43 The Normans Are Here!

Just as the Irish were beginning to see the emergence of truly powerful high kings, something happened that altered the course of their history forever—the Normans arrived. The Norman English, who had recently consolidated their rule over Britain, began a conquest that eventually led to English domination of Ireland.

The ironic thing about the Norman arrival is that an Irishman invited them in. Dermot MacMurrough, king of Leinster, was unseated from power in 1166 by Rory O’Connor, king of Connacht. MacMurrough had heard that the Norman (derived from the term “North man,” descendants of earlier Vikings) knights over in England were particularly tough, so he asked his English neighbor King Henry II if he could borrow some of them to get his throne back. Henry, alert to the possibilities of the situation, sent over Richard FitzGilbert de Clare—known to the world as Strongbow.

MacMurrough had guessed right about one thing—the Norman knights were tough. In 1170 Strongbow and his team of heavily armored knights plowed through the relatively lightly armed forces of Irish lords. The Irish probably could have put up a good fight if they’d joined together. But Ireland at that time was divided up among 100 or more kings, who tended to wait in their home territories for the Normans to arrive. When they did, the result was invariably Norman victory.

What MacMurrough didn’t expect, though, was that the Normans might like Ireland and want to stick around. MacMurrough allowed Strongbow to marry his daughter Aoife, and when MacMurrough died in 1171, Strongbow had himself declared lord of Leinster. No one in Ireland could afford to object.

But someone back in England wasn’t so happy about all this—the English king. Henry II watched Strongbow’s string of successes and began to worry that his knight was getting too many ideas about his own power. So Henry sailed to Ireland to oversee the campaign and assert his own rights.

To consolidate the Norman victories, Henry declared Strongbow the king of Leinster but granted the province of Meath to Hugh de Lacy, a loyal knight. In 1175 Henry signed the Treaty of Windsor with Rory O’Connor, MacMurrough’s old rival. The treaty declared O’Connor high king of Ireland, but it also said that he was a vassal of the king of England. Through these maneuvers, Henry established a system of competing lords in Ireland, who all ultimately owed their allegiance to the English Crown.

Over the next seventy years, Anglo-Norman knights extended English control over about three-fourths of Ireland. It wasn’t so much an organized campaign as a series of advances by Norman adventurers who wanted their own fiefdoms. They only took property that they judged worth fighting for, so substantial portions of northwest Ulster and southwest Munster remained Irish.

The Irish probably thought they’d be able to take back their lands as soon as the Normans let down their guard, but the Normans did something the locals didn’t expect—they built castles. Irish nobles generally moved around with their cattle, so they rarely built substantial structures. But Normans immediately set their serfs to building motte castles— earthen mounds defended by ditches and wooden towers. The mounds from these motte castles still dot the Irish countryside. Once these were in place, they built more substantial castles out of stone.