In the first week of May, 1169, Sir Robert fitz Stephen landed at Bannow Bay in southeastern Ireland with a force of thirty knights, sixty mounted esquires, and 300 archers. [1]
This event marked the beginning of what is frequently described as the ‘Norman Conquest’ of Ireland - although it bore very little resemblance to the more famous Norman Conquest of England just over a century before. William the Conqueror had deliberately set out to seize England’s throne in 1066, and mustered a large, powerful army to achieve his purpose. Fitz Stephen, on the other hand, had been invited to Ireland to help an exiled Irish king, Dermot MacMurrough, regain the throne to one of the dozens of petty kingdoms into which the island was divided. Furthermore, Fitz Stephen’s tiny force was not the vanguard of a mighty army, but in fact represented a substantial portion of the total military strength available to a small band of Anglo-Norman adventurers from Wales who would shortly follow him across the Irish Sea. These men were drawn to Ireland by the prospect of winning new lands, but their ambitions (at least initially) did not extend to conquering the entire country. However, their overall leader, Richard fitz Gilbert de Clare (better known by his nickname ‘Strongbow’) had been promised that he would succeed Dermot as King of Leinster if the enterprise prospered.
[2]
As it turned out, the ‘invasion’ succeeded against all odds and beyond all expectations. Within two years the invaders not only reconquered the Kingdom of Leinster, but also captured broad territories to the north and west, and took the walled cities of Waterford, Wexford and Dublin from the Nordic ‘Ostmen’ (i.e., descendents of the Vikings). However, a crisis arose in the summer of 1171, after Dermot’s death allowed Strongbow to assume the throne of Leinster. The installation of a foreigner in their midst so offended the Irish that for the first time most of the native ‘kings’ put aside their differences and rallied behind the High King, Rory O’Connor in a common effort to eradicate the invaders. This was to have been coordinated with a counterattack by the Dublin Ostmen (with the assistance of their kin from the Hebrides and Isle of Man), but the Norse impetuously assaulted Dublin before the High King arrived and were wiped out. Within a few weeks, Rory besieged the city with an army that chroniclers of the day reported as 60,000 men strong. This was certainly an exaggeration, but the Irish no doubt outnumbered Strongbow’s force of perhaps 2,000 men by at least ten-to-one. Yet, after a leisurely siege lasting almost two months, it was the Anglo-Normans who went on the offensive. Attacking on September 1st , they took Rory’s massive army by surprise and utterly routed it - putting an end to Irish hopes of driving the invaders back into the sea. [3]
Historians of this critical period in Ireland’s history have naturally focused their energies upon unraveling the causes for this amazing success. The traditional thesis has been that the ‘Norman’ triumph was due primarily to military factors, and most notably the invaders’ use of heavily armored, mounted knights, which had not previously been seen in Ireland. Dr. Gerald A. Hayes-McCoy, the ‘father’ of modern Irish military history, provided one of the best synopses of this interpretation. The victory of the Normans was due to their military ability, and to the fact that they were better equipped than the Irish were; it was also the consequence of the Irish slowness in action and of the Irish political circumstances, which made effective opposition to the intruders almost impossible. But primarily it was a matter of military superiority. … The Irish had no such warriors as these Norman knights. Like the Spanish horsemen in Mexico, the knights dominated the battlefield. Nor were these the Normans’ only fighters. They also had good archers, skilled bowmen from the Welsh marches, the forerunners of the famous longbowmen of England .... [4] The Irish, in contrast, had no shock cavalry and their principal missile weapons were javelins and slingstones. Furthermore, with the exception of some of the nobility, none of the Irish wore armor - and most would continue to go into battle unprotected right through the end of the 16 th Century. A Gaelic chronicler of the Battle of Downpatrick (1260) bemoaned the natives’ lack of protection in verse: Unequal they came to the battle, There is thus no questioning the Anglo-Normans’ military superiority over the native Irish, but in recent decades, historians have challenged the traditional view that this was the decisive factor which explains their success. It has been shown, for example, that the knights were afforded relatively few opportunities to employ their shock effect in conventional battles fought on open ground. Instead, the Anglo-Normans were drawn into the traditional style of Irish warfare, which revolved around raiding and burning hostile territory, and driving off ‘preys’ of cattle. [6] Cattle were important because they were practically the only movable commodity of value in Gaelic Ireland, and the wealth and influence of an Irish ‘king’ was judged largely by the size and quality of his herds. The objective of this style of warfare was less to destroy the enemy than to force him to submit to one’s overlordship and surrender hostages – in return for which he would be restored most of his stolen cattle.
