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Intermarriage in fifteenth-century Ireland: the English and Irish in the ‘four obedient shires’

2013; Royal Irish Academy; Volume: 113; Issue: -1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3318/priac.2013.113.02

2009-0048

Sparky Booker,

Historical Studies of British Isles

Many attempts have been made to understand and explain the complicated relationship between the English of Ireland and the Irish in the later middle ages.This paper explores the interaction between these two groups through the curiously understudied phenomenon of intermarriage, and centres on the 'four obedient counties' of Dublin, Meath, Louth, and Kildare in the fifteenth century.These counties, which later comprised the Pale, were home to an English community that helped to produce much of the anti-Irish rhetoric found in record sources of the fifteenth century, including frequent enactments that prohibited marriage between the English and the Irish.And yet, English men and women from this region chose to marry Irish people, and they did so in much greater numbers than the current historiography acknowledges.The prevalence of intermarriage in the four counties indicates that the English and Irish interacted far more peaceably and amicably than the often belligerent attitudes displayed toward the Irish in records from the colony would indicate, and that the attempts made by the Irish parliament to distance the English of Ireland from their Irish neighbours were largely unsuccessful.The so-called 'four obedient shires' 2 of Meath, Kildare, Louth and Dublin are a fruitful area for a study of marriage between the English of Ireland and the Irish, as these counties comprised the region of the colony most firmly under English control in the fifteenth century. 3Much of the anti-Irish rhetoric that survives in sources from the period, particularly in the legislation of the Irish parliament, originated in these counties and was generated by the self-aware community of the region, later called 'Palesmen', who touted themselves as the most 'English' of the settlers in Ireland. 4 It is among these individuals that such marriages are most interesting and, it could be argued, surprising.One might question why these marriages are notable, as, by the fifteenth century, the English of Ireland had lived in close proximity to the Irish for hundreds of years and naturally assimilated, at least partially, with their neighbours.Robin Frame has given a salutary warning about this, as he terms it, 'naive' assumption that time and proximity breed assimilation, and it is certainly worth bearing in mind that this is not necessarily always the case. 5 One could point to the fact that the anti-Irish rhetoric of the settler community increased, rather than waned, in the later middle ages.Nevertheless, it is a rare colonial community that is able to hold itself entirely remote from its host culture, and the English of Ireland did, either from choice or necessity, adopt more and more Irish customs as the late middle ages progressed. 6 In many cases, this adoption of Irish customs went hand in hand with intermarriage Intermarriage among the settler elite of the four counties is well documented. 7 Members of the powerful Fitzgerald family of Kildare, for example, frequently intermarried with the Irish and one 2 The phrase 'four obedient shires' is first recorded in 1488, but the term 'four counties' appears in 1450.The four counties were grouped together, as detailed in note 3, from the start of the fifteenth century: Charles McNeill (ed.), Calendar of Archbishop Alen's register (Dublin, 1950), 250; Henry F. Berry (ed.), Statute rolls of the parliament of Ireland: Henry VI (London, 1910), 225. 3 Although this area was not given its own name, the 'Pale', until Poynings' parliament in 1494-5, it was treated as a distinct region, and the most 'English' part of the colony, throughout much of the fifteenth century.These four counties appear grouped together in documents of the Irish chancery in 1402-3 and 1414-15, although sometimes, particularly in the first decades of the fifteenth century, County Carlow appears alongside them: Edward Tresham (ed.), Rotulorum patentium et clausorum cancellariae Hiberniae calendarium(Calendar of the patent and close rolls of the chancery of Ireland) (Dublin, 1828), 136, no 206, 165, no 228, 209, nos 171, 187, 188, 190.Provision was made to defend these four counties with tower houses in 1429-30, but by 1435 the Irish council complained that 'the nether parts of the counties of Dublin, Meath, Louth, and Kildare, that join together, out of the subjection of the said enemies and rebels scarcely thirty miles in length and twenty miles in breadth, thereas a man may surely ride or go in the said counties to answer the king's writs and to his commandments': William Betham, Dignities, feudal and parliamentary and the constitutional legislature of the United Kingdom (London, 1830), 361; H.G. Richardson and G.O. Sayles, The Irish parliament in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1952), 180, note 40.For one of the most recent discussions of both documentary and archaeological evidence for the emergence of this area, see Margaret Murphy and Michael Potterton, The Dublin region in the Middle Ages (Dublin, 2010), 264-683. The work of Steven Ellis, particularly, has highlighted the self-consciously English aspect of settler identity: 'Nationalist historiography and the English and Gaelic worlds in the late middle ages', Irish Historical Studies (hereafter IHS) 25 (97) (1986-7), 1-18.Additionally, a great deal of work on this community and its identity has been done by early modernists: Brendan Bradshaw, The Irish constitutional revolution of the sixteenth century (Cambridge 1979); Nicholas Canny, The formation of the Old English elite in Ireland (Dublin, 1975); Ciaran Brady, The chief governors: the rise and fall of reform government in Tudor Ireland (Oxford, 1994). 5 Robin Frame, '"Les Engleys nées en Irlande": the English political identity in medieval Ireland', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 (3) (1993), 83-103: 89. The Irish customs adopted ranged from clothing and hairstyles to forms of taxation and social interaction.For those families who took on these customs most, see K.W. Nicholls, Gaelic and gaelicized Ireland in the Middle Ages (Dublin, 2003).Assimilation and intermarriage were evident in other English colonies in this period, as in English-held areas of France in the early fifteenth century and in Wales, by the fourteenth century: