1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (25 page)

For centuries the English had shared Britain with other peoples and other kingdoms. This had not prevented one of Henry II’s courtiers, Walter Map, referring to Britain as ‘the English island’ and ‘our island England’, though he was by no means the first and certainly not the last to confuse the identities of England and Britain in this typically English fashion. In the west there were the people of Wales, proud of their descent from the Britons against whom Julius Caesar had fought. At any one time there were usually several Welsh princes in Wales, rulers of old kingdoms such as Gwynedd, Powys and Deheubarth. There was only one king of the Scots, but his authority did not reach as far as the Scandinavian and Irish peoples of Caithness, Argyll and the Isles, where virtually autonomous chiefs held sway under the loose overlordship of Norway. It was not until 1266 that the king of Norway sold his rights over the kingdom of Man and the Western Isles to the Scottish Crown in the ‘closing down sale’ that marked the end of the ‘Viking period’ of Scottish history. And it was not until 1469 that the Scottish Crown acquired possession of Orkney and Shetland.

During the course of the twelfth century the English came to look upon the Celts with new, condescending eyes. Writing in the 1190s both the dean of St Paul’s, Ralph of Diss, and the Yorkshire historian William of Newburgh referred to the Welsh, Irish and Scots as barbarians. By this time their views of the Scots were a little old-fashioned: according to the English historian, William of Malmesbury, King David I of Scotland (1124–53) had offered tax-breaks to his subjects if they would learn ‘to live in a more civilized style, dress with more elegance and eat in a more refined manner’ – they had, in other words, to be more like the English. By 1200 economic development and the foundation of new towns such as Berwick, Edinburgh, Stirling, Perth, Glasgow and Aberdeen by the Scottish kings meant that Lowland Scotland had in fact come to look very much like England. But the Welsh, the Irish-speaking Highland Scots and, still more, the Irish themselves continued to be classified – and vilified – as primitive, savage and immoral. They were, for instance, often accused of being addicted to adultery and incest. Welsh and Irish marriage law allowed divorce, remarriage and marriage with cousins. So, too, had English marriage law in earlier centuries, but no longer. Now Celtic marriage customs seemed, to English and continental European eyes, a licence for wife-swapping and every kind of sexual immorality.

Also, while in Lowland Scotland there was just one king, in Ireland and Wales there were many kings and princes, fiercely independent rulers who fought among themselves with what seemed, to English eyes, stomach-turning brutality. Irish and Welsh kings and princes appeared to have no compunction in the open way they killed, blinded and castrated their rivals, especially their own kinsmen. By contrast King John could not deal with his nephew and rival, Arthur of Brittany, in the same fashion. If he was responsible for his nephew’s death – as he probably was – he carried out secretly what he knew he could not possibly do openly. The rumour that he was to blame decisively damaged his reputation in the crucial years when he lost control of Normandy and Anjou.

Gerald de Barri accompanied the young Prince John on his expedition to Ireland in 1185, and used his experiences to write two remarkable and hugely influential books on Ireland and the Irish. He painted a picture of Ireland as a country rich in natural resources but undeveloped owing to the lack of industry of the natives, as a land of gold and rain-forests, where the savages whiled away their lives in war, sex and laziness, an Eldorado awaiting colonisation by enterprising and clean-living Englishmen. He envisaged a ladder of evolution of human societies with Ireland still on the bottom rung.

It is noticeable how much weight Gerald and other contemporary observers gave to towns and the market economy. They associated towns with a civilised lifestyle, and claimed to be civilised themselves.

These perceptions helped people feel comfortable with their invasions of Wales and Ireland. They were confident that they were introducing a morally better, economically more advanced and socially more sophisticated way of life to the natives. Soon after their conquest of England, Norman ‘marcher lords’ to whom William I had given estates in the ‘marches’, as the frontier zones were known, invaded Wales, occupying the more fertile parts, the coasts and river valleys, especially in the south. They built castles and towns such as Chepstow, Monmouth, Cardiff, Brecon and Pembroke, and filled them with English settlers. The biographer of King Stephen wrote: ‘They vigorously subdued the natives, imposed law upon them in the interests of peace, and made the land so productive that it could easily have been thought to be a second England.’ In his mind this was just as well since he saw native Wales as ‘a country of wood and pasture, abounding in deer and fish, milk and herds, a land which breeds men who fight against each other like animals’. As far as the English were concerned, the Welsh did not change. In Gerald’s words, ‘they ate very little bread and paid no attention to commerce, shipping or industry.’ English commentators undoubtedly exaggerated the extent to which the economy of Celtic peoples, including the Welsh, relied upon pastoral farming, but the fact remains that they continued to exaggerate, and in consequence looked down upon their neighbours. It was with this attitude that, towards the end of the thirteenth century, Edward I embarked on the final conquest of Wales.

Soon after his accession to the throne of England, Henry II discussed plans for an invasion of Ireland. He may even have received a bull from Pope Hadrian IV granting him Ireland, on the grounds that the Irish were not good Christians, and they needed a decent, upright king like Henry to go in there and set them straight. Hadrian IV, whose original name was Nicholas Brakespeare, was an Englishman, the only one ever to sit on the throne of St Peter. In fact this papal bull, known from its opening word as
Laudabiliter
, might have been a forgery; scholars still argue the point. Forgery or not, it undoubtedly reflected views current in twelfth century Rome. In the event King Henry changed his mind and it was not until years later, after an Anglo-Norman magnate, Richard de Clare, better known as Strongbow, answered an appeal for help from an Irish king, Diarmait Mac Murchada of Leinster, that English soldiers first entered Ireland in force. This was in 1169, known in Irish history as ‘the year of destiny’. Two years later Henry II came to Ireland with an army and an armada of four hundred ships. When the English invaded Ireland or Wales, they came with the military resources of a much more highly industrialised power behind them. In terms of armour, arms and ammunition – crossbow bolts and arrowheads – they were able to out-produce any Welsh or Irish ruler many times over.

