'Irish history Essay\r'

'Rose Fitzgerald †wife of Joseph Kennedy, Sr. and matriarch of a U. S. semipolitical dynasty †was born of a royal Boston Irish family. Her last name merely betrays origins that were other than Irish. In fact, the name â€Å"Fitz-Gerald” indicates that her first Irish ancestor to bear that name was the son of a Norman knight or nobleman who was make â€Å"in the wrong bed,” so to speak. Irish legends formulate that the island had been invaded several times before the arrival of the Celts close to 250 B.\r\nC. E. (Austin, 2007). In historical times however, Ireland was practical(prenominal)ly untasted for centuries; Romans never got to the island, nor did the early Germanic invaders that turned Romano-Celtic Britain into England jump around 450 C. E. By the time of the first Viking rupture nearly 350 years later, the Celtic inhabitants of Ireland had retained their extraordinary and ancient Celtic farming and verbiage in a pure form for nearly a mi llennium.\r\nEven Christianity didn’t wee a massive effect on the core grow, and at that place is attest that suggests al to the highest degree druidic practices were integrated into early Celtic Christianity, which differed signifi bungholetly from Roman Catholicism prior to the Council of Whitby (Griffin, 2000). Interestingly, Celtic speech communications historically are lost in the face of an onslaught by a more aggressive culture. The Celtic language of Gaul was almost completely replaced by Latin, and in the face of Germanic invaders from the Continent, Brythonic (Welsh and Cornish) and Scots Celtic retreated into the mountainous fringe of Britain.\r\nHowever, Scandinavians (from whom Normans were descended) invading Celtic-speaking Ireland ultimately wound up adopting the language and the culture. This is probably due less to the durability of Irish culture than it is to Scandinavian adaptability. Wherever Scandinavian Vikings conquered and sett lead †fr om Russia to Normandy, or around the Mediterranean †they eventually became assimilated by the culture and language of those they had conquered.\r\nIn the object lesson of the early Norsemen, political conquest and colonization of Ireland was non a aboriginal goal. For the first dickens centuries, raids were conducted for the purpose of booty. Only later, get-go in the tenth century, did Norse Vikings begin grammatical body structure their port cities †Dublin, Wexford, Waterford and Cork †and begin to settle in. The purposes of the towns were to practice as bases from which raids on England could be launched.\r\nArchaeological induction suggests that oer the following two centuries, the Norse who started to circle out into the countryside around their towns were â€Å"heavily Hibernicized” (Oxford Companion, 1999). In the boldness of the Anglo-Normans however, there were additional factors †political, social and environmental †that lead to the decline of their dominance and subsequent absorption into Irish culture. The first Anglo-Normans in Ireland actually arrived as mercenaries two years prior to the â€Å"official” date of 1169.\r\nThey had been chartered by the ousted King of Leinster, Dermot MacMurrough in order to acquire his throne. At the time, their was a great deal of internecine warfare in Ireland at the time everyplace the throne and title of High King, providing what was basically an hazard for the bastard offspring of Norman knights who otherwise would hang in landless. Anglo-Norman intervention began in earnest with the arrival of over five hundred fighters between May of 1169 and lofty of 1170 (Oxford Companion, 17).\r\nEventually †and despite tackleed intervention (with portentous blessing) on the begin of King Henry II, Norman families such as Le Gros, Prendergast, FitzStephen, FitzGerald, FitzHenry and Le Poer had secured virtual kingdoms for themselves by 1200 (Wikipedia, 2007 ). Events in Ireland during the early 13th nose candy eventually led to the dissolution of these Norman principalities as the native Gaelic-speaking Irish began to reassert themselves. crack of the reduction of Norman solve in Ireland had to do with inheritance laws; land was divided among all sons, not just the eldest, which led to the reduction in sizing and power of Norman lands.\r\nPeriodic famines also served to dilute Norman power in Ireland. Over the close hundred and fifty years, two additional events led to the decline of Norman power in Ireland. graduation was the invasion of Scottish king Edward Bruce, who rallied the Gaelic nobleness against the Sassunach. The other was the Black Death 0f 1347-1350. This plague decreased the population of Europe by a third. urban dwellers †such as the Anglo-Normans of Ireland †were affected in overmuch greater numbers than those vivacious in the countryside, which was the case of Gaelic-speaking Irish.