404. Norman Conquest: Colonising Ireland (Part 4)

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2:36Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash Empire. Cost and coverage may vary. In the last episodes of Empire, we've talked about the familiar story, the relatively familiar story of the Battle of Hastings and William the Conqueror coming, defeating Harold, the arrow in the eye and all that stuff. We're going into much less well-known territory today, but arguably more important, because this is the moment that the Normans move into Scotland, conquer Wales, build all those amazing fortresses on the Welsh border, and finally, Strongbow takes Ireland, captures Dublin, and begins the English conquest of Ireland, a wound whose pain is still being felt today. I'm on my own with our wonderful friend, Mark Morris. Mark, welcome back

3:34to the show. Thank you for having me back. Well, last time we had such fun and got so chatty about the harrowing of the North and doomsday book that we barely had mention of the really important uh events which take place towards the end of william the conqueror's reign and his successors reign when the norman influence or arms spill over into the celtic fringe beyond the harrowing of the north beyond cumbria uh the whole business of the normans in scotland which is a peaceful infiltration rather than a conquest but which is incredibly important for scotland's history the slightly different story of the normans in wales and anyone that's wandered around the welsh border country will know there's magnificent norman castles with their keeps

4:22and their deep ditches which still uh act as as a kind of boundary in the landscape between the two countries we're going to be talking about all that and then in the second half we're going to look at the bit of norman history that arguably has left the most current wounds which is still current history because it's the story of the Normans in Ireland and the wounds opened up by Strongbow and his followers arguably have never been healed. They continue to fester even to this day, or certainly the we're still feeling some of the last aftershocks of that conquest. So really important stuff. And I think it's material which is much less well known than the story of the battle of hastings which many of us study at

5:11school but arguably just as important and mark this is something you've been working on uh uh for a book in the last few years yes too many years really um my publishers would say um for me the dynamic of let's say the people who lived in England after the conquest, whatever we call them, pushing north and west in search of not just conquest for its own sake, but in search of profit, in search of more land. That is the dominant dynamic of those three centuries until you get to the Black Death, when all of a sudden you lose maybe half the population and all of a sudden that population pressure disappears and the English expansion suddenly becomes a contraction. I think this is stuff that will come as a bit of a surprise to most listeners.

5:57This is not stuff we study at school in the British curriculum. And even if you're getting a bit of it in your Irish or your Scottish curriculum, Scottish and Irish and Welsh listeners, I suspect you won't know the other bits of the Celtic world which were affected. So this hopefully will pull the whole thing together. He sort of creates an intellectual justification, in a way, for the Norman conquest in that he calls the Celts on the edge of Norman territory barbarians. And he focuses particularly on the fact that they still have introduced immediately after 1066 were chivalry in the sense of not killing your opponents when they surrender, sparing them, ransoming them, maybe let them go free if they promise to be good.

6:56And the other side of that is slavery, which the Normans had done in the past when they were Vikings, but hadn't done for a generation before the conquest and didn't do afterwards. In a way that all the people in Britain and Ireland, all the peoples in Britain and Ireland, whether they were Anglo-Saxons or Scots or Irish or Welsh, slavery as an institution and war as slave hunt was very much the normal way of doing things. And the Normans end that quite quickly. And so you get to, to finally get to the point you wanted to start at, William of Malmesbury, you get to a point, William of Malmesbury is writing in the 1120s. And so this is 50 or 60 years after the initial Norman onslaught. Sitting in Wiltshire in the west of England. Yeah, he's in western England,

7:39yeah, Wessex. These new attitudes have now, in England, become the norm. They've percolated down from the aristocracy and everyone accepts the fact that oh we used to do slavery we don't do it anymore we used to do politically we don't do that anymore but they're looking at their neighbors and say well these guys do exactly what we used to do and that's one very important factor sort of moral factor if you like there are lots of other things that the main one i think or one of the main planks of Malmesbury's argument is it's an economic shift, because in the course of the 10th and the 11th centuries, England had really stolen a march on its insular neighbours in all kinds of ways, like having an abundant silver coinage, having towns with thousands, if not tens of thousands

