The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People by Neil Hegarty

conflict and dispute; and the colonizers’ grip on their lands could never be taken for granted.
    At the same time, new agrarian practices were being implemented in Ireland. It would be wholly inaccurate to imagine the landscape of Gaelic Ireland as purely pastoral: land continued to be given over, as it had for many hundreds of years, to the production of oats and barley, with a little wheat and flax for the production of linen. But the twelfth century in Europe had witnessed an agricultural revolution, and now the Anglo-Normans transferred the rudiments of this sophisticated agrarian economy into Ireland by means of the cultivation of cereal crops on a much larger scale. This conversion to more intensive agriculture was driven by the recognition that much of Leinster and Munster were ideally suited to these methods of farming. It was given added urgency by the loss of the fertile plains of Normandy to the French in 1204: the English were obliged to make up the difference with a more thorough exploitation of land elsewhere.
    In the middle of this changing rural landscape, new communities began to develop: most of the market towns in the south and east of Ireland can trace their beginnings back to this period, as full urbanization took root in the country. The aim of the colonists in establishing what was sometimes quite a dense network of towns and communities was to re-create a familiar country beyond the Irish Sea. They wished to replicate in Ireland the familiar paraphernalia of life that had existed back home: the crops and castles joined by parish churches and monasteries, by priests and labourers, by merchants and tradesmen and farmers. And in consequence, the colonial presence was no longer a matter of adventurers on the make; it became a story of cultural transformation, as men and women and children by the shipload began to arrive in Ireland, as towns and countryside were moulded into a more comfortable form. This gradual expansion of the English colony at the expense of the Irish in the course of the thirteenth century was culturally and economically shocking. As the boundaries of the colony extended outward, the Irish were left increasingly with the marginal and less agriculturally viable land. It would create a powerful imperative in the Irish mind to hold whatever territory was left.

Chapter Four
    Wasted and Consumed
    In the century that followed John’s campaign in Ireland, the authority of the lordship became firmly recognized across the south and east. The names of counties that are familiar today – Carlow and Kildare, Kilkenny and Tipperary and Kerry – were already inscribed on the maps; established settlements and fortified strongholds had spread along the coasts of Ulster and Connacht as far as Donegal Bay and Lough Foyle; and no part of the island of Ireland was immune to the influence of the colony. Yet the maps and records tell only one side of the story: in practice, the political situation was curiously unresolved. The authorities at Dublin were engaged in a game of checks and balances with a host of rulers up and down the land – local powers in any number of hues, both Irish and Anglo-Irish, all of them able to command the attention and loyalty of swathes of the population. The power of the lordship on the ground was far from undisputed, and the fragility of colonial authority in Ireland was becoming increasingly apparent.
    This feeling found its clearest expression in what might be called the first formal articulation of Irish alienation from English rule. Written in about 1318 from King Donal O’Neill in Ulster to Pope John XXII, the Remonstrance of the Princes expresses the rising sense of grievance and outrage felt by the Irish against the English community in the country.
There is no hope whatever of our having peace with them. For such is their arrogance and excessive lust to lord it over us and so great is our due and natural desire to throw off the unbearable yoke of their slavery