Norman invasion

The insular world of Gaelic Ireland was significantly breached with the arrival of the Anglo-Normans in the years following 1169. After the defeat of the Vikings at Clontarf in 1014, the government of the country became radically unstable, creating a situation in which the Annals of the Four Masters entry for the year 1145 can describe the country as ‘a trembling sod’. The Norman invasion was precipitated, according to tradition, by Dermot MacMurrough (Diarmait Mac Murchadha), King of Leinster, in a struggle against the O'Neill, O'Brien, and O'Rourke families. In 1152 MacMurrough abducted Tiernan O'Rourke's wife Dervorgilla. In 1166, Roderick O'Conor, High King of Ireland, and O'Rourke attacked Diarmait, who retreated to Bristol and thence to Aquitaine, where he sought assistance from Henry II. Henry had already acquired authority to invade Ireland in a Papal Bull (Laudabiliter) secured by John of Salisbury from Adrian IV (the English Pope Nicholas Breakspear) in 1155. Basing himself in Bristol, Dermot gathered an army around the nucleus provided by Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke (known as Strongbow in Irish tradition). After the initial incursion of a limited Norman party at Baginbun in Wexford in 1169, Strongbow arrived with 200 knights and 1, 000 men-at-arms in 1170. The success of the mailed knights and their bowmen was immediate. When Dermot died in 1171 Strongbow assumed the office of King of Leinster. Henry II came to Ireland in order to secure the feudal loyalty of the Normans, and many Irish chieftains. Strongbow died in 1175, by which year Leinster and part of Munster were in Norman hands but Ulster and Connacht remained Gaelic. The appointment of Prince John as Lord of Ireland by his father in 1175 and his succession to the throne of England in 1199 initiated the second phase of the conquest. John made extensive grants in Gaelic territories to his Norman liege-lords, establishing the Butler, Fitzgerald, and de Burgh dynasties of Ireland. The penetration of Gaelic society by cultural forms associated with the Normans made a lasting alteration in the development of Irish culture, for instance in the dánta grádha, the Irish lays [see laoithe], and in the elaboration of native patterns of story-telling by the addition of romantic elements. There were, also, a number of literary productions in Norman French and in English (such as The Land of Cokaygne); and English began to be used as the language of commerce and administration beyond the Pale. Extensive political and economic changes reflected the process of feudalization intrinsic to the Norman system of social administration and land use. Gaelic writers varied in the degree of their attachment to the Normans and their legacy, the closest point being reached in Geoffrey Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, a classic of Gaelic historiography that characterizes his own Norman lineage as the ‘Sean-Ghaill’ (‘Older Foreigners’) in contradistinction to the ‘Nua-Ghaill’ or New English, settled in the plantation period.