goddard henry orpen, ireland under the normans, 1169-1333 (1911-20)

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Goddard Henry Orpen, Ireland under the Normans, 1169-1333 (1911-20)Author(s): Seán DuffySource: Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 32, No. 126 (Nov., 2000), pp. 246-259Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30006999 .

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Irish Historical Studies, xxxii, no. 126 (Nov. 2000)

Historical revisit: Goddard Henry Orpen, Ireland under the

Normans, 1169-1333 (1911-20)*

I

A lmost a century after the publication, in 1911, of the first two volumes of his magnum opus (the third and fourth appeared together in 1920)

Goddard Henry Orpen's Ireland under the Normans remains controversial. The way to test this is not to read the polite comments of this generation of his successors but to go to a university library, take all four volumes off the shelf, and expose one's eyes to the palimpsest of student marginalia added down through the decades. Pencilled emotions ranging from anger and outrage to ridicule and blasphemy litter the pages and tarnish its author's memory, every bit as much in the reprint (dating, interestingly, from 1968) as in the original edition.

When the first two volumes, covering the period 1169-1216, were published, they were warmly greeted in certain quarters, British journals in particular carrying laudatory reviews. But in nationalist Ireland grave offence was taken not merely at some of the author's apparently callous and hurt- ful statements, but at his basic thesis, a thesis which Orpen set out clearly in the preface to his first volume:

In the course of my study of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (which has been spread over many years)... I have been led to regard the domination of the English Crown and of its ministers in Ireland, during the thirteenth century, and indeed up to the invasion of Edward Bruce in 1315, as having been much more com- plete than has been generally recognised, and to think that due credit has not been given to the new rulers for creating the comparative peace and order and the manifest progress and prosperity that Ireland enjoyed, during that period, wherever their rule was effective ...

... it is, I think, manifest that the most prominent effect of the Anglo-Norman occupation was not, as has been represented, an increase of turmoil, but rather the introduction over large parts of Ireland of a measure of peace and prosperity quite unknown before.1

One can well imagine that to Irish nationalist readers, in the heady atmos- phere surrounding the publication by Asquith, in April 1912, of the third

*IRELAND UNDER THE NORMANS, 1169-1333. By Goddard Henry Orpen. 4 vols. Pp 400, 363, 314, 343. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1911-20 (vols i-ii, 1911; vols iii-iv, 1920); reprint 1968.

'Orpen, Normans, i, 7-8, 10-11.

246



DUFFY - G. H. Orpen, Ireland under the Normans (1911-20) 247

home rule bill, Orpen's allusions to the order, peace, progress and prosperity that flowed from the English connexion seemed designed to undermine the case for Irish self-rule. The union debate was certainly a subtext in Orpen's work. He used, for instance, the marriage of Strongbow and Aoife as a metaphor for the union of England and Ireland. Describing it as 'a sign which all might read that the invaders had come to stay', he notes how some contemporaries may have failed to realise this and concludes: 'But there was something else which the Irish at any rate did not foresee, but which we, looking back over the centuries, can see clearly enough. The union of Strongbow and Eva was the symbol of that union between the two islands which, for better or worse, has lasted ever since.'2

If Orpen here appears agnostic as to the benefits of English intervention, he reveals his true conviction in commenting on the early death of Strongbow (again with more than a hint that the latter euphemistically rep- resents England itself) that it 'was a real misfortune, not just for the Anglo- Norman colony, but for Ireland. If Ireland was to benefit by Norman rule and Norman organisation, and by the higher civilisation and greater indus- trial energy of the new colonists, there was needed a man whom the other colonists would recognise as being, by birth, antecedents, and abilities, their natural superior.'3 Ireland needed to be conquered, Orpen believed, because its people 'were still in a lower plane of civilisation than had been reached elsewhere', and conquest, which was in fact 'rendered inevitable by the previous anarchy', was 'effected primarily by superior weapons and better discipline in the field', while 'the position won was maintained and peace secured by that instinct for organised rule which is the mark of pro- gressive races all the world over'.4

Orpen saw in the marriage of Strongbow and Aoife 'the first clash of English feudalism with Celtic tribalism - the first clash of those discordant ideas which were to lead to so much hardship and misunderstanding in the future between the two races'.5 This is a point of view which it is perfectly reasonable to hold, but what angered those of Orpen's critics who saw themselves on the 'Celtic' rather than the Norman side of the equation was an apparent gratuitous descent into insult in describing some of the basic differences between them. On the Norman capture of Waterford, for instance, Orpen remarked that here 'we see the difference between the Celt and the Norman. The Celt would have plundered and burnt the town and then left it. The Norman plunders, no doubt, but puts a garrison in to hold the place, and, if necessary, fortifies it.'6 Condescension outdid insult when Orpen, in a passage worthy of the pen of Sir John Davies, James I's attorney general for Ireland, castigated the Normans for not showing 'a wiser statesmanship' by recognising that the Irish 'were not to be emended by the use of hard names and exaggerated language, but by patient

2Ibid., pp 201-2. 3Ibid., p. 358. 4Ibid., i, 309; ii, 324. 5Ibid., i, 200. 6Ibid., p. 197.