8:19of people in the case of London, having proto- proto universities by the end of the 11th century and certainly universities into the 12th century um international trade you know um you know big new romanesque cathedrals and the monasteries not to be forgotten they're very important particularly in the north yeah all those things we talked about again in terms of the revolution that the conquest ushers in but the the fundamental thing even before the conquest was that england was precociously rich united and powerful in a coin coinage is a very fundamental thing, even before the conquest, was that England was precociously rich, united and powerful. Coinage is a very fundamental thing. You've got all this silver sort of sloshing around.

8:52And when you go to Scotland, Ireland and Wales, they don't even have coins. They don't mint coins. The only specie they've got is imported or stolen, you know, from England. These things hadn't been particularly noticeable in the course of the 10th century. They're very noticeable by the late 11th century. And by the 12th century, William of Malmesbury is happy to draw this distinction by saying these people on just economic criteria alone are barbarians. And that was an important shift because previously, if you'd said to somebody, oh, these people are barbarians, your listener would have understood, oh, you mean they're non-Christian. They're the pagan men from the north who have been raiding for the last 200 years.

9:31No, no, no. Malmesbury's point was he was reviving a classical distinction, which was these people are barbarians because they don't meet the sort of socioeconomic standards that we have. And that was a big shift. And if Malmesbury wasn't the first to do it he was certainly the person who expressed it most stridently most intelligently most trenchantly and this of course is a is a message which in various forms will continue and and power the english conquest of the globe this idea that the english are somehow more civilised, more clued in about the way things should be than the people around them. And it's an idea which leads to the British Empire, ultimately. Yeah. Well, in this case, in a sort of a forerunner of that, which has been dubbed the first English

10:17Empire, the English expanding into Ireland and Scotland and Wales. And, you know, without sort of wishing to side with Malmesbury on an economic level, there's no denying he's right, you know, that all these things apply. But what he then does is he puts a sort of a moral filter and says, well, the reason these people aren't as productive as us is because they're lazy or they're feckless or they're not as Christian as they should be. So when you desperately, greedily eyeing the lands to the north and west and thinking, well, we could farm that more productively we could you know build castles there and have nice manorialized society then you start to come up with rationales for saying and these people haven't done that

10:53because they're savages and that's that's that therefore justifies us going in to take their lands and to subdue them really important point in terms of the sort of uh the philosophy behind you know the if you want to that's probably a grand term but in terms of the sort of uh the philosophy behind you know the if you want to that's probably a grand term but in terms of the um the the thought process behind these people who are doing the conquering he's an imperialist uh writer mark let's start with scotland and the first thing we'd say is that scotland is a fairly new concept at this point before that we've had pick land we've had the britains in in the west and we've had Pictland, we've had the Britons in the West, and we've had the Irish, muddlingly the Scotty, the Scots, heading into first the West of Scotland and then allying and conquering the Picts.

11:38And with Kenneth MacAlpin, we get the beginnings of a Scottish state. Now, by this stage, that is quite well established by the time of the Norman conquest of England, isn't it? Yeah, I mean I wouldn't say Scotland is any newer a concept than England, but the point is that there had been earlier societies, earlier kingdoms, and the thing that throws everything into a state of chaos and confusion is the Vikings in the course of the late 9th and through the 10th century. The problem with Scotland is in England, when you see kingdoms that we know about, Mercia and Northumbria and East Anglia being destroyed, it's comparatively well documented, not least because Wessex survives and we have the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle produced in Wessex.

