond the walls to the north side of the river, hence Oxmantown. Thus ended Dublin’s Viking connection.

We know quite a lot about the Norman invasion thanks to another grandson of Nest, Gerald de Barry, son of  her daughter Angharad and her husband William FitzOdo de Barry.  Gerald, as a cleric and historian, would famously chronicle the Norman invasion of Ireland and record his impressions of Ireland and the Irish.

Altogether, Nest’s offspring would therefore include the Fitzgeralds, Fitzmaurices, de Barrys, de Cogans, and Carews. The FitzGeralds would create two dynasties in Ireland (earls of Desmond and Kildare) and effectively rule Ireland, technically on behalf of the English crown, until they were deposed by the New English under Henry VIII in the sixteenth century.

So it was that Edmund Curtis in his history of Ireland referred to Nest as the “queen bee of the Welsh-Norman swarm.”  It is interesting that this is the only treatment that Nest receives from Curtis.  Nor does she feature much in any of the histories.  This treatment at the hands of almost exclusively male historians is too dismissive and here’s why.

Nest’s sons and grandsons were the key agents in the Norman invasion of Ireland.  They were the first to cross the sea and establish the critical beachhead of Wexford and then Baginbun.  They battled against ferocious odds to hold on until Strongbow arrived with his main force, almost a year and a half after Maurice. Strongbow, out of favour with Henry II and very probably against the King’s instruction, was necessarily crafty and patient as his position depended on the success of this audacious adventure.  Had Maurice and Robert faltered, or had the High King mustered effectively against the Normans, Strongbow would in all likelihood not have risked crossing the channel.  He was gambling with his reputation and remaining resources in Ireland; he was gambling just about everything.

Taking ‘medieval’ to describe a particular type of European culture rather than a chronological period, medieval Ireland was a creation of the Normans.  They took the towns of Wexford, Waterford, and Dublin from the Ostmen and developed them through city charters, the emergent English common law, and investment.  The Normans built castles and sponsored a new wave of abbey building.  They established manors and new forms of agriculture, introduced taxation (King John’s Tower in Dublin was built as a treasury) and bureaucratic government.  They created permanent villages, developed markets and improved ports.  The Normans ended the Irish slave trade and replaced it with new trade through improved links with towns like Bristol and Chester.

Gaelic Ireland stayed wedded to its pastoral, raiding ways and regnal wars, eschewing primogeniture and urban living, all the while adhering to their Irish language, Brehon laws, customs, and culture.  It was clearly an attractive life and Normans were quickly Hibernicised, such that by the fourteenth century, the Statutes of Kilkenny were passed to try to save the English colony from complete Gaelicisation.

The source of political power of the FitzGeralds was their ability to negotiate between the two societies within Ireland, the Norman and the Gaelic, and between the English crown and the many sources of contending power within Ireland.  They applied Brehon or English law, depending on which was most advantageous to their interests.  This capacity was pretty much in their blood, from the marriage of Nest and Gerald de Windsor.  Like the Normans who intermarried in Wales, they forged an affinity with the society within which they had seized lands, the better to hold those lands and pass them on securely. The story of Nest and her intermarriage with the Normans prefigured what would happen a century later in Ireland.

This was most clearly so in the case of Aoife, Dermot MacMurrough’s daughter.  Her marriage to Strongbow in Waterford, in the days following its capture, was a revolutionary event.  It audaciously declared that Strongbow would become Lord of Leinster and holds its lands under feudal norms.  It defied the norms of Gaelic society, both in terms of how power and land were held as well as passed on.