248 Irish Historical Studies

teaching, wholesome example, and the gradual introduction and enforcement of better laws'.7

Foremost among Orpen's critics was Eoin MacNeill, not remembered today primarily for the gifted historian he was and for his remarkable expertise in the sources for the history of early medieval Ireland (the chair of which he had held in University College Dublin since 1909), but rather as a public and political figure of some stature.8 MacNeill had published a restrained and dignified review of Orpen's first two volumes in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland immediately upon their appearance in 1911.9 Perhaps moderation was called for in the journal of a society in which Orpen had published many ground-breaking contributions over the years and of which he would later be president. However, in 1917, following his release from the life imprisonment to which he had been sen- tenced in the aftermath of the Easter Rising, MacNeill delivered a series of public lectures on medieval Ireland which were published in 1919 as Phases of Irish history, in which he bitterly assaulted Orpen's work.

One of his bugbears was Orpen's persistent use of the terms 'tribe' and 'tribal' to describe Irish dynasties and inter-dynastic conflicts, and as an explanation for one of the weaknesses, as he saw it, in the Irish body politic. For instance, while Orpen did not condone the unlicensed Anglo-Norman expansion from Leinster into Munster in 1174, he did note: 'Human nature being what it is, however, such encroachments are the inevitable result when a strong conquering and as yet united race gets a foothold among a weak ill-knit congeries of tribes."10 MacNeill's response to this was to state in his public lecture on 'Medieval Irish institutions' (later published as chapter 10 in Phases of Irish history) that Ireland in the twelfth century, says Mr Orpen, was still in the tribal state. This is written to justify the Norman invasion. The Normans were not in the tribal state.11

MacNeill explained that he himself avoided the use of this term because 'others have used it with the deliberate intent to create the impression that the structure of society in Ireland down to the twelfth century, and in parts of Ireland down to the seventeenth century, finds its modern parallel among the Australian or Central African aborigines'.12

He believed that Orpen was under the misapprehension that (to use the examples he cites) everybody who lived in the territory of Diarmait Mac Murchada bore that surname, or that everybody in Clandeboye was an O'Neill, and went on to cite what he calls 'clans' of Norman origin in Ireland and declared that Orpen must accept them as, by extension, 'tribal': 'Every one of these great families was precisely as much and as little a tribe as any Irish tribe that Mr Orpen has in contemplation; as much and as

7Ibid., p. 309. 8See E X. Martin and E J. Byrne (eds), The scholar revolutionary: Eoin MacNeill,

1867-1945, and the making of the new Ireland (Shannon, 1973). 9R.S.A.I. Jn., xli (1911), pp 277-82. 10Orpen, Normans, i, 330. 11Eoin MacNeill, Phases of Irish history (Dublin, 1919), p. 292. 12Ibid., p. 290.



DuFFY - G. H. Orpen, Ireland under the Normans (1911-20) 249

little a tribe as the Plantagenets or the Bourbons or the Hapsburgs or the Hohenzollerns.'13 It was an unfair reproach, since at no point in any of Orpen's four volumes did he ever show signs of such ignorance of the structures of medieval Irish society - the contrary, in fact - and one cannot help but feel that the impulse behind MacNeill's angry response was simple annoyance at the pejorative way in which Orpen seemed to employ his 'tribal' terminology.

Rather than poking fun at Orpen before a receptive public audience, MacNeill would have been better employed exploring more fully the impli- cations of Orpen's line of argument: that if twelfth-century Ireland was simply an 'ill-knit congeries of tribes', it was not a country, it was not a 'small nation' whose sovereignty could be infringed or right to self-determination denied (to use the sort of parlance current at the very moment of MacNeill's assault). Orpen was quite clear where he stood on this matter. In Volume II, when absolving Ruaidrf 0 Conchobair, the high-king, of any blame for not putting up a more effective resistance to the invaders, he states:

It was the clan-system and the weakness and irresolution inherent in it, rather than lack of courage and determination in any individual, that rendered continuous and united opposition to the foreigners impossible. There was no national sense of country - only a 'tribal patriotism' and consequent anarchy.14