From the moment of Henry’s arrival he acted as though he were the lord of all Ireland, come – he claimed – to stop the Irish slaughtering each other. Most of the more powerful Irish kings submitted to him. Henry kept the most important ports of Dublin, Waterford and Wexford for himself, and handed out Irish estates to his followers. In 1177 he designated his son John as king of Ireland, and asked Pope Alexander III to provide a crown. It never arrived, but John assumed the title ‘Lord of Ireland’ and actually visited the country in 1185 – his first political command. English courtiers became great landowners in Ireland, although some never went there, remaining absentee landlords. English – and a few Welsh and Flemish – settlers, farmers, craftsmen, traders and labourers did, however, cross the Irish Sea. In the south and east of Ireland, from Cork to Carrickfergus, where most of the immigrants settled, a massive change in the man-made landscape occurred: villages, mills, bridges and new towns were built. The countryside here became anglicised and, on the whole, permanently so. The Irish were pushed back into uplands and bogs, the poorest areas. As William of Newburgh, writing in the 1190s, remarked: ‘This marked the end of freedom for the Irish, a people who had been free since time immemorial. They had not been conquered by the Romans, but now they fell into the power of the king of England.’

According to Gerald de Barri, the Irish kings and chiefs who came to the Christmas dinner Henry II gave at Dublin in 1171 were made to eat crane, a bird they had never before thought of as a delicacy. It was a demonstration of the
nouvelle cuisine
that identified the French-speaking English as members of a cosmopolitan west European civilisation. The Italian pope, Alexander III, wrote to the Irish clergy expressing joy at hearing that the ‘unlawful practices of a barbarous and ignorant people were already beginning to decrease’. In 1210 King John sent a book of English law to Ireland: justice in his lordship was to be administered according to the rules of the Common Law. For a while it even seemed possible that the Irish themselves might become anglicised, just as the Lowland Scots had been. In Gerald’s language the Irish would be made to learn to ‘conform to a better way of life and enjoy the benefits of peace’. ‘Let them eat crane’, as Henry II might have said. Intermarriage gave some cause for hope of assimilation. Aristocrats such as Richard de Clare and Hugh de Lacy married daughters of Irish kings. The Irish came under pressure to learn French. In the 1220s an English Cistercian abbot, after a tour of inspection of Irish Cistercian monasteries, recommended that no one should in future be received into the order in Ireland unless they had learned how to speak either French or Latin.

Unfortunately those who saw the Welsh and Irish as uncivilised were all too likely to treat them with contempt. Gerald reported that when John landed at Waterford in 1185

Because the English saw the Welsh and Irish as bloodthirsty barbarians, they were inclined to treat them far more brutally than they did their enemies on the continent. When the Irish king, Tigernan Ua Ruairc of Breifne, was killed in 1172 – treacherously assassinated by the English, according to Irish annals – his head was sent as a gift to Henry II and his body displayed, hung by the feet, in Dublin. In 1175 Seisyll ap Dyfnwal of Gwent, his wife and seven-year-old son were among the Welsh victims of a massacre at Abergavenny. In 1165 Henry II cut off the noses and ears of the daughters of Welsh princes whom he held hostage; he blinded and castrated their brothers. This atrocity signalled the end of his aggressive policy towards the Welsh. From now on he left the marcher lords to make their own way in Wales.

In the early years of his reign John continued his father’s policy, content with the Crown’s loose overlordship over both marcher barons and native rulers; his struggle to retain his ancestral lands in France gave him more than enough to do. But he exploited any opportunities that came his way. He supported Maelgwyn ap Rhys of Deheubarth in his feud against his own kindred and obtained Cardigan in return. He clearly favoured the English incomers. In 1200, for example, he gave William de Briouze licence to conquer all he could from his Welsh enemies. But he did not go out of his way to dethrone Welsh princes. Indeed he acknowledged the rising star of Wales, Llywelyn ap Iorwerth of Gwynedd, even recognising him as prince of North Wales by treaty in 1201 and then giving him his illegitimate daughter Joan in marriage. One consequence of John’s loss of Anjou and Normandy was that from 1206 onwards he was able to give more time and energy to extending the power of the English Crown within the British Isles – a shift in emphasis that English historians have often applauded.

In 1208 John arrested Gwenwynwyn, prince of Powys, and refused to release him until he had handed over twenty high-ranking hostages. In 1209 he threatened to invade Scotland. King William of Scotland was ill, in no position to resist, and he was forced to accept the humiliating terms of the treaty of Norham. He had to pay John £10,000, hand over thirteen noble hostages and send his two daughters to the English court for John to arrange their marriages. All of this rankled still in 1215. Although by then William was dead, his son Alexander II (1214–49) supported the rebel barons and received his reward in Magna Carta.

When John turned against his old friends the Briouzes, they fled to their estates in Ireland. John ordered his justiciar there, John de Gray, bishop of Norwich, to arrest them. But Gray was unable to carry out his orders; they were sheltered by the most powerful English landowners in Ireland, William Marshal, lord of Leinster, Hugh de Lacy, earl of Ulster, and Walter de Lacy, lord of Meath. Faced by this defiance John decided on an expedition to Ireland. A 700-ship armada was assembled. William Marshal prudently crossed the Irish sea, met John at Pembroke and submitted, providing hostages as a guarantee of his future good behaviour. But the Lacy brothers and the Briouzes were still recalcitrant. John’s army landed at Crook in June 1210 and in a whirlwind nine-week campaign defeated the Lacys and captured Matilda de Briouze and her older sons.