12:18So we can see, not in as much detail as we'd like, but we can see the outlines of this story and we can see what happens in England. The problem in Scotland is no good sources at all but what we what we see at the same time that england is emerging is the emergence of a new kingdom the kingdom of the scots the crucial thing to point out for you know for someone like me who was new to it about five years ago is that the kingdom of the scots originally is very small just as wessex is initially small and becomes a larger kingdom called england scotland when people refer to it in the first instance is just the area to the north of the well it's the the tay basin really so it's only about you know 50 miles wide and about the same north to south it doesn't extend any further south

13:01than the line where scotland is at its narrowest point, the Forth Clyde line between those two firths. And there's this big area of what they call debatable land, isn't there, between the two, which is more or less semi-independent. Yeah, I mean, so you've got, if you measure from, say, the north of Yorkshire to the Forth Clyde line, it's about 120, 150 miles. Where I spent all my childhood not the kingdom of northumbria there you go and you'll know therefore a bit but even if you say northumbria to people they think of the modern county whereas the kingdom of northumbria is vast and extensive many of us would call it the most beautiful and civilized part of the country between the the fourth and the humber exactly but

13:39maybe not so much if you're living in the 11th century but it's uh but one of the things one of the problems for Northumbria is it's been sort of muddling along for the last hundred years or so as, I guess, kind of a client kingdom. We're very poorly informed about this region, but it's sort of like they're doing their own thing, as you say, semi-independent, but occasionally kowtowing either to England or to Scotland. And what happens in the wake of the Norman conquest is the Normans, being Normans, is they go in hard kind of with castles and colonisation. And the Scots seem to sort of match them blow for blow. So that middle kingdom that's neither Scotland nor England is kind of ground between these

14:17two big millstones. And by the end of the 11th century, it's gone. You know, and there's a new these two kingdoms now england and obviously the much much smaller much less powerful much less prosperous kingdom of scotland is is kind of rubbing up against expansionary norman england but initially having some quite sort of successful forays southwards that there isn't a sense that the scots are uh easy easy pickings for the normans no well apart anything else, if you're ruling a kingdom from London or Winchester, as the Normans are, then Scotland is obviously a long way away. So it's far easier to raid into Northumbria from, say, Edinburgh than it is to go and stop people raiding Northumbria if you're raising armies in southern England.

15:01So that has to be a very major royal expedition. And the Scots have been clearly been raiding into Northumbria for decades. There's a Hexham chronicler that says there's not a hamlet or a hut in Scotland without an English slave. Well, that takes us back to the initial point that their economy is based on sort of war as slave hunt, and they don't any anything in the way of coins so what you promise to your your your your powerful men your powerful um heads of clans is in in four years time or it's been five years since we did a previous great raid this summer we're going to go on a great raid and we can fill our boots you know we can go home with thousands of captives all chained or roped together and you know make make a fortune. And that's the primary purpose of the Scottish kingship,

15:48is to facilitate that transfer of wealth. And, of course, that brings them up against the Normans who would rather do things differently. So into this picture comes another fly in the ointment, which is refugees from the Anglo-Saxon Royal House coming north to Scotland. Edgar the Athling, who we mentioned last time, and I wrongly said he died in Hungary. He dies, as you suggested, in the West Country. So interesting characters to dwell on there. The last male heir of the House of Wessex, and his mother and sisters, including Margaret, who became Saint Margaret. I remember as a young good Catholic boy on the altar at church as a teenager celebrating the moment that Margaret became a saint. Edgar is to remind people

16:33the man with the strongest blood claim to the English throne. He is a great nephew of Edward the Confessor. He's called Aetheling because he's a member of the House of Wessex. He's throne worthy. And when the rebellions start immediately afteruldron because he's a member of the House of Wessex. He's throne worthy. And when the rebellion start immediately after the conquest, because he's he's complicit in them, he flees north. And eventually, when William comes north, the leaders of that rebellion ultimately end up fleeing to Scotland for sort of political refuge, as you say. And very quickly, their fortunes are linked, as you said, by Edgar's sister. We don't know whether she's older or younger, but his sister Margaret is snapped up by Malcolm, Malcolm III, the King of Scots.