This is a statement with which one could certainly choose to disagree, and which Eoin MacNeill more so than any of his peers was perfectly posi- tioned to contest, citing solid evidence. Instead he chose the easy option of playing to the gallery in a public lecture on 'Ireland's golden age' (chapter 8 of Phases of Irish history) and, without naming the target of his attack, launched into a most cruel and personalised tirade:

When I see the eulogist of Anglo-Norman feudalism in Ireland sitting in judgement upon the political institutions of a people which he has never studied and does not at all understand, I call to mind the estimate formed by 'the ancient philosophers of Ireland' about Victorius of Aquitaine - that he was deserving of compassion rather than of ridicule.15

Yet ridicule is what he proceeded to feed to his willing listeners, just as in the foreword to the published version he could enunciate the noble principle that 'Neither apathy nor antipathy can ever bring out the truth of history', and then proceed to commit to print some of the most bilious antipathy to flow from the pen of an Irish historian of the twentieth century in reference to one of his peers. He said of Orpen's approach to writing about the medieval Irish that 'every item [was] culled out that might suggest comparison with the head-hunters of New Guinea and the Hottentot' - a grossly unfair caricature of Orpen's not inconsiderable efforts to try to understand pre-Norman Irish society and of his purpose in

1"Ibid., pp 293-4. 14Orpen, Normans, ii, 182. "SMacNeill, Phases, p. 240.




writing. Employing an anecdote from Bede with which his audience was presumably familiar, and which no doubt produced raucous laughter, he declared that 'we can still use the scrapings of our Irish vellum as a cure for the foreign snake-bite', the clear inference of which was that Goddard Orpen, Dublin born and bred, was a foreigner in his own land.16

MacNeill then alluded to the use by Orpen (still unnamed) of phrases such as 'the tribal state' of medieval Ireland and implied that the latter had called the Irish 'a barbarous people', when in fact what Orpen had written, in a passage heavily critical of certain aspects of Norman rule, was that 'it is plain that the Normans regarded the Irish as an uncouth and barbarous people and the fit spoil of their conquerors'.17 MacNeill next asked his audience how it was that in the midst of this barbarism there had existed 'schools everywhere, not schools but universities - books everywhere, "the countless multitude of the books of Eire"'. He then launched headlong into an anti-intellectual rant on the source materials for the history of Anglo-Norman Ireland, comparing the literature and achievements of Ireland's golden age with

the pomp and circumstance of Feudalism, with its archiepiscopal viceroys, its incastellations and its subinfeudations, its charters and its statutes, its registers and its inquisitions, but during four centuries not one school of note, not even one, and one abortive university, no literature except the melancholy records of anti- national statecraft, and whatever learning there was for the most part suborned to the purposes of a dominating officialdom, just as in our own day we have seen the highest achievements of science and invention suborned to the service of the war departments.18

This was not the stuff of a history lecture, rather a political rally, and one, at that, likely to incite to hatred. But MacNeill was not now wearing the mor- tarboard of a university professor (though the chair which he had forfeited in 1916 had been restored to him two years later),19 but was speaking and writing as a politician, elected in 1918 as M.P. for Derry City and the National University of Ireland, and by the following year Minister for Finance in the first Dail.

It is most unfortunate that a scholar of Eoin MacNeill's integrity and stature should have let his emotions enter the historical debate in this way, as it left no room for a just assessment of the very real achievement of Orpen's first two volumes, and gave licence to scholars of lesser standing to join the pack when the other two volumes, covering the period 1216-1333, appeared in 1920. Obviously stung by some of the more robust criticism that had greeted the first half of his project, Orpen concluded the foreword to the latter half with the following heartfelt statement:

In the immediate future Ireland is likely to focus upon herself a large share of political attention, and many ill-founded assertions regarding her past history as well as her present condition will doubtless continue to be made by politicians of all

16Ibid. 17Orpen, Normans, ii, 335. 18MacNeill, Phases, p. 240. 19Martin & Byrne (eds), The scholar revolutionary, pp 387-90.




parties. It might indeed be thought that what happened upwards of seven centuries ago can have no practical bearing on our present-day problems. Nevertheless the appeal to history will inevitably be made... it has been my aim to examine the Anglo-Norman period from a mediaeval standpoint, and not to allow any modern political nostrum to colour the presentation of the picture drawn. All those who are sincerely desirous of understanding the Irish problem with the single-minded object of arriving at the best solution for all concerned, should therefore welcome an endeavour to set forth the facts of that occupation with as much exactness of statement and indifferency of judgement as is humanly possible.20