The Normans formed an embryonic Irish government under the Crown.  Their state council would form the nucleus of what would become the Irish parliament.  Their house of Lords developed over the intervening centuries a distinctive Irish identity that was often in conflict with the Crown in Ireland, particularly on the issue of who had the right to initiate legislation, which in turn was emblematic of the deeper issue of whether Ireland’s interests or the rights of the Crown were predominant in Ireland.  Their influence in the House of Lords survived even as the chamber absorbed the parvenus of the New English and Cromwellian settlers in the seventeenth century.  Norman identification with Ireland and distinctly Irish interests formed the seed bed for the ideas expressed by Grattan and more radically by Lord Edward Fitzgerald.

There is a strange echo too in the stories of Nest and Dermot McMurrough.  Nest captivated Owain ap Cadwgan, a Welsh princeling, who raided and kidnapped her and her children.  Her husband and a few companions escaped, apparently using the toilet chute. Owain eventually returned Nest to her husband, Gerald, and, not for the first time, fled to Ireland.  In the topsy-turvy world of Welsh-Norman intrigue and war, Owain was eventually knighted by Henry I, Nest’s former lover, and agreed to support him in suppressing the revolt by Nest’s brother, Gruffyd.  Gerald was also supporting the King’s campaign, but killed Owain upon their encounter.

There was more consequence to the parallel story in Ireland.  In 1152, Dermot MacMurrough kidnapped Derbforgaill, the wife of the king of Breffni, Tieran O’Rourke, and the daughter of the king of Meath. Neither Dermot nor Derbforgaill were spring-chickens so it is as likely they had their own agendas.  Derbforgaill may not have been an unwilling victim as it is said she took most of her furniture with her.  Certainly Dermot might have seen her as a route to the kingship of Meath, a strategically critical area in the swaying balance of regnal wars in Ireland. Like Nest, Derbforgaill eventually returned to her husband.  The Brehons decreed that Dermot pay O’Rourke compensation in gold.  He didn’t and thus continued the bitter feud between them.  When the balance of power swung in O’Rourke’s favour in 1166, he settled his feud by exiling Dermot.  This in turn led to Dermot’s solicitation of help from Henry II, and the Norman invasion of Ireland.

While neither might have launched a thousand ships, both Nest and Derbforgaill were to be known as the ‘Helens’ of their homelands for these colourful episodes in their lives.

Princess Nest clearly had many qualities that helped her survive tumultuous times as her society was turned upside-down by Norman invasion.  History as it was written then – or indeed ever –  was not kind to women, even when they occupied positions of power and influence.  So we know little of Nest.  We do know that her immediate descendants took great pride in her and their lineage to her.  Gerald de Barry writes his history of the invasion such that the FitzGeralds and other relatives predominate, even at the expense of Strongbow (and particularly Montmorency).

Through the strength of the familial lines to which she gave rise, Nest was one of the great influencers in the development of Ireland’s history and indeed that of the British-Irish archipelago. The Tudors trace their line to her.  And through the FitzGeralds, so too could the Kennedys, giving Nest a reach to the US and the twentieth century.

Yet it is in Ireland that Nest’s influence was most direct and formative.  It is impossible to reconstruct the Norman invasion of Ireland without the critical leadership and influence of her sons and grandsons. Without FitzStephen and FitzGerald, it’s unlikely that Strongbow himself would have taken the fateful steps that led him to Ireland.  There might well not have been a Norman invasion at all.  And it is impossible to imagine Ireland’s historical narrative without the Normans.  Try to imagine Ireland without the FitzGeralds, or all the other Norman cognomens that abound in Ireland past and present. This is not a value judgement as to whether that is a bad or a good thing.   It is to say that our history would have been very different. However, I would hazard that Ireland would eventually have been invaded by the Tudors simply because they regarded Ireland as an exposed flank likely to be exploited by their arch-rivals, the Spanish, as indeed it was.

Have I persuaded you that Ireland is unimaginable without Princess Nest? That, if she was not the mother of us all, then mother of quite a few and through them an elemental ingredient in our history? I may not have persuaded you that Princess Nest is a lost mother of Ireland but perhaps you’ll grant that she deserves to be better known here. In knowing about her, we know more about ourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

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