17:12Uncle Canmore. Malcolm Canmore, if you wish, yes. This, I think, is one of the reasons that William personally feels the need to intervene, because all of a sudden Malcolm has linked his dynasty with the old English dynasty so potentially the children of that marriage have a right to the throne of England have the right to the throne so William is quite quick once you know once he's dealt with rebellions in England the first thing he does is to lead an army right into Scotland and it's not up to the border it's right into the heart of the kingdom of Scots he crosses the the fourth probably at sterling and and there's a treaty signed at a place called abernethy this is the beginnings of a sort of if

17:50you like sort of in english as much as norman english infiltration into the scottish house and the anglicization of the scottish house which had previously been purely native now we have a queen who is anglo-Hungarian, starts making all these kind of changes in terms of religious practice at the court, introducing Benedictine monks, introducing manners and customs and ways of doing things. One of the reasons that Margaret is such an interesting character is we have a contemporary biography written of her. So allowing for all the biases and propaganda- like qualities to that biography it's it's wonderfully unique because it's there are very few women in stories like this you know women get underrepresented in general in the middle ages especially when it

18:35comes to stories of kind of blood and thunder and conquest and colonization but she is it is one of the ways in which uh scotland starts to. One of the things you can see that is very, very striking for the next decade or so, their successors, her eldest children with Malcolm are all given English names. So she has a son called Edward and she has a son called Edgar and she has a son called Athelstan. And these kings are sort of also rankings. They die out quite quickly. But you could have had a situation where it was quite hard to tell apart the kings of pre-conquest england and post-conquest scotland because they are they are sharing the same anglo-saxon names and of course they also share

19:15a language that english is spoken as certainly as far north as the firth of forth uh and uh and you have a whole load of english place names right through the lothians and the borders right up to at least a further fourth where you could begin to get names like abernethy which are p celtic names yes um i mean i think one of the difficulties they have though is that malcolm isn't speaking um english he's speaking gaelic um so they have difficulties communicating at first but anyway so edgar and via edgar marg, very important in sort of sort of setting the Scottish monarchy on a different path. But I suspect the other thing we should talk about is the next generation. So this is David, the first of Scotland who we're talking about here.

19:55I grew up very much being taught that David was the man who brought sort of European civilization in quotes to to to Scotland and particularly the very beautiful border abbeys which I spent a lot of my childhood pottering around Jedburgh, Kelso, Melrose these beautiful beautiful Cistercian abbeys are very much David's creation aren't they? Yeah I think I mean David has certainly come in for a certain amount of revisionism in the last 30 years or so but I think that his importance to scotland is still unrivaled in as much as as you say he is the conduit by which sort of not just anglicization but the europeanization of of the scottish monarchy and by extension scottish society is really sort of set underway or massively increases. It was perhaps begun with his mother. The crucial thing is that David is brought up

20:47at the Anglo-Norman court. So he's brought up at the court of Henry I of England. He's sent southwards. Is it as a hostage or is it to sort of, you know, give him a good education further south? Or what's the idea there? It's because there are lots of politics which we haven't got time to get into, but because there is a sort of backlash um after margaret and malcolm die and there are more um conventionally scottish gaelic speaking kings and the anglicized members of the the royal house have to flee south it's kind of they go back the other way the refugees and they are refugees at the norman court and also because his sister is given the good anglo-saxon name of edith um marries henry the first of of england so this is william the conqueror's son so it all gets sort of because his sister, who's given the good Anglo-Saxon name of Edith, marries Henry I of England.

21:26So this is William the Conqueror's son. So it all gets sort of genealogically very complicated. But now we have an Anglo-Scottish queen of Anglo-Norman England. He is Henry I's younger brother-in-law. And because he doesn't have any prospect in Scotland, he fights for Henry I in Normandy, and to all intents and purposes, becomes a sort of an honorary Anglo-Norman knight or baron. like Stuart, like Balliol, and my wife's family, the Fraser's, who I was always brought up to believe were strawberry pickers, Fraser's from Bordeaux, but I'm told that isn't a real etymology. I suspect not, apart from anything else, because that's based on their heraldry, and we don't have heraldry for another hundred years or so.