This was not to be. To pick but one example, within months the Irish Jesuit journal Studies

carried a lengthy review of the latter two volumes by Father John MacErlean, a member of the order and an ecclesiastical historian and Gaelic scholar of some merit.21 The review appeared in September 1921, and it was perhaps inevitable that it would be coloured by circumstance, though the level of personalised vitriol which had earlier marked MacNeill's assault and now reappeared was unworthy of its author. As a cleric, Father MacErlean reserved the brunt of his criticism for Orpen's treatment of the church in Anglo-Norman Ireland and, in perhaps his most uncharitable outburst, stated that Orpen had judged 'the progress of the church from a thoroughly unchristian standpoint' or, again, that he was unable 'to view the Christian religion from the Christian standpoint'. This specific sectarian tone is matched by sweeping insult:

... neither Mr Orpen's ability nor his admiration for the invaders has succeeded in imparting a living human interest to what is little else than a dreary catalogue of murder and fraud, spoliation and chicane, disguised in the legal phraseology of a semi-civilised feudalism. The general dullness might have been to a great extent dis- pelled, had the author taken a wider view of his subject, or had his sympathies lain with those who kept up during that whole period a long and desperate struggle to maintain or regain their independence against successive hordes of invaders. There alone could he have found those high and noble motives to which the human heart will always respond despite the lapse of time. But viewed from the author's standpoint, the material could hardly be anything but dull and deadening.22

It is hard to reconcile such comments with those made at precisely that same point by Edmund Curtis, then Erasmus Smith's professor of modern history at the University of Dublin (Trinity College): Dr Orpen maintains to the full in these two volumes that careful scholarship which, when its first two volumes appeared, at once placed him in the foremost ranks of real Irish historians - a band, unfortunately, not too numerous. He shows again here his determination to get to the root of things, to take nothing for granted, and to verify his statements to the utmost available degree. His work on chronology, pedigree, and baronial tenure is impeccable, and constantly he revises our views and adds to our knowledge of this period ... Dr Orpen is a true pioneer in a field which, before him, was almost untouched, and every student of mediaeval Irish history will find his work absolutely indispensable.23

20Orpen, Normans, iii, 9. 21Studies, x (1921), pp 471-6. 22Ibid., p. 472. 23R.S.A.L Jn., li (1921), pp 81-2.




Of course, Orpen was a Trinity graduate (in classics) of many years' standing, a scholar of the college, and was in fact awarded a Litt.D. honoris causa by the university in June 1921 in recognition of his contribution to the study of medieval Ireland. Curtis may well have played a part in securing this for him, and it might be argued that some such connexion accounts for his gen- erous assessment of Ireland under the Normans.

But it is far more likely that Curtis was simply being fair-minded. He was, after all, a man who shared with Eoin MacNeill a similar vision of medieval Ireland,24 so much so that when Brendan Bradshaw made his famous plea for a return to the pre-revisionist tradition of Irish historical scholarship he cited as his ideal 'the vision of its great luminaries Eoin MacNeill and Edmund Curtis'.25 When, in 1923, Curtis published his own History of medieval Ireland from 1110 to 1513, his very opening words made reference to Orpen and his work as 'an invaluable guide for part of my period, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge my great indebtedness to him'. Curtis may even have produced his own monograph as a single-volume complement to Orpen, since he openly declares the main difference between the two (apart from the chronological scope) to be the fact that Ireland under the Normans is 'professedly devoted to the history of the Norman colonists, whereas I have devoted more attention to the native side'.26 It seems, therefore, that where others saw only the faults in Orpen's work, Curtis recognised the depth of the attainment encapsulated in Ireland under the Normans, and saw the folly of condemning to oblivion the work's many positive attributes solely on the ground of antipathy towards its author's (very commonly held) prejudices.

And prejudices, not objections on the grounds of historical accuracy, are at the core of the reaction to Orpen. Orpen's four volumes are cluttered with the prejudices of his class and age, his 'touching faith', as F. J.Byrne put it,'in the cultural superiority of the Anglo-Normans as a race, his Victorian belief in the civilising destiny of England, and his very English [sic] trust in the trappings of law and order as essential prerequisites of civilisation'.27 It is this that angered MacNeill and others, rather than factual error. Professor Byrne, a successor to MacNeill's chair, has recognised what the latter - understandably, perhaps, in the midst of a war of independence - could not, that Orpen 'did his best to paint as accurate a picture as he knew how of Gaelic Ireland and its institutions', and that 'Orpen's view of pre- Norman Irish society, if partial in more senses than one, contains much truth'.28 He is, in fact, a very astute observer of the conditions of life and the body politic in pre-Norman Ireland. He is all too aware, for instance, that

24See James Lydon, 'Historical revisit: Edmund Curtis, A history of medieval Ireland (1923, 1938)' in I.H.S., xxxi, no. 124 (Nov. 1999), pp 535-48.

