Gaelicization

Gaelicization, a term favoured by some modern historians to describe what they see as a key development in the later Middle Ages, the assimilation of the descendants of the Anglo‐Norman settlers by the Irish host society. While the term is not of course contemporary, it does reflect the view of medieval administrators—expressed most notably in the 1366 Statute of Kilkenny—that the Englishness (and hence the loyalty) of the settler population was being undermined by native influences. Among the socio‐political changes often identified—alongside the spread of the Irish language and literary culture—as symptomatic of ‘Gaelicization’ are the decline of English common law and its replacement over large areas by brehon or march law; the presence of extended aristocratic lineages, sometimes practising Gaelic marriage and inheritance customs; the use of Gaelic personal names; the prevalence of cattle‐raiding and Irish styles of arms and combat; and the exercise of lordship, including the support of troops, through Gaelic exactions such as coyne.

The concept of Gaelicization should, however, be employed with caution and discrimination. The official evidence is the product of a period which assumed a closer linkage than before between language, nationality, and political allegiance. Both royal ministers and the settler elites of towns and manorialized lowlands in the south‐east might attribute Irishness, with connotations of disloyalty, to lords and lineages who saw themselves as English, and loyal. Ministers were also inclined to lump together all divergences from supposed English norms and view them as the result of specifically Irish influences. Some features—particularly cattle‐raiding and march law—need to be understood also as the product of frontier conditions and a largely pastoral economy; they have parallels in other regions, including the English‐speaking Anglo‐Scottish borders. Above all, the rhetoric of the sources can obscure the fact that influences passed both ways. Between the 13th and 16th centuries, for instance, Irish law borrowed English terms and procedures; Gaelic lordship and military institutions were influenced by English models; members of some Irish dynasties bore Anglo‐Norman personal names. Irish historians have tended to be comfortable with the idea of a settler population progressively absorbed by the Gaelic world, to the point of becoming ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’. The other side of the coin has until recently attracted less attention.

This is not to doubt the impact of Gaelic influences, which affected different areas of the colony in differing degrees, and operated in different ways at various social levels. But the concept of Gaelicization, if used as a glass through which to view the society of later medieval Ireland, is liable to distort. That society was a hybrid one which had emerged through a complex process of interaction and cultural exchange.

Bibliography

Frame, R. , ‘Power and Society in the Lordship of Ireland, 1272–1377’, Past and Present, 76 (1977)
Nicholls, K. , Gaelic and Gaelicised Ireland in the Middle Ages (1972)
Simms, K. , From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Political Structure of Gaelic Ireland in the Later Middle Ages (1987)

Robin Frame