Anglo‐ Norman colonization and settlement

Anglo‐ Norman colonization and settlement, a process which occurred mainly between c.1170 and c.1270, directed by the new feudal aristocracy. It should be distinguished from the conquest (see anglo‐norman invasion) as such: not all conquered territories were settled by significant numbers of Anglo‐Norman tenants or town dwellers (burgesses), but where this did occur, primarily in Leinster, Meath, and Munster, the demographic, social, and economic consequences proved to be abiding. Ireland was never again to be Gaalies in the sense that it had been before the conquest. Seen in its European context the colonizatioon of Ireland was part of a wider demographic movemnet, ranging from the settlement of wetlands and forests to accommodate an expanding population on north‐western Europe to the penetration of the emerging Baltic and central European states by large numbers of German and Flemish colonists. Most villages and towns in the Anglo‐Norman areas of Ireland, as in northen and central Europe generall, owe their origin to an immensely significant demographic shift that may without risk of exaggeration be compared to the changes wrought by the industrial revolution. Thus the Anglo‐Norman conquest was the occasion rather than the cause of large‐scale settlement. Haid it coourred a century earlier or later, its impact on Ireland would have been greatly diminishedd.

The gowth of historical interest in settlement originates in a pioneering article by A. J. Otway‐Ruthven in 1965. Her challenge was quickly taken up by a rising generation of historians, historical geographers, and archaelolgists, and shows no sign of slackening pace. As a measure of the new‐found interest in settlement, Robin Frame dedicated a chapter to the subject in his book Colonial Ireland, 1169–1369 (1981).

Unlike the carefully decides schemes that characterzed the Irish plantations of the 16th and 17th centuries, Anglo‐Norman settlement patterns were more individualistic, not to say hit and miss, with a high incidence of misses. Feudal lords, whether they ruled great lordships or humble fiels, were not obliged to fulful plantation quotas like their Elizabethan and Jacobeas successors. Neither were they medieval real estate agents. Their obhective was the exploitation of their fudal and seigniorial prerogatives to the utmost. Where such considerations coincided with the location of their castles at points that were equally well placed for the exploitation of trade routes—like Kilkenny or Carlow—well and good. But as often as not their seats of power were selected for administrative or military considerations, for example Shanid, Nenagh, Dunkerrin, Knockgraffon, which never developed in the medieval period as significant centres of commerce. Trim was the administrative axis of the great lordship of Meath, but it was Drogheda that emerged as the engine of regional commerce. Nevertheless, within these constraints, the great lords undoubtedly sought to maximize their revenues by endowing their demesne manors and towns with considerable investments in the form of prime arable land. In spite of the turbulent circumstances of the initial conquest, the structures of the great lordships were carefully planned by their founding lords. The Butler lordship (see Ormond (Butler)), comprising some 750,000 statute acres, was divided into seven cantreds or baronies, each administered from a seigniorial centre or caput: Arklow, Tullow, and Gowran in Leinster, and Nenagh, Caherconlish, Dunkerrin, and Thurles in Munster. Each caput had its castle, demesne lands, seigniorial court, and town, with a dependent population of military tenants, free tenants, burgesses, tenants‐at‐will, cottiers, farmers, and, usually, servile tenants of the betagh class.

The newly imported institution of the manor was the vehicle of colonization. Having first taken care of the military needs of a conquered territory by building castles and organizing military fiefs, the lord sought to profit from the remainder by developing his demesne lands and founding a town as a focus for trade and as a school for essential crafts within his lordship. The skills for the latter, like the technology, had to be imported. Hence it was necessary to encourage immigration by demanding lighter labour services than were customary elsewhere in the Angevin world and by granting autonomy to the towns.

That a numerically significant assortment of landless English and Welsh labourers, serfs fleeing oppressive labour services, or medieval carpet‐baggers seeking their fortune in the new colonial towns settled in Ireland seems undeniable, if we are to judge from the evidence of later manorial records, of the Dublin Guild Merchant Roll c.1190–1265, and of archaeological work on densely concentrated moated sites. Some settlements were highly successful. At the beginning of the 14th century there were about 200 small tenants on the demesne lands in Gowran. More problematical is the question of the population of the manorial town, which was composed of 515 burgages. Unfortunately, it is impossible to deduce from this how many burgesses actually rented them. Nor is it possible to estimate how many cottiers occupied dwellings in the lanes and backstreets, though they may have been as numerous as the burgesses. The total immigrant population, together with the knights and free tenants and their humbler dependants on the outlying manors (which accounted for 86 per cent of the entire area of the cantred), was probably well in excess of 1,000 households in an area of some 44,000 acres. Compared to the painfully slow progress of later plantations, such an achievement was remarkable.

But there were failures too, and not just near the thinly populated frontier. Even in the densely settled regions of Co. Kilkenny, we know of at least five towns that did not endure: the Newtown of Jerpoint, Coolaghmore, Danesfort, Odagh, and Tullaherin, and perhaps two others. In 1303 we hear of two towns called Kukomor and Clonetheran, near Thurles, which clearly survived only in the form of burgage tenures. This seems to have been all that remained of urban foundations that never got off the seigniorial drawing board. Nevertheless, the Anglo‐Norman settlement reinforced a partial conquest to such a degree that it struck deeper social and cultural roots in strategic areas of Ireland than did a more comprehensive but exclusively aristocratic conquest of England a century earlier.

Bibliography

Barry, T. B. , The Archaeology of Medieval Ireland (1987)
Empey, C. A. , ‘Conquest and Settlement: Patterns of Anglo‐Norman Settlement in North Munster and South Leinster’, Irish Economic and Social History, 13 (1986)
Otway‐Ruthven, A. J. , ‘The Character of Norman Settlement in Ireland’, Historical Studies, 5 (1965)

Revd Canon C. A. Empey