\r\nAs the Englis h-controlled areas became confined to the lands in and around Dublin (called â€Å"The brainsick”), the Hiberno-Norman lords in the hinterlands began to adopt the Irish language, allying themselves with the native Irish in politics and warfare, and remained Catholic despite the Reformation (Barry, 1988) . This process of â€Å"Hibernicization” was well underway by 1400; it so troubled the English governance in Dublin that they passed laws in 1367 in an attempt to stop those of English (Norman) descent from intermarrying with the Irish and adopting the language and culture.\r\nThe statutes had little effect, however because of the Dublin government’s limited authority outside of The Pale. Archaeological tell of Norman occupation of the Irish countryside includes the frame of legion(predicate) â€Å"mottes,” or remains of castles, scattered throughout the country. However, there are some places where Normans are indicated to have lived in written reco rds such as the Irish Annals, where remains of these â€Å"mottes” are not found. It is possible that â€Å"ringworks” †ear then forts †whitethorn have been present in these areas (McNeill, 1999).\r\nAn archaeological ray at Caherguillamore in County Limerick sheds some light on daily life in Ireland during the late mediate Ages. The construction and layout of the houses discovered in this area is quasi(prenominal) to those on feudal Norman manors one would bet to find in France and England (Barry, 1988). They place to be extensive houses with a central hearth, typical of Scandinavian construction which Normans retained long after becoming culturally and linguistically French.\r\nA coin found at the site from the reign of Edward I dates the houses’ construction to the decades on either side of 1300. There does not appear to have been any sort of genre as â€Å"Norman-Irish” or â€Å"Norman-Gaelic” literature, although the latter ter m was used in the 1940’s by Austin Clarke to describe numbers such as Feuch fein an obair-se a Aodh , which, while powerfully Irish in its subject matter and structure, bears some resemblance to the â€Å"courtly love” poems of the French troubadours, which whom most Norman nobility would have had some familiarity with (Carney, 1955).\r\nThis cross-pollination seems to have gone both ways; Bebedeit’s transit of Saint Brendan, dedicated to the wives of Henry I, was adapted from the Irish saga Navigatio Sanctis Brendani, an account of what may have been an early Irish voyage to North America in the fifth Century (Harper-Bill, 2003). Beyond this, there is little in the way of true â€Å"Anglo-Norman-Irish” literature or p rosaceous.\r\n match to an article in The Cambridge bill of English and American Literature, there were three reasons for this. First of all, the vernacular language of Ireland †Irish Gaelic †was difficult for English speakers then as now, and very few inside The Pale would have bothered to learn it. Secondly, those Norman-English living at bottom The Pale were busy trying to hold on to what they had in the face of rebellion by the native Gaels.\r\nThe Third reason has to do with the entire assimilation issue: separated from their kinsmen in England and on the Continent, skirt by native Irish speakers, it was inevitable that the Anglo Normans living outside The Pale should be drawn out-of-door from the Anglo-French literary traditions and into the Irish Gaelic forms (Bartleby, 2005). The Scandinavian influence †particularly that of the Normans †on European history can hardly be underestimated. The Vikings and their Norman descendants were a dynamic people who, for all their violent ways, created ready societies wherever they went.\r\nHad William the Conqueror failed in 1066, English would presently sound a great resembling Dutch or German, and the socio-political landscape would look very unalike today. This qualification may be exactly what has allowed Irish culture to survive, despite seven centuries of what was often harsh, beastly and even murderous oppression on the part of the Protestant English beginning around 1600. This spry culture was ultimately transplanted to the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In the U. S. especially, people of Irish descent read like a â€Å"Who’s Who” of American history.\r\nThe fact that the Irish who came to the U. S. †who were initially despised and discriminated against violently †eventually rose to prominence and produced some of the greatest political leadership and literary figures in the nation owe their energy in part to the contribution of Scandinavians and their Anglo-Norman descendants. Works Cited The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. (1907â€21). (Vol. XIV). The Oxford Companion to Irish History. (1999). ).\r\nOxford: Oxford University mess A Companion To The Anglo Norman World.(2003). ). Suffolk: Boydell Press. Norman Ireland. (2007). Wikipedia. Retrieved 2 April 2007, from http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Norman_Ireland Barry, T. B. (1988). The Archaeology of Medieval Ireland. London: Routledge. Carney, J. (1955). Studies in Irish Literature and History. Dublin: Dublin Institute for advance Studies. Griffith, P. (2000). Celtic Cross Development. Retrieved 2 April 2007, from http://www. bluhorizonlines. org/cros/cros2. html Mcneill, T. (1999). Castles in Ireland: Feudal Power in a Gaelic World. London: Routledge.\r\n'