Land of War : The Story of Ireland, c. 1152-1399

In 1152, one man's actions on an unknown battlefield in the Irish midlands set in motion a chain of events which would fundamentally alter the course of Irish history. The abduction of Dearbhforgaill Ni Mhaoilseachlainn, wife of Tiernan O Ruairc (King of Breifne) by Diarmuid Mac Murchadha (King of Leinster) lit the spark for a fire which engulfed the island over the following decades. Several years later, when O Ruairc's ally had replaced Mac Murchadha's in the High Kingship, O Ruairc's actions in expelling his nemesis from Ireland led to the Leinsterman seeking aid from the totemic Plantagenet King of England, Henry II, which assistance gradually morphed into the Cambro-Norman Conquest of Ireland. Over the centuries that followed, the island was divided between the Lordship of Ireland and the surviving Gaelic Kingdoms, while the intersection of these two societies led to the new arrivals becoming - in that famous phrase - more Irish than the Irish themselves. By 1399, as Richard II departed Ireland for the second and final time, the Lordship was whittled down to a series of personal fiefdoms loosely connected to the Dublin administration.

From the carnage of the Conquest, through the gradual assertion of the Lordship's power in the late 1100s, we see how Gaelic Ireland eventually re-established itself through a combination of charismatic military tacticians and a series of crippling minorities in the Lordship in the mid-13th century. But with the passing of that dominant generation, the Lordship stemmed the flow through the latter part of the 13th century through its two leading lights, before the heady combination of the Bruce Invasion, the Burke Civil War and the Black Death decimated the island. As the 14th century wore on, it became patently clear that this land of war could never fully be quelled. Even Richard II's visits in the 1390s did little to reverse the tide of the previous century and a half, with the Hiberno-Normans more closely related to Gaelic Ireland than Plantagenet England, and ended with Richard desperately scurrying back to England in a futile attempt to cling to power.

While the story of medieval Ireland has been told many times, the various historians have tended to focus on either the Lordship or the Gaelic Kingdoms in isolation, but not on the interactions between these two worlds. Further, most studies of medieval Ireland are purely academic texts -excellent pieces of work upon which I have built this story - which are largely inaccessible to the average reader with a passing interest in Irish history. Instead, the aim of this book is to tell the story of Ireland - not the Lordship, not Gaelic Ireland, but the entire island encompassing the two societies and occasionally its neighbouring realms - in a cohesive narrative, broken into seven distinct periods, each with several smaller chapters, which seeks to entertain as much as inform. Therefore, building on the existing scholarship and the surviving medieval sources, this book tells the story of Ireland from 1152 - 1399 in narrative form for the first time.