22:22The crucial point is that David, against all expectations, because he's the youngest child of Malcolm and Margaret, he's, I think, the eighth child. He's got many, many older brothers who were king ahead of him. Because they all die off without heirs, he is suddenly and unexpectedly king of Scots from 1124. All of a sudden, therefore, we have a very Europeanised man in charge of Scotland. Also very pious, as you say, he's founding uh lots of monasteries i mean there's a checklist of things i can run off that he does he founds monasteries which have previously been very very few on the ground in scotland he founds more monasteries i think than any other european ruler of the middle ages he founds new towns burrs as

23:03they're known in scotland so he's founding places like roxburgh edinburgh he's he's getting merchants to come in and set up shop and this is really important for the economy of scotland this is i mean roxburgh is one of the no longer exists as a town that's just a ruin but in its day was one of the great economic hubs of of the north of britain yeah and significantly these are all in the first instance, the early decades of his reign, these are all south of the River Forth. So they're in the place called Lothian, which at the time was considered not part of the Kingdom of Scotland. It was land ruled by the King of Scots, but not of Scotland itself. So he's developing this bit of the intermediate zone,

23:41which is, of course, close to England, close to the North Sea, closer to the continent. One of the things he's able to do is, of course, close to England, closer to the North Sea, closer to the continent, one of the things he's able to do is, because he's got lands in England given to him by Henry I, he's able to use the profits of those lands to found these new start-ups, if you like. That's exactly what they are, start-ups, new towns, new monasteries. Also, because one of the first things he does when the Civil War of Stephen's reign kicks off is he seizes Carlisle, seizes Cumbria, and he's able to exploit new silver mines which have been opened up in the previous decade or so. So for the first time

24:09in Scottish history, the Scots are striking their own silver coin. Mark, just before we go to the break, this is just looking ahead, because this is something that will be a familiar landmark to many people around the world. Braveheart. Now, Braveheart has these Scottish nobles who are depicted as traitors to Scotland, and they are, in fact, people like the Balliols and the Bruces, who are Norman Arivistes, who do look to the south and who do try to reach an accommodation with English. So that, though Braveheart is very poor history, the fact that there's an aristocracy which is looking southwards and is sympathetic to the Norman court in the south is not false, is that you've got rival claims to the crown. And people with the best claim to the crown,

25:06who are the Balliols, they are able to take a more independent line. The people who have the weaker claim to the throne, the Bruces, who ironically become the sort of the, identified with the patriotic cause even more staunchly, in the first instance, for a couple of generations, they are quite happy to tell the kings of England whatever they want to hear, because they're looking for English support to bolster their claim. But leaving all those politics aside, the one point I would make is that 200 years is a long time. By the time we get to the late 13th century, this is more than two centuries after the Norman conquest, these people now consider themselves Scottish. They don't go around saying, oh, my great, great,

25:44great, great, great grandfather was a Norman been there's loads of intermarriage with gaelic families there's loads of intermarriage with english families similarly edward i doesn't consider himself norman either he considers himself english but although he considers himself scottish braveheart the real the real william wallace um is actually uh of British, that Strathclyde British stock, and he has no kilt, no woad, none of the kit that Mel Gibson wears. I go along with the no kilt, no woad, no Anglo-Australian accent, or US-Australian accent, or no dodgy Scottish accent, perhaps. But I think that, I mean, we know so little about Wallace's background, the fact that he's called Le Wollace know i think neither here nor there um but my my point and this is an

26:30important point i have to make in the book is that people's national identities shift quite quickly i mean you listening to me and the way i talk and the books i write about you'd assume i was english in fact you know my father was a dubliner and i hold the only passport i hold is an irish one um but i'm not you know i don't present as if i lived in boston i might say oh yes i'm marco My father was a Dubliner, and I hold the only passport I hold is an Irish one. But I don't present as if I lived in Boston. I might say, oh, yes, I'm Marco Morris and a long, long line of Irishmen. So where people's identity lie can shift very quickly. And in the case of the Normans, which is obviously the main theme of this episode,

