Plantagenet Ireland: an English invasion, not a Norman one

We are all determined to learn lessons from the pandemic. For many of us, it has brought the realisation that we take too much for granted. In 2020, as we hunkered down for the first lockdown, the unfanfared 50th anniversary took place of an entity that has, arguably, done more to encourage Irish historical research than all the universities, advanced-study institutes, and State heritage bodies combined. It is a small, privately owned publishing house called Four Courts Press.

Few who have heard of it have given it a second thought. Yet, with a minuscule budget and staff, this labour of love of the late Michael Adams has published more books relating to the history of Ireland than would fill a library – literally thousands at this stage, countless of them works of superlative scholarship. Most would never have seen the light of day if left to the tender mercies of trade publishers or, had they taken the scenic route through the narrow, arduous pass of a university press, would be for sale at a price even your wealthier granny couldn’t afford. So, apologies for neglecting you, Four Courts, and here’s to the next 50 years.

Speaking of superlative scholarship, and things taken for granted, hands up all those who have ever heard of Robin Frame? We Irish pride ourselves on our interest in history, we still buy history books, we listen when historians speak, and some are household names. Yet Frame is not among them. This is despite being one of the finest historians this country has produced in recent generations, publishing insightful interpretations of Ireland’s past that are – apart from being accurate, thorough and provocative – also a joy to read. As an essayist of Irish history for more years than even Four Courts Press – publishers of his latest book – have been with us, Frame has never written an ugly sentence.

‘More Irish’

Frame is the archetypal historian’s historian who has always eschewed the limelight’s glow. Though Belfast-born and reared, and having spent most of the 1960s studying history at Trinity College Dublin, he secured a lectureship at Durham University in 1969, and has remained there ever since (retiring as professor of history in 2002). While at TCD, Frame was inspired by his teacher, the late James Lydon (to whose memory this latest book is dedicated) to take up the study of later medieval Ireland and it – a large 200-year chunk of Irish history from the fateful year 1169 onwards – has remained the singular focus of his scholarship ever since. He has been quietly but spectacularly successful at doing so, including in the 15 scintillating essays assembled in this latest collection (five of them never previously published).

All historians seek to make an original contribution but most don’t have a unitary overarching thesis which permeates their work and becomes their lasting contribution. Frame does. Of all the cliches that cling on barnacle-like to the hull of Irish history there is perhaps none as pervasive as that which has it that the “Normans” who arrived into Ireland in 1169 rapidly “became more Irish than the Irish themselves”. Scholars like Frame have long since pointed out to us that we cannot call these people “Normans”, many of whom had never set foot in Normandy. Rather, we must call people what they called themselves, and they called themselves the English.

So it was the “English” settlers in medieval Ireland who became “more Irish than the Irish themselves”? No, this isn’t the case either. Frame’s great teacher Jim Lydon preferred to think of what happened in Ireland in the centuries after the 1169 invasion as the emergence of a “Middle Nation” (a phrase once used by the native Irish to describe the descendants of the original colonists), not quite Irish but no longer fully English.

Subtle man

This is, I think, the point at which Lydon and Frame part company, academically speaking. It is a point the demonstration of which lies at the core of the latter’s prodigious oeuvre spanning a career of more than 50 years. Frame is a subtle man and his is a subtle thesis. The English in medieval Ireland did not become more Irish than the Irish. Some may have become as Irish (Frame would perhaps argue, a small proportion), others somewhat Irish, in some aspects of their lives. These English born in Ireland might even appear Irish to the English born in England, and be treated shabbily as a result (as is the fate of colonists through the ages). But, Frame would argue, they did not stop thinking of themselves as English.

And this latter point has big implications. When we assumed that the English settlers in medieval Ireland became more Irish than the Irish, we imagined a long, slow process beginning the moment they arrived. The history of the colony could therefore be conceived of as the story of a long, slow decline from pristine beginnings. It made for dull reading. Take away this notion, and supplant it with Frame’s idea of a people who, no matter how long their association with Ireland, retained a lingering – in some respects vibrant – sense of their Englishness, and talk of decline seems less apt. The story, if less straightforward, becomes more nuanced, variegated and real.

These are the ideas Robin Frame brilliantly presents to us in this volume, hence essay titles and subtitles like “Being English in Medieval Ireland” or “Barriers to Acculturation on an ‘English’ Edge” or “Interactions of Government and Society in an Age of ‘Decline’”, and so much more besides. This is a book about a past that keeps pressing itself on our attentions because – in the age of Brexit and Putin – its themes endure. It is a book about an empire – the aggressive and expansionist Plantagenet empire of medieval England – doing what empires do, conquering, colonising and frequently misruling, and about what happens when two antagonistic nations try to inhabit one small piece of earth. What could possibly go wrong?

Seán Duffy is professor of medieval Irish and insular history at Trinity College Dublin