25Brendan Bradshaw, 'Nationalism and historical scholarship in modem Ireland' in LH.S., xxvi, no. 104 (Nov. 1989), p. 350.

26Edmund Curtis, A history of medieval Ireland from 1110 to 1513 (Dublin, 1923), Foreword.

27E J. Byrne, 'MacNeill the historian' in Martin & Byrne (eds), The scholar revolutionary, p. 25.

28Ibid., p. 27.




'theoretically there was a regular chain of subordination from the tiller of the ground through his immediate lord leading up, link by link, to the ard-ri or chief king of Ireland', and that, as more recent Irish historians have pointed out, 'in theory the organisation bore a certain superficial resemblance to the feudal system'; the problem was, as Orpen saw it - and it is a view well-supported by the evidence, no matter how vehemently MacNeill might argue to the contrary - that this theory was not matched by practice, and that 'the provincial king seldom acknowledged the superiority of any other unless under compulsion and then, as a rule, only so long as the compulsion lasted'.29

When MacNeill objected to Orpen's (never more than implicit) comparison of the inhabitants of medieval Ireland with aboriginal tribal communities in other continents, it was out of concern that the Irish might still be considered 'uncivilised', but in point of fact it is a perfectly legit- imate exercise to look to Africa and elsewhere for parallels with early Irish society: Kenneth Nicholls, for example, opened his pioneering Gaelic and gaelicised Ireland in the middle ages with a comparison between medieval Ireland and Abyssinia.30 MacNeill's objection to the term 'tribal' had the same protective purpose, although, as Byrne points out, 'the modern student would concur in the designation of Irish law as fundamentally tribal', the only qualification being that no ethnic or linguistic distinction existed between 'tribes', rather a remarkable uniformity in customs and institutions.

It was the redoubtable Professor Binchy of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (spiritual successor to MacNeill as the leading authority on early Irish law) who, almost half a century ago, put his finger on the essence of the contention between Orpen and MacNeill. In a Thomas Davis Lecture on 'Secular institutions' in early medieval Ireland broadcast in 1953 he noted on the subject of law and order that some believe that these cannot exist in the absence of formal structures for their enforcement, and added:

Well, this was the conclusion reached by a fair-minded, scholarly (though I think subconsciously prejudiced) historian, the late Goddard Henry Orpen, who held that prior to the coming of the Normans anarchy reigned in Ireland. This view was hotly contested by MacNeill, as those of you who have read his great work Phases of Irish History will remember. It has always seemed to me that these two eminent scholars, despite their violent collision, started out from precisely the same suppressed premise: that law and order were impossible in any society where the State had not substantially the same functions as in the late Victorian era in which they both grew up! Orpen's study of the Irish evidence convinced him that the Irish kings had nothing like these functions; hence, he concluded, Gaelic Ireland was anarchical. MacNeill, tacitly admitting the same suppressed premise, sought to disprove Orpen's facts and to show that in each tuiath law was promulgated, applied and enforced by the king's authority. I disagree completely with MacNeill in this, but I dissent just as emphatically from Orpen's conclusion. If comparative legal history

29Orpen, Normans, i, 20-21. 30Kenneth Nicholls, Gaelic and gaelicised Ireland in the middle ages (Dublin, 1972),

p. 3.




teaches us anything, it is that legal order has in fact obtained among communities where, as in ancient Ireland, the State exists only in embryo.31

If Orpen and MacNeill shared something of the same starting-point in terms of the value-system they inherited, they also had other things in common, and it is a great pity that political circumstances and perhaps differing allegiances prevented the latter and others from recognising this. For instance, it was evidently part of MacNeill's design in publishing Phases of Irish history to instil in his readers a pride in Ireland's past, a sense of self- belief and self-worth, and to contribute his own particular talents to the urgent and proper task, as he would have seen it, of casting off the legacy of colonialism. The book is infused with a love of Ireland and with a pride in the past achievements of the country and its people. How unfortunate that he could not recognise in his antagonist, Goddard Orpen, a similar love for the land of his birth.

II

Orpen was fifteen years MacNeill's senior, born into a legal family in Dublin in 1852, and was educated in Tipperary and at Trinity College, but then left Ireland to practise at the English bar. However, it was in England that he began in earnest his studies into medieval Irish history, and while resident there he published, at the age of forty, his first major work, an edition, still unsurpassed, of the contemporary Norman-French poem on the English invasion of Ireland, to which he himself gave the title that has clung to it ever since, The song of Dermot and the earl.32 Eight years later he returned to Ireland when his wife inherited Monksgrange, in the Blackstairs Mountains on the borders of Wexford and Carlow, and there he lived until his death, just short of his eightieth birthday in May 1932. Ireland under the Normans is Orpen's single greatest accomplishment, but it is upon the entire corpus of his published writings rather than upon any single work that his subsequent reputation rests.