27:02is the Normans are very good at sort of integrating themselves out of existence. They're not like the Romans. They don't come in and say, we're the Romans. This is Roman law. This is Roman society. You will bend to our way of doing things. The Normans go in and very quickly, wherever they go, whether it's the Mediterranean or whether it's England, they're very quick to say within a couple of generations, oh, well, you know, I grew up in Yorkshire, so I'm basically English now. Now, we're going to take a break now. In the second half, we're going to go into more violent intrusions into the Celtic fringe when the Normans invade Wales and fatally Ireland. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey?

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29:58Host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are no antibiotics in their meat department ever. So carve up turkey and spiral cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 brand. And guess what? All their delectable pies are made with no high fructose corn syrup. Gourmet Thanksgiving flavours with the quality you want, only at Whole Foods Market. Welcome back. Now, with Wales, Mark Morris, we have a very different story of the relatively peaceful integration of the Normans into the Scottish polity. But in Wales, they come with swords and modern Bailey castles, not with invitations take us there well yes so in the so Wales and England have been have been sort of you know hostile for centuries

30:51offers dyke is built to keep the Welsh out offers dyke exactly well for whatever reason it's it's a it's a it's a line in the sand isn't it um well more than that but anyway the nor when the Normans arrive there are Anglo-Saxon rebellions going on and they are being they are seeking help the anglo-saxon rebels from the the multiple welsh kingdoms in wales so in the first instance when the normans go in to what we would later call the march of wales the borderland they are planting castles really just to sort of put a cordon sanitaire between these polities to the west this is like the kind of israeli separation wall between israel and the west bank if you say so um but anyway so that's the first instance

31:31going forward because as i say one of the things that the chief dynamic of this whole period is the population of england is exploding from the middle of the 11th century and there are all of a sudden you know 50 60 more people that that are looking for land so they're going into wales particularly along the north coast and the south coast looking for the most fertile bits to steal for themselves and we complained uh in the scottish uh part of this story about the lack of sources but we have a very opinionated very well educated and well briefed figure to tell us about Wales in the person of Gerald of Wales and his whole family. Tell us about them. Well, we have that as well. I mean, the sources for

32:10Wales for this period are very good. We've got a family of monks as well writing, or a family of priests writing in Ceredigion on the West Welsh coast. Gerald of Wales is a couple of generations later. He writes these kind of travelogues almost. He's like a sort of Bill Bryson of the late 12th century, writing about Wales and Ireland and his travels in these countries with a very kind of, you know, sort of insightful eye, very prejudiced eye. But his family, to take it back to the sort of early stages of the conquest, he's the grandson of another Gerald who's called Gerald of Windsor. And Gerald of Windsor is the man who's put in southwest Wales by Henry I, to sort of try and clamp down on the area after

32:55Welsh rebellions. And he's the man who establishes, or if not establishes, then, you know, develops very quickly from humble beginnings, Pembroke Castle in the extreme southwest. And crucially, again, I'm saying in reference to the Normans in other areas, they integrate very quickly. What Gerald of Wales does is he marries the daughter of the last king of southwest Wales, the last king of Dehoibath, Rhys of Dehoibath, Rhys Aptuda. And so his descendants are, well, are they Welsh? Are they English? Are they Normans? You know, they've got this very interesting opinion of themselves. And they basically, Gerald of Wales basically says, well, we're the best of all three worlds. You know, we have this

33:36sort of fighting, you know, ability from our Norman ancestors. And we have this kind of wiliness and tenaciousness from the welsh so he's he's he sort of has a very interesting identity at a point where identities are in flux but he's he's one of our best informed sources for what is um you know i think one of the most fascinating periods in in welsh history and and just to encourage people to go to see the remains here some of the most spectacular castles and medieval ruins in uh northern europe are the welsh marcher castles they are remarkable uh objects um and and the other thing is the density of of castle building in this period is because you know when when you're in england um england as i've said repeatedly is a kind of a precociously united well-governed uh centralized

