Old English and New English

Old English and New English, terms expressing the new divisions created by the arrival during the Tudor conquest of a new cohort of soldiers, settlers, and officials. Tension mounted steadily from the 1550s but was not fully articulated until the 17th century. In 1500 the descendants of the Anglo‐Norman conquerors referred to themselves as ‘Englishmen born in Ireland’. Scholars tend to call them ‘Anglo‐Irish’, the analogy being with the 18th‐century elite who allegedly possessed a similar sort of colonial nationalism founded on the local parliament. This term is used up to 1603, especially for magnates inhabiting the borders with the Irish. Scholars use the term ‘Old English’ for Palesmen and townsmen after the mid‐16th century, though they are actually called ‘Anglo‐Hiberni’ (Stanihurst) and ‘English‐Irish’ (Moryson) in the literature of the period. Only in the 1620s does the term ‘Old English’ make its appearance to cover all descendants of the Norman conquerers as opposed to the recent Elizabethan and Jacobean settlers, the ‘New English’. Similar terms—sean Ghaill and nua Ghaill—came into use in Irish.

New arrivals had also aroused resentment during the Middle Ages but they quickly integrated by marriage into the local Englishry. Many of the newcomers attracted to Ireland, particularly by the distribution of lands following the dissolution of the monasteries, during Henry VIII's reign likewise assimilated, being essentially state Catholics. Over time, however, successive English lords deputy used their powers of patronage to fill posts in the military–state–church apparatus with compatriots who were increasingly Protestant and less likely to intermarry with the local elite. The Old English, proud of their associations with the original conquest, not only felt a loss of control to arrivistes but also an erosion of their rights in the cess and composition disputes. Their discontent was visible in the Baltinglass revolt, which had a Counter‐Reformation political dimension.

The New English, who could only succeed by displacing the Old English, now began their systematic denigration, depicting them as disloyal servants of Rome, gun‐runners to the Irish, and corrupters of the common law. These critics, notably Edmund Spenser, sought to tar the Old English with an Irish brush, alleging that they had degenerated from their original Englishness through marriage and fosterage to the point where they now spoke Irish and had become even more incorrigible than the Irish themselves.

The Old English were on the horns of a dilemma. The state was demanding conformity to Protestantism from a population traditionally loyal to the English crown who had committed themselves to the spiritual leadership of the pope. For a moment, with the Graces, the Old English seemed to have secured their rights as Englishmen. In fact common religion and mutual threat was accelerating an alliance between themselves and the Gaelic Irish. This coming together, long feared by the Protestants and prefigured in Rothe's Analecta (1616–19) and Keating's History (see literature in irish), was eventually realized at Knockcrofty during the rising of 1641 and in the subsequent Catholic Confederation (see Confederate Catholics) for God, king, and country.

Ironically, the New English, who had completed their assumption of power under Chichester (1605–15) and his successor Sir Oliver St John (lord deputy 1616–22), were themselves threatened by further incoming groups of high Anglicans under Wentworth in the 1630s and most significantly by soldiers and adventurers of the English parliament in the 1650s. However, the Old and New Protestant groupings apparent at the Restoration rapidly coalesced as they united to resist the claims of the dispossessed Catholics.

Bibliography

Canny, N. P. , The Formation of the Old English Elite in Ireland (1975)

Hiram Morgan