[7]
The Anglo-Normans adapted quickly to the ‘idiom’ of Irish warfare because they were accustomed to a similar mode of fighting against the Welsh. [8] Knights alone could not prevail in this kind of warfare, and were actually quite vulnerable when ambushed in the dense forests and bogs that covered most of Ireland in those days. The Anglo-Normans accordingly employed their relatively few knights in close cooperation with the Welsh bowmen and large numbers of lightly-equipped Gaelic allies, welding these disparate elements together into what would nowadays be called a system of ‘combined arms.’ The knights could sweep away any opposition on open ground, while the Welsh archers’ superior range and accuracy allowed them to keep Irish skirmishers at bay, and the Gaelic allies could move and fight effectively in difficult terrain. [9] Hayes-McCoy likened the Anglo-Normans to Spanish conquistadors, and the comparison is an apt one. For, like Cortez and Pizzaro, the sheer novelty of the Anglo-Normans’ weapons and tactics lent them a moral effect that far outweighed the concrete military advantages they conferred. In time, the Irish would grow accustomed to these weapons and tactics, and learn how to counter them using largely the same resources they possessed in 1169. The Anglo-Norman invaders were also akin to conquistadors insofar as they could not have succeeded without the aid of powerful native allies - whom they would later betray. The pattern set by Strongbow and MacMurrough would be repeated on innumerable occasions over the following centuries. That is, having been invited to intervene in a war or clan succession struggle among the Irish, the Anglo-Normans would use the opportunity to conquer new lands either by prior agreement with their Gaelic allies or by treacherously turning on them after victory had been achieved. This pattern highlights the decisive role that the political disunity of Gaelic Ireland played in facilitating the invaders’ success. Ireland had never been united at any time in its history, and in the mid-12 th century, sovereignty was divided among over a hundred petty ‘kingdoms.’ These were very loosely grouped into five highly unstable regional blocs that were customarily - but by no means invariably - dominated by particular clans such as the MacMurroughs of Leinster and the O’Connors of Connacht. The leaders of these regional blocs competed constantly for the title of high king (ard ri), and also faced endless internal challenges from treacherous relatives and rebellious under-kings who sought to replace them as overlord. Ireland was consequently wracked by an endless cycle of warfare characterized by a bewilderingly complex and constantly-shifting tangle of alliances. The Anglo-Normans’ amazing success probably owed more to these divisions among the Irish - and their own skill at exploiting them - than to their military advantages.