34:24state from the late 10th century onwards. That's absolutely the opposite is true in Wales. And this is the key to understanding the difference between Wales and Scotland is Scotland, although that there are the outlying bits of it, you know, beyond the core are all sort of more or less independent. So Murray in the north and, you know, Gallowayay to the southwest and Lothian to the south, there's a kingdom at the core of Scotland that the Normans can do business with and negotiate with, if not as equals, then kind of like as country cousins. Whereas when they look at Wales, there is no polity that they consider worthy of buying into. So they're not going to marry their daughters in the first instance to the King of Gwynedd or the king of Dehoibath or maybe the you know baron like Gerald of Windsor will but there's no sense of

35:08we can sort of enter this polity and it will be a kind of a host for our ambitions they just go in and say they're our rivals and we'll just take this by force and we'll just push them into the sea you know so that's why you get just such a vast number of castles being built. And also, as with Scotland, in this more controlled way that is happening with David of Scotland, they are planting new towns, they are building new monasteries, and very crucially, they are bringing in peasant colonisers, peasant colonists. And this is one of the very poorly documented things, because chroniclers, for the most part, aren't interested in the doings of peasants, but none of this sticks, none of this conquest holds

35:50if you don't bring in English farmers to do the kind of grunt work of conquest, laying out new manors, laying out new fields, you know, all the hard graft. It's no good just building a castle and then sort of, you know, riding out and trying to compel the Welsh to manorialise so they and and this is the thing that drives everything is the land hunger from people in england who have got not enough land to keep their families alive in every case both in wales and in scotland and ultimately in ireland these new landlords are able to say i've built a castle i've built a church i built a new town and if you come here and live in this attractively named new place then then you will not have to pay rent for the first 10 years or

36:31you won't have to pay you know your rent will be a peppercorn rent literally and and it is in in every sense colonization it's not just a military seizure of land but you're settling people on that land and encouraging them to move there from elsewhere and speak your language and fly your flag. And I think it really boils down to, of course, you know, ethnic identities and sheer kicks, you know, daring do, you know, this is what we are brought up from boyhood to do as knights is to kind of go and, you know, conquer and build castles, etc. And so you can get a very kind of a sense of a sort of a boy's own history when you read older histories of this period but the fundamental thing is as i say population explosion land hunger and and this this what um one historian the late and

37:17much missed uh professor cerise davis called a second tidal wave of anglicization so in other sense the first tidal wave was the english arriving in britain in the fifth sixth and seventh centuries and spreading over the the lowland parts of britain and this is a new sort of the the english sort of spilling over those boundaries such as their hunger at this point for more land into the less desirable parts in terms of obviously scotland wales and ireland have more upland they're you know there's a lot of the land is not good enough quality to be worth conquering but they're going for the best bits in these in these countries and claiming them for themselves now it doesn't stop in wales does it because uh in wales there is a man who very much wants to move further still into the Celtic world of the West.

38:07And that is Richard de Cleyre, known as Strongbow. Take us there. Yeah, well, I mean, again, there's a little bit of backstory there because people have been looking at Ireland since the beginning of the 12th century, if not earlier. I mean, William Rufus at the end of the 11th century, the conqueror's first successor as king of England, he is said to have stood on the coast of Pembrokeshire and fantasized about building a bridge of boats across the Irish Sea to conquer Ireland. By the time you get to the middle of the 12th century, Henry II, right at the start of his reign, is applying to the pope for permission to conquer Ireland and is all set to go until he's distracted by other business in his sprawling kind of, you know, cross-channel

38:45empire. So the idea of, you know, Ireland is the next stage in the next part of the frontier that we're going to colonise, that's there very strongly. What sort of finally sort of tips it over and sort of makes it a viable proposition is infighting amongst the kings of Ireland because Ