frontier society

frontier society, in medieval Ireland. Historians have increasingly come to view medieval Ireland, both militarily and culturally, as one of a number of frontier zones which emerged in Europe, and on its fringes, in the late 11th and 12th centuries. These include the Celtic areas of Britain, the Slav lands, the Iberian peninsula, and the crusader states. Although the experience of each was different, all felt the expansionary impact of the dominant Frankish society, whose characteristic features included French language and culture and the reforming church, together with castles and heavily armed cavalry. These features are associated with the English intervention and settlements in Ireland, although the 12th‐century reform of the Irish church, developments in castle building, and changes in the nature of kingship, all testify to the extent to which influences from the Continent had already begun to affect the country before 1170.

The Irish frontier was complex. The physical geography of Ireland ensured that there was no clear, continuous border between the colonized and uncolonized areas. The English encastellated and settled fertile coastal zones and river valleys, predominantly in Leinster, Meath, and east Munster, though there were significant pockets of settlement elsewhere, for instance around Belfast Lough, Galway, and Coleraine. From these cores, they were, particularly during the period up to the mid‐13th century, successful in dominating the uplands and boglands where Gaelic society continued to function. It is therefore more accurate to think of Ireland as containing, in the territorial sense, numerous regional and local frontiers. These had distinct histories, which might be shaped partly by the vigour and durability of particular settler magnates, their families, and knightly subtenants. The colonizing powers did not exist in a state of perpetual warfare with their Gaelic neighbours. The segmentary quarrels of native ruling houses permitted a constant criss‐cross of alliances, through which lords such as the Lacys, Geraldines, and de Burghs maintained and expanded their influence. In the first generation, marriages between settler lords and native noblewomen were not uncommon. Irish and English troops fought in the same armies, and military equipment and tactics were affected by this experience.

From the late 13th century there was a faltering of colonization in Europe generally, which some have associated with climatic change. Ireland shared this experience. The retreat of the colony, as the initiative passed back into Gaelic hands, although slow and patchy, sharpened contemporary awareness of the frontier. From the 1270s the Irish of Wicklow and Offaly were raiding the settlements in Leinster, creating a serious problem of defence for the Dublin government. But at the same period Richard de Burgh, the Red Earl of Ulster, was able to expand his power to Derry and beyond, and Thomas de Clare was establishing a lordship in Thomond. Even so, the royal records now constantly distinguish between the ‘land of peace’ (the settled regions where English law prevailed), the ‘land of war’ (the areas of Gaelic custom, where cattle‐raiding was normal), and the ‘march’, or borderlands, in between.

During the 14th century the ‘land of war’ and the ‘march’ expanded greatly at the expense of the ‘land of peace’. The most fundamental agent of change was probably the recurrent outbreaks of plague, beginning with the Black Death of 1348, which seem to have affected the populations of towns and nucleated manorial settlements particularly severely. But disruption caused by the Bruce invasion of 1315–18, which coincided with a major European famine, was also significant. There was in addition the impact of the subdivision of lordships among co‐heiresses and their inheritance by absentees, which was a particular feature of the first half of the century. The retreat of the frontier is visible in various ways. The Dublin government focused increasingly on the south‐east, as justiciars fought and negotiated with the Irish of Leinster; by 1500 this concentration was to foster the concept of the English Pale. Easy terms were offered to men willing to take and fortify deserted lands. Legislation urged lords and communities to desist from individual negotiations with the Irish, and to synchronize their military efforts. Towns such as Waterford, Cork, and Limerick portrayed themselves as surrounded by Irish enemies and rebellious English lords. Resident magnates probably weathered the storm better than central government or absentees. Their power had always depended on a combination of exploiting settler communities and establishing networks of clientship among the Irish. During the later Middle Ages the balance between the two activities altered; in the mid‐14th century the archives of the earls of Kildare and Ormond contain many contracts regularizing their relations with Gaelic lords. In the border zones there was an increasing convergence between lesser noble families of English and Irish orgin; both were securing their possessions by building tower houses.

In the mid‐14th century official pronouncements about what historians have come to call Gaelicization reveal a consciousness that there was a cultural as well as a military threat. Relations with the Irish host society, which had once been taken for granted, were now, fruitlessly, outlawed. This phenomenon is encapsulated in the Statute of Kilkenny (1366). The image the statute presents, of an embattled ‘English Ireland’, though oversimplified, reveals the characteristic outlook of a colonial society alarmed by the contraction of its once expanding frontiers.

Bibliography

Bartlett, R. , The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change (1993)
Bartlett, R. and Mackay, A. (eds.), Medieval Frontier Societies (1989)
Lydon, J. F. , The Lordship of Ireland in the Middle Ages (1972)

Robin Frame