[10] Yet, if it was the fundamental lack of unity among the Irish that made it possible for Strongbow’s small band of adventurers to achieve so much, by the same token it also made it impossible for them to win the entire country. The outcome of William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066 was effectively decided in a single day when he killed Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings. Ireland, on the other hand, took more than 400 years to conquer, principally because it could not be subjugated simply by toppling a single ruler. Instead, each of the dozens of Irish kingdoms was an autonomous sovereignty that had to be conquered separately - and showed a maddening tendency not to stay conquered. For, although Irish ‘kings’ readily submitted when confronted by superior force, they just as quickly renounced their submissions when circumstances changed. The Anglo-Normans gradually came to realize that completing the conquest would be neither swiftly nor easily accomplished. Barely two decades after the ‘Norman Conquest’ began, its best-known chronicler, the churchman Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) wrote: The Irish have four prophets, Moling, Brechan, Patrick and Colmcille …. They speak of this conquest, and all bear witness that it will be welded together as a result of many battles, after a long struggle, and at a cost of much loss of life extending far into the future. But they hold out no hope of a complete English victory, with the whole island subdued from shore to shore and fortified with castles, much before judgement day.[11] Slow and frustrating though the conquest would ultimately prove, in the early years it progressed far too rapidly for the peace of mind of Henry II, King of England. He had given Dermot MacMurrough license to recruit mercenaries from among his subjects, but had never anticipated that the expedition would produce such dramatic results. By the summer of 1171, Henry had become alarmed by the possibility that Strongbow might be plotting to establish a rival kingdom in Ireland. In October of that year, Henry set sail for Ireland with an army of approximately 4,500 men in order to establish his authority over the budding Anglo-Norman colony. After Henry arrived in Ireland, the Anglo-Normans and all but a handful of the Irish kings hastened to offer their submissions, and the ‘campaign’ became a triumphal progress that met virtually no resistance. [12] The Irish kings and Anglo-Norman lords alike were awarded title to their lands through a process known as ‘Surrender and Re-grant’ under which they surrendered their properties to the Crown and then had them immediately granted back as feudal fiefs. However, in order to restrict the power of Strongbow’s party, Henry granted extensive lands to English lords who had accompanied him to Ireland - most notably Hugh de Lacy, who was given title to the greater part of Meath. De Lacy was also appointed Justiciar (i.e., governor) of Ireland when Henry returned to England in 1172.
[13] No sooner had Henry II departed Ireland than his Anglo-Norman vassals began attacking the Irish and seizing their lands regardless of the fact that these had been granted to them by the Crown. The Irish responded with a series of revolts that convulsed the entire country, but never succeeded in halting expansion of the colony’s borders - which were secured by the construction of numerous castles [14].
Ard ri Rory O’Connor ultimately concluded that it was impossible to drive out the invaders. Accordingly, in 1175, he negotiated the Treaty of Windsor, wherein he promised to pay tribute to Henry II as his overlord, while himself being recognized as High King of those parts of Ireland that remained in Gaelic hands. However, despite overwhelming evidence about the risks involved, Rory and other Irish ‘kings’ continued to attempt to use the Anglo-Normans against each other. Thus, as historian A. Jocelyn Ottway-Ruthven explains: The weakness of the Irish position was, of course, that O’Connor was really interested only in his own kingdom: so long as he was not threatened there, he would not seriously resist Norman advances, and would indeed be quite ready to invite Norman action against his under-kings elsewhere … and ready to accept that the Normans could replace an under-king who had shown himself rebellious. The under-kings themselves were ready to assist the Normans against each other, and piecemeal Norman expansion was thus facilitated. [15] O’Connor therefore raised no objection in 1177 when Henry II made ‘speculative grants’ of Cork and Ulster to Anglo-Norman nobles on the condition that the grantees conquer their new fiefs. Thus, Sir Robert fitz Stephen and Sir Milo de Cogan were granted the entire ‘Kingdom of Cork’ although its Gaelic ruler, Dermot MacCarthy, had submitted to Henry in 1171. [16]
Sir John de Courcy was granted Ulster "if he could conquer it" - and subjugated most of the province in a single epic campaign with an ‘army’ that initially numbered just over 300 Anglo-Normans and a small contingent of Irish allies. [17] Henry II awarded Irish lands to relative newcomers like Fitz Stephen, De Cogan and De Courcy in part because of lingering concerns about the ambitions of Strongbow and his cohorts - and their heirs. However, surprisingly few of the veterans of 1169-71 produced any legitimate male offspring, a circumstance that Giraldus attributed to the fact that many of them had been involved in plundering the ecclesiastical center at Lismore in 1174.
