Ireland Under the Normans

Orpen's magnum opus was originally published in two volumes in 1911, and a further two in 1920 - a total of some 1500 pages.

Clarendon Press subsequently reissued the four volumes in 1968.

It dealt with events in Ireland from the Cambro-Norman invasion of 1169 to the portentous murder of the earl of Ulster in 1333 as the history of a number of regions, rather than focusing exclusively on the concerns of the English king?s administration, but his example has never hitherto been followed in relation to the Anglo-Irish colony.

Although the project had its detractors (most notably Eoin MacNeill, who held the Chair of medieval history in UCD from in 1909).

To quote Dr Duffy in his introduction: "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 dreadful shame if sight was lost of the fact that his work is a work of quite the most stupendous 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His work has not been surpassed, and it cannot be superseded, because it is the fons et origo of the professional historiography of Anglo-Norman Ireland"