Early in 1177, John de Courcy, one of the new Norman knights in Ireland, headed north from Dublin with twenty-two cavalry and 300 infantry. He pushed through the Gap of the North, the Moyry Pass through which both the road and railway line that connect Dublin and Belfast run today. It is one of the few natural access points to the province of Ulster, whose necklace of hills and lakes girdles the province and presents a natural barrier to incursion from the south.
Despite his modest numbers, de Courcy demonstrated in the most emphatic fashion the superiority of Norman arms by winning two battles against Gaelic chieftains in the area known as Lecale, near Downpatrick. The Norman cavalry, protected by mail armour and riding in stirrups — two accessories unknown to the Irish — proved irresistible. Not that de Courcy had it all his own way: he did not win all his battles and was vulnerable to ambushes in countryside that was strange to him but familiar to the Ulstermen.
None the less, he established himself. And he built. Stone castles, by far the biggest human artefacts yet seen in Ireland, were the Normans’ key means of securing and defending their position in conquered territory. This was as true in Ireland as in Wales or Sicily, where there was a Norman kingdom from 1130 to 1194. And none was more impressive or more intimidating than the great castle de Courcy built at Carrickfergus, on the shore of Belfast Lough, to secure the northern end of his coastal territory which now encompassed much of modern Co. Down.
In 1180, he married the daughter of the king of the Isle of Man, and her dowry included a fleet of ships. By keeping the sea to his back, de Courcy had the means both to trade and in extremis to escape. The latter option was not needed. Carrickfergus castle and others that he strung around the margins of his new territory were impregnable to attack by the Ulstermen.
Carrickfergus is the anglicised version of Carraig Fhearghais, meaning the rock of Fergus, the eponym being a local sixth-century king of Dal Riada. This was a seaborne Gaelic kingdom, with its twin poles in north-east Ulster and south-west Scotland. It had existed from about the fifth century when Gaelic warriors from Ulster made the crossing over the narrow passage of the North Channel to create a sister kingdom in Argyll (from the Gaelic Oirear Gael, shore of the Gaels). Scotland is very close: the Mull of Kintyre is clearly visible from the top of Torr Head in north Antrim. In the classic way of the ancient world, the sea was a highway rather than a barrier: it was easier for Ulster to colonise part of western Scotland than to form a connection with the rest of Ireland to the south. Here was an enduring theme in the province’s history.
The castle that de Courcy built at Carrickfergus was formidable even by Norman standards: it stands alongside de Lacy’s castle at Trim and King John’s Castle in Limerick as the most assertive of their kind. The inner keep or donjon has walls nine feet thick. Its four storeys rise 90 feet above the rock on which it rests. This was the warlord’s untouchable citadel and de Courcy established what was in effect a palatinate jurisdiction in these conquered lands, minting his own coins and dispensing justice through his barons.
All this lasted until 1199, when de Courcy fell foul of the new king John (Jean sans Terre). The king encouraged a younger son of Trim Castle, Hugh de Lacy, to make war on de Courcy. By 1205, de Lacy had won and was created earl of Ulster, while de Courcy was put to flight. He tried to recover his lands by launching a seaborne invasion force from the Isle of Man with help from Reginald, the Manx king, his brother-in-law. He failed.
The medieval earldom of Ulster was as much subject to the Gaelic re-conquest of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as other parts of the island previously subdued. Yet de Courcy’s achievement was never wholly undone. Even in the darkest moments of the colony in the late Middle Ages, the toehold in Ulster that owed a formal allegiance to the crown held out. Although outside the Pale in the literal sense, the colonists still controlled the coastal marchland south of Belfast Lough as well as the great redoubt of Carrickfergus on its northern shore. It is no accident that, when the plantation schemes for Ulster were first mooted in the sixteenth century, these lands were the first to be planted. The private scheme sponsored by Sir Thomas Smith in what are now Cos Antrim and Down proved to be a short-term failure but a long-term success — so much so that they were never part of the official Plantation of Ulster because they did not need to be.
The medieval earldom of Ulster was the farthest northern margin of the conquest, but its survival — however vestigial at times — provided a beachhead. It was at Carrickfergus that William of Orange landed in 1690 to settle one of the decisive quarrels of Irish history, one whose aftershocks are still felt. It was a marginal place, always vulnerable: the French under Admiral Thurot held Belfast Lough and environs for a week during the Seven Years’ War in 1760 and in the next decade the American privateer John Paul Jones sailed a fleet into the Lough and laid about him without let or hindrance.
And yet, despite these external threats, the Presbyterians of Antrim and Down, the coastal counties nearest to Scotland and thus most heavily influenced by the Calvinism of the Scottish Kirk, also furnished the Ulster republican rebels of the 1790s. These were internal rebels, chafing at the effortless superiority and exactions of the eighteenth-century Anglican establishment from whom they were remote socially, temperamentally and theologically. They were defeated, and in their defeat discovered that however unpleasant the Anglicans, they were at least fellow Protestants. Thus was sown the germ of pan-Protestant solidarity, a hothouse flower that requires much nervous attention but one that is the basis of the modern unionist tradition in Ulster.