Because we now take it for granted, it is difficult to believe that it was Goddard Orpen, for instance, who, in a series of ground-breaking articles and in the teeth of much resistance and not a little resentment, first con- clusively proved that the many hundreds of 'motes' which dot the Irish countryside are not 'Danish' mounds or prehistoric sepulchres but motte- and-bailey castles erected by the Anglo-Normans (albeit sometimes on the site of earlier monuments). He established this by sheer graft and by the type and degree of fieldwork which very few professionally trained archaeologists half his years and in this age of mechanised travel could rival. He visited the sites about which he wrote, whether they were in the furthest

31D. A. Binchy, 'Secular institutions' in Myles Dillon (ed.), Early Irish society (Dublin, 1954), p. 62. On this matter see Donnchadh 0 Corrdiin, 'Nationality and kingship in pre-Norman Ireland' in T. W. Moody (ed.), Nationality and the pursuit of national independence: Historical Studies XI (Belfast, 1978), pp 1-35.

32The song of Dermot and the earl, ed. and trans. G. H. Orpen (Oxford, 1892).




reaches of Ireland or, for that matter, in the home of so many of the invaders, south Wales. With an extraordinary eye for topographical detail, he seemed to know - and to love - every nook and cranny about which he wrote, and, particularly in the case of castles and defensive structures, described them with the skill and assurance possessed only by the most gifted of archaeologists and architectural historians: this is all the more important in view of the extent to which so many of the sites he surveyed have since become degraded or been destroyed.

Orpen's pride in Ireland and in things Irish is not something confined to the Anglo-Norman contribution. In Ireland under the Normans he is, for instance, scathing in his criticism of Ruaidri 6 Conchobair's father, Toirrdelbach, high-king of Ireland, c. 1120-1156, repeatedly labelling him as an unscrupulous and violent ruler (a description, it must be said, from which it is hard to dissent). Yet, when writing of the high-king's death, Orpen declares that 'After the lapse of seven and a half centuries we too may forgive Turlough much, and remember him as the young King of Erin for whom "the cross of Cong" - one of the noblest surviving examples of native Irish craft - was made in the year 1123', adding in a footnote: 'Let us try too to remember the name - Maelisa son of Bratan O'Echan - of the wonderful craftsman who made the shrine.'33 These are the words of a man who rejoices, equally with Eoin MacNeill, in the artistic achievements of ancient Ireland, but who, as an Irishman, feels entitled, in lauding the patrons of such creations, to bemoan their more destructive actions. And it is entirely incorrect to state that Orpen lacks sympathy or empathy with the Irish. In describing the divisive aftermath of Brian B6ruma's death at the battle of Clontarf, he remarks: 'Few pages of Irish history are more bitter reading for an Irishman than those which tell of the subsequent fortunes of the shattered battalion of the Dalcassians, the brave remnants of Brian's own tribe.'34 He can spare a thought for what might have been: 'Had Ireland been allowed to go her own way unheeded by Europe, she might in time, and after much suffering, have evolved a better ordered system with some hope of progress in it, and the world might have seen a Celtic civilisation, where Celtic imagination and Celtic genius, free and unfettered, would assuredly have contributed something towards the solution of human problems, which, as it is, mankind has missed for ever. But it was not to be.'35

And it was not to be because of the Anglo-Norman invasion, for which Orpen is assumed to be an unequivocal apologist, though his view of it is by no means as straightforward. As an apologist, Orpen might, for example, have taken refuge behind the frequently repeated nonsense that the English under Henry II had little interest in Ireland and only reluctantly became involved in its affairs when Diarmait Mac Murchada's overtures to the Normans of south Wales made royal intervention unavoidable. Instead he argues convincingly that Henry had lusted after involvement in Ireland almost from the moment he ascended the throne, and that Mac Murchada's

33Orpen, Normans, i, 60-61; cf. pp 46, 51. 34Ibid., p. 32. 35Ibid., p. 27.




request for aid was music to Henry's ears: 'No doubt', he comments can-

didly, 'pretexts for war, when required, are in general easily manufactured, but here was an admirable one offered by Dermot, ready made to Henry's hand.' As to the actions of men who sought foreign aid for their own advancement, like Mac Murchada - who ought to be the hero of a Norman apologist - Orpen declares that 'If such princes were wiser and more patriotic than their fellows, they might have learnt and observed the

great historic lesson that such a course was a likely way to enslave both themselves and their country.'36

A careful reading of Orpen is enough to show that he viewed the Anglo- Norman invasion of Ireland very much as a mixed blessing. For all his much-vaunted 'Pax Normannica', he was aware that the alleged turmoil of

pre-Norman Ireland (for which MacNeill so vehemently castigated him) was not ended by the invasion; rather, it continued, but it was, in his own words, 'turmoil now caused partly, but not exclusively, by the efforts of the newcomers to extend their domination'." Of Henry II's actions in 1172 in

establishing Strongbow as lord of Leinster and granting the kingdom of Meath to Hugh de Lacy, he confesses that the king had thereby 'rendered inevitable a conflict between English and Irish aims and interests'.38 When, in 1177, the kingdoms of Cork (Mac Carthaig's Desmond) and Limerick

(0 Briain's Thomond) were similarly granted away to Anglo-Norman feudatories, he admits that it is 'impossible to reconcile these sweeping grants with our ideas of equitable dealing'.39 And he shows the extent to which he appreciated the motivations of the Irish in making war on the colonists, saying that they 'had always the feeling rankling in their minds that the invaders had robbed them of the best lands, and they remained

always ready, when opportunity should occur, to raid and plunder as of old, and if possible recover the land they had lost'.40

Orpen does not regard it as part of the role of the historian to mete out blame, but his story does have its villains. However, just as these are not the

Anglo-Norman settlers in Ireland whom he admires for what he sees as their courage and adventurous spirit on this new frontier, neither are his villains, as some suppose, the native Irish. In fact Orpen vents most of his

spleen on the policies of Ireland's lord, the king of England. He has little

good to say of Henry II, of whose policy in south Wales and Ireland in 1171 he states: 'It was Henry's cue throughout this expedition to appear as the friend of the natives, Welsh and Irish, and the stern oppressor of the Anglo- Norman marcher-lords, his real object being to secure the control of the Crown over both.'41 Of the 1185 expedition to Ireland by Henry's son John, and the Irish response it evoked, he has very bitter words: 'A proud and sensitive people never willingly submits to the rule of a master, however

mighty, who despises them.' Here we see something of Goddard Orpen's

36Ibid., p. 82. 37Ibid., ii, 328. 38Ibid., i, 284. 39Ibid., ii, 33. 40Ibid., p. 328. 41Ibid., i, 253-4.




regard for the Irish, not the contempt his detractors allege. He then pro- ceeds to describe the incident recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis when John and his youthful entourage pulled the beards of the Irish lords who had greeted them on their arrival, and adds that 'this rude plucking of the beards was only a symbol of that want of consideration for the native Irish which exhibited itself in more harmful ways'.42

Some more recent historians have attempted to rehabilitate King John, the late W. L. Warren making the colourful if somewhat meaningless statement that he was 'the most successful high-king Ireland had ever seen',43 while the late E X. Martin went one step further with the even more improbable suggestion that 'John, so often described as the worst of the kings of England, was, paradoxically, the best for Ireland.'44 Oddly enough, this latter point had specifically been addressed over sixty years earlier by Orpen, who could remark of his day that it 'has been the fashion, especially with writers who have seldom a good word for English policy in Ireland, to bestow a considerable measure of praise upon the action of King John in that country'. He concluded, however, that 'If we have correctly read the record of his rule, this praise is wholly undeserved... For the native Irish themselves, in common with too many of his contemporaries, he had no sort of regard' and was 'always ready to grant away their territories (for a consideration) to his favourites'.45

John's successors, in Orpen's eyes, were little better. In discussing the change in English government policy under John's son, Henry III, which involved authorising the confiscation of Connacht from its king, Aed son of Cathal Crobderg 0 Conchobair, and the grant by royal charter of most of the province to Richard de Burgh, Orpen states that 'When all is said that can fairly be said in favour of the new policy, the fact remains that it involved harsh treatment of King Cathal's son, and was not unnaturally regarded by him and his followers as an act of treachery and deception.'46 Henry's son, Edward I, is sometimes regarded as the greatest of England's medieval kings, but Orpen is again severe in his criticism of the lack of attention he displayed towards his lordship of Ireland. He states that had Edward devoted his whole attention 'even for a short period' to the busi- ness of governing the country, 'he could not have failed to perceive that there were several parts of Ireland which required "pacification" to enable an orderly government to be carried on there'. In a passage not far removed from MacNeill's caustic summary of English governmental pro-

42Ibid., ii, 97. 43W. L. Warren,'King John and Ireland' in J. E Lydon (ed.), England and Ireland

in the later middle ages: essays in honour of Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven (Dublin, 1981), p. 39.