[18]
Strongbow set the pattern for most of his compatriots when he died in 1176 leaving an infant daughter as his only heir. Until she came of age and married, his former estates in Leinster would be administered by several royal custodians, including Hugh de Lacy. Yet, by the end of the decade, De Lacy himself fell under suspicion after he married Rory O’Connor’s daughter without leave from Henry. This aroused fears that Hugh was scheming to make himself King of Ireland, and in 1181 he was recalled to England. De Lacy was allowed to return and resume his office the following year, but only to pave the way for the impending arrival of Henry II’s youngest son, John, who had been proclaimed ‘Lord of Ireland’ at age ten in 1177. Upon coming of age in 1185, John (who is perhaps best known as ‘evil Prince John’ of the Robin Hood stories) traveled to Ireland to take up his lordship. Among John’s companions on this trip were Theobold Walter, hereditary Butler of England, and William de Burgo, nephew of Hubert de Burgo, Justiciar of England. These men would go on to found two of the greatest of Anglo-Irish lineages of all - the Butlers of Ormond and the Burkes of Connacht. [19] Prince John’s visit to Ireland was intended to cement royal authority over the country, but in fact had precisely the opposite effect. For, although John remained in Ireland for just a few months, in that brief time he badly antagonized the native Irish. Giraldus explains how even well-disposed Gaelic lords were alienated by their new overlord: As soon as the king’s son arrived in Ireland … [t]hey greeted him as their lord and received him with the kiss of peace. But our newly arrived Normans treated them with contempt and derision, and showing them scant respect, pulled some of them about by their beards, which were large and flowing according to the native custom. For their part, as soon as they had regained their freedom, they … made for the court of the king of Limerick. They gave him, and the prince of Cork, and Ruaidri of Connacht [i.e., Rory O’Connor] a full account of all their experiences at the king’s son’s court. They reported that the son himself was a mere youth, with an entourage composed only of youths, a stripling who listened only to youthful advice [20] . These three great Gaelic lords, the most powerful in all Ireland, dropped plans to submit to John’s authority, and instead began plotting rebellion. Their determination to resist Norman domination was strengthened when John (like his father in 1177) granted members of his entourage title to lands that had previously been granted to Irish nobles. Having thus stirred up a hornet’s nest in Ireland, John departed the country in late 1185, leaving de Courcy, the conqueror of Ulster, as Justiciar. Just a few years later, in 1193, John ignited civil war in England by rebelling against his brother, King Richard I (‘The Lionhearted’). De Courcy and Walter de Lacy (son of Hugh de Lacy, who had died in 1186) fought for Richard’s cause in Ireland, attacking John’s allies and pillaging his estates. Prince John was defeated and forced to submit to his brother in 1194, and was granted pardon, but himself never forgave De Courcy and De Lacy. The events of 1193-1194 established an ominous precedent for Ireland’s future. Throughout the rest of the Middle Ages and well into the Modern Era, civil strife arising from dynastic and political struggles in England would repeatedly spill over into Ireland, sparking civil war there as well. More ominous still, this brief conflict offered the first hint of an impending cycle of mutually-destructive feuding among the Anglo-Irish that would eventually require no external stimulus to sustain it. This pattern of lawlessness would intensify over the years and centuries until ultimately it posed as a great a challenge to royal authority as the chronic rebelliousness of the Gaelic Irish. Rory O’Connor died in monastic retirement in 1198. Within a year he was followed to the grave by Richard the Lionhearted, who was succeeded by his brother John. Rory’s succession was not so easily resolved, as his brother, Cathal Crovderg O’Connor, and his grandson, Cathal Carrach O’Connor, battled each other for the throne. This contest afforded the Anglo-Normans their first opportunity to make inroads into Connacht, since both contenders (ignoring every lesson that the Irish had learned about Norman rapaciousness and treachery) recruited allies amongst the colonists. William de Burgo exploited their naivete by first allying with Carrach, then switching his support to Crovderg, and finally, after Carrach was killed in 1202, attacking Crovderg. However, by that time, Crovderg had won the royal government’s support for his kingship by ceding certain Connacht lands to the Crown, and the Justiciar forced De Burgo to withdraw.
[21]
All the while, King John I had been plotting against his old nemeses John de Courcy and Walter de Lacy. His plans were motivated in part by a simple desire for revenge, but also fit into a larger scheme of curtailing the independence of the great barons of the realm. In England, John’s misrule had aroused the opposition of a strong baronial party that sought to place limits on the power of the Crown, and the Anglo-Irish nobility (many of whom held estates in both countries) were of the same mind. De Courcy was the chief offender in Ireland, openly challenging royal authority by ignoring repeated summons to perform military service (knowing that in all likelihood he would be arrested as soon as he came within King John’s clutches). Employing a strategy of ‘divide and conquer,’ John incited Walter de Lacy and his brother, Hugh, to attack De Courcy. After two years of campaigning, the brothers succeeded in conquering Ulster and capturing De Courcy in 1204. Hugh was rewarded with title to De Courcy’s former Ulster estates, but this act of beneficence was deceptive, since John was merely biding his time awaiting a favorable opportunity to avenge himself on the De Lacys.
[22] In 1207, a conflict arose between the Justiciar, Meiler fitz Henry, and William the Marshal, hereditary Marshal of England. Marshal had gained title to the Lordship of Leinster by marrying Strongbow’s heiress some years previously. Now, however, the Justiciar had seized the estates of Marshal’s sub-tenant in Offaly - evidently with the approval of the King - and refused to return them. Small-scale warfare broke out and lasted into 1208, when Hugh de Lacy threw his support behind Marshal, attacked Fitz Henry and took him prisoner. King John evidently chose not to press the issue on this occasion, perhaps because he was more concerned about rising opposition to his rule within England. Whatever his reasons, John restored Marshal and De Lacy to his favor, and seems to have removed Fitz Henry as Justiciar.
[23] Yet, later that same year, Marshal and the De Lacys found themselves at odds with the Crown yet again as result of a falling-out between the King and his former favorite, William de Braose. When De Braose failed to pay large annual dues owed to the Crown, John repossessed three of his castles in Wales. Efforts to appease the King having failed, De Braose rebelled and tried to recover his castles by force, but was defeated and fled to Ireland. There he found refuge first with his vassal, William Marshal, and then with his son-in-law, Walter de Lacy. This time, King John was determined to take decisive action. Thus, after a year’s delay during which he restored William Marshal to his obedience, John sailed to Ireland with a large army of English troops and Flemish mercenaries in May of 1210. Rejecting Walter’s offer to submit, John conquered all of the De Lacy lands in Meath and Ulster, and seized De Braose’s estates in Limerick. De Braose escaped to France, while the De Lacy brothers fled to Scotland. John also took the opportunity to reassert royal authority over the Gaelic nobility, and twenty Irish ‘kings,’ including Aedh O’Neill, Donough O’Brien and Cathal Crovderg O’Connor, did homage to him. [24] John I’s campaign of 1210 marked a pinnacle of royal authority in Ireland, since with the overthrow of De Braose and the De Lacys, the chastened William Marshal was the only remaining Anglo-Irish magnate of the first rank. Yet, just five years later, in 1215, Walter de Lacy was pardoned and restored to his estates in Meath, and Marshal was also given back title to some of his lands that been seized by the Crown. The cause for this turnabout was the rising tide of baronial opposition to John I’s rule in England, which came to a head in June 1215 when the King was forced to put his seal to the Magna Carta. The Anglo-Irish nobility had not become involved in the dispute, and John’s acts of reconciliation were designed to encourage them not to take arms against him in the civil war that raged in England after the Great Charter was granted. This policy proved a total success. For, after John died of dysentery in October 1216, it was William Marshal who was appointed guardian of his underage son, Henry III, and led the royalist forces to victory against the rebels and the invading army of France’s King Louis VIII in 1217. [25] William Marshal and Walter de Lacy honored their renewed allegiance to the Crown, but Hugh de Lacy, who remained in exile, plotted with his half-brother William to retake Ulster. Exploiting the chaos in England, William de Lacy seized several castles in Ulster during 1217, but was forced to surrender them by the Justiciar. Over the next seven years, he made sporadic attempts to expand De Lacy power into southern Ulster, with mixed success. In 1224, Hugh de Lacy returned from his Scottish exile and joined William in attacking royal estates in Meath and the O’Connor kingdom in Connacht. William Marshal the Younger was appointed Justiciar (William Marshal the Elder died in 1219) and succeeded in defeating the rebel De Lacys by year’s end. William de Lacy took refuge among the Gaelic Irish and disappeared into obscurity, but Hugh was eventually pardoned and restored title to his Ulster estates in 1227.
[26]
Meanwhile, Connacht was being wracked by civil war among the O’Connors after Crovderg’s death in 1224 sparked a succession struggle between his son, Aedh, and Rory O’Connor’s surviving sons. Then, in 1226, the Crown abruptly abandoned its long-standing policy of supporting Crovderg and his heirs, and granted all of Connacht to Richard de Burgo (son of the deceased William de Burgo). It was an act of pure betrayal, since the O’Connors had by and large remained faithful to their vows of loyalty to the Crown. [27]
This sudden reversal can probably be attributed to the fact that Richard de Burgo’s great-uncle, Hubert, still held office as Justiciar of England and was acting on behalf of his relative. Indeed, Hubert de Burgo continued to dominate the English government even after Henry III came of age in 1227. Richard de Burgo’s power in Ireland was further strengthened when he was appointed Justiciar in 1228. [28] With the aid of Rory O’Connor’s sons, Richard de Burgo succeeded in killing Aedh and overrunning all of Connacht. He supported installation of one of Rory’s sons (also named Aedh) as under-king, but in 1230 all the Gaelic nobility of Connacht rose up against De Burgo, swearing that they "would never own a lord who should bring them into the house of the Galls [i.e., foreigners]." [29]
De Burgo responded to the crisis much as his father had three decades before. In order to sow dissension among his Gaelic enemies, Richard built up a rival candidate in the form of Crovderg’s younger son, Felim, and forcibly installed him on the throne of the O’Connors. Then, in 1231, Richard switched his support back to Aedh and helped him overthrow Felim. However, just as it appeared that De Burgo ascendancy in Connacht had been restored, disaster struck when Hubert de Burgo was imprisoned and stripped of his offices by Henry III in 1232. Richard was caught up in his great-uncle’s fall from grace, losing his own office as Justiciar and being stripped of his estates in Connacht. However, a brief civil war fought in 1234 between the supporters and enemies of Henry III’s new favorite, Peter des Rivaux, dramatically improved the De Burgo family’s fortunes. Riveaux’s removal brought Hubert de Burgo back into favor, and in 1234, Richard’s estates in Connacht were restored in exchange for payment of a large fine to the Crown. Yet, the process of conquest had to be started over from scratch because Felim O’Connor had taken advantage of De Burgo’s discomfiture by killing Aedh, seizing the throne for himself, and expelling the Anglo-Normans from Connacht. In 1235, the Justiciar led a great hosting of Anglo-Norman magnates (including De Burgo and Hugh de Lacy) into Connacht. Felim was swiftly defeated and agreed to surrender all of the province except a region roughly corresponding to modern County Roscommon - though in practice the De Burgo lordship in Connacht was so thinly colonized that most of the local Gaelic ‘kings’ were left largely undisturbed. [30] The subjugation of Connacht was the last great accomplishment of the generation of Anglo-Irish magnates that had dominated the life of the colony for almost half a century. The men of this generation all passed from the scene in 1240s, and as fate would have it, not one of them left an intact inheritance. Walter de Lacy died in 1241 without a male heir, so his vast landholdings in Meath were divided among several granddaughters. Hugh de Lacy and Richard de Burgo both died two years later, and control of their huge estates passed into the hands of the Crown - Hugh’s because he had evidently been granted Ulster for life only, and Richard’s because his sons were minors. In 1245, William Marshal the Elder’s last surviving son, Anselm, died childless like his four brothers before him, leaving the Marshal lands in Leinster to be divided among five sisters. The resulting leadership vacuum, and worse still, the subdivision of the great lordships, significantly weakened the colony because it undermined unity of purpose, inhibited concerted action, and increased the potential for feuding among the Anglo-Irish.
[31]
This generational shift came on the eve of a major turning point in the history of England’s Irish colony. By 1250, just eighty years after the first landing, the invaders had conquered roughly three-quarters of Ireland. This was an incredible accomplishment considering their limited numbers and the manifold difficulties they had encountered. Yet, they were fated never to take the remaining quarter during the Middle Ages, and in time it would become clear that the mid-13 th Century marked the peak of the colony, which stopped expanding immediately thereafter - and eventually went into a prolonged and profound decline. The wave of invasion had crested and would soon begin to recede.
[32] Part 2: The Land of War
[1] Roche, Richard, The Norman Invasion of Ireland (Dublin: Anvil Books Ltd., 1970), pp. 112 and 118.
The foreigners and the race of Tara,
Fine linen shirts on the race of Conn,
The foreigners one mass of iron. [5]
Part 3: The Lords of Ireland
Footnotes
[2] Ibid., Chapter 8.
[3] Hayes-McCoy, Gerald A., Irish Battles: A Military History of Ireland (London, 1969 and Belfast: The Appletree Press Ltd, 1990), pp. 28-33, and Roche, The Norman Invasion of Ireland, Chapter 15.
[4] Hayes-McCoy, Irish Battles , pp. 26-27.
[5] Curtis, Edmund. A History of Medieval Ireland, From 1086 to 1515 (London, 1923; reprint 1950), p. 85.
[6] Rogers, Randall, Aspects of the Military History of the Anglo-Norman Invasion of Ireland, 1169-1225 Irish Sword Vol XVI, No. 64 (Summer 1986) and Robin Frame, War and Peace in the Medieval Lordship of Ireland, in James Lydon (ed.), The English in Medieval Ireland (1984), p. 121.
[7] Simms, Katherine, Warfare in the Medieval Gaelic Lordships, The Irish Sword Vol XII, No 47 (Winter 1975), pp. 98-108.
[8] Rogers, Aspects of the Military History of the Anglo-Norman Invasion of Ireland, 1169-1225 , p. 140.
[9] Ibid., pp. 138-140.
[10] Edwards, Ruth Dudley, An Atlas of Irish History, Second Edition (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1981 and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 83-89.
[11] Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hibernica , translated by A.B. Scott and F.X Martin (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978), p. 233.
[12] Roche, The Norman Invasion of Ireland , pp. 184-187.
[13] Ibid, pp. 187-194.
[14] Ibid, pp. 196-198.
[15] Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland , p. 61
[16] Ó Murchadha, Diarmuid, The Battle of Callann, A.D. 1261, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society Vol. LXVI, No. 204 (July-December 1961), p. 105.
[17] Roche, The Norman Invasion of Ireland , pp. 203-204.
[18] Ibid., pp. 197-198.
[19] Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland , pp. 63-64.
[20] Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hibernica , p. 237.
[21] Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland , pp. 74-76.
[22] Ibid., ,pp. 75-76.
[23] Ibid., pp. 76-79 and Jean Kirkwood, William de Braose and St Leonard’s Hermitage, Windlesora , No. 4 (1985).
[24] Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland ,pp. 79-81.
[25] Ibid., pp. 85-86 and Nicholas Hooper and Matthew Bennett, Cambridge Illustrated Atlas: Warfare, The Middle Ages 768-1487 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 64-66.
[26] Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland , pp. 89-92.
[27] Martin, F.X. and T.W. Moody (eds.), The Course of Irish History, Revised and Enlarged Edition (Cork: The Mercier Press, 1984), p. 136.
[28] Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland , pp. 92-94.
[29] As quoted in Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland , p. 95.
[30] Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland , pp. 97-99.
[31] Ibid., p. 100-101.
[32] Martin & Moody, The Course of Irish History , pp. 135 & 141.
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