44E X. Martin, 'John, lord of Ireland, 1185-1216' in Art Cosgrove (ed.), A new history of Ireland, ii: Medieval Ireland, 1169-1534 (Oxford, 1987), p. 132. I have attempted a reassessment in 'John and Ireland: the origins of England's Irish problem' in Stephen Church (ed.), King John: new interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), pp 221-45.

45Orpen, Normans, ii, 319-20. 6"Ibid., iii, 163-4.




cedure quoted above, Orpen notes that peace 'was not to be produced by the magic of mandates from Gascony or even from Westminster, or to be enforced by the entry of fines on the pipe roll'. Instead, he states, it required the highest efforts of statesmanship and adequate military power, 'guided by principles of justice and fair dealing'.47

This statement captures some of the recurrent themes of Ireland under the Normans. To take the latter point first, one of the reasons, as Orpen sees it, that the Normans failed to conquer Ireland was because of the sense of injustice their actions produced among the Irish, specifically arising from their denial of access to legal remedy. In commenting on some of the fail- ures of the first fifty years of Norman rule, he (a lawyer, it should be remembered) remarks on how the western world had learnt from experience that 'to make a united and contented nation, equal rights before the law must be secured to all'; unfortunately 'such a conception was, however, entirely beyond the ken of the statesmen of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries'. By denying the native population access to the law, 'those who guided the destinies of the colony were not', he argues, 'far-seeing enough to perceive the ultimate effect of a half-conquest carried out in such a spirit'.48

This lack of statesmanship, he believed, came from the top, and here we see in Goddard Orpen the authentic voice of the Anglo-Irishman through the ages. He criticises Henry III and his English officials, not the Anglo- Irishmen who governed in Henry's name. The reason?

They [the Anglo-Irish] were men who spent most if not all of their lives in Ireland, who held lands there, and had the interests of the colony at heart, and who, if they took little thought of the interests of the native Irish population, at least understood them and their ways as no official fresh from England could do.49

Resentment at the intrusion of English-born officials was almost as old as the Anglo-Irish colony itself, and here, in 1920, Orpen articulates it with the same conviction that his forebears had for centuries past. Nine years earlier, in Volume I, he had been, if anything, more forthright. Ostensibly discussing the efforts to which Henry II went in 1170 to choke off the supply of men and provisions to the insubordinate Strongbow and his men in Ireland, Orpen launches into an attack on English policy reminiscent of a Swift or a Grattan:

Henry's embargo, then, must rather be regarded as the first example of that perversity which in after years too often characterised England's policy towards Ireland, and from which, perhaps, it is not yet wholly free, a perversity which mani- fests itself in first encouraging the formation of an English colony in Ireland for the greater glory and security of the English Crown, and then, not from any regard to the native Irish, but from motives of suspicion and jealousy, thwarting the efforts of that colony whenever it seemed likely to be successful and prosperous.50

This statement brings us as close as we are likely to get to the perspec- tive of Goddard Orpen on the period of Irish history about which he wrote

47Ibid., p. 271. 48Ibid., ii, 334. 49Ibid., iii, 296. 50Ibid., i, 219 (my italics).



DuFFY - G. H. Orpen, Ireland under the Normans (1911-20) 259

with such fervour and such skill. He wrote from the standpoint of an Anglo- Irishman, confident in the belief that generations of people of his back-

ground had striven to give of their best to Ireland and that, on balance, in spite of the divisions to which their presence gave rise and their many mis- takes and injustices - which he is ready to acknowledge - theirs was a positive contribution. If blame is to be meted out - and he does not believe it part of the function of the historian either to praise or blame51 - it does not belong with those who made Ireland their home for better or worse, but with an English government which cared neither for native nor newcomer, but sought merely to exploit both for its own ends.

Goddard Henry Orpen's four-volume study Ireland under the Normans offers so many insights into the Weltanschauung of its author and his class that it is rewarding of study for this purpose alone. But it would be a dread- ful shame if sight was lost of the fact that his is a work of quite the most stu- pendous scholarship. Every monograph which has since appeared on this era of Irish history has paraphrased him, adjusted some of the minutiae of his account, added some details where a new source has been unearthed, or sought to tell the same story in a different tone. His work has not been sur- passed, and it cannot be superseded, because it is the fons et origo of the professional historiography of Anglo-Norman Ireland.

SEAN DUFFY Department of Medieval History, Trinity College Dublin

"Ibid., p. 143.



goddard henry orpen, ireland under the normans, 1169-1333 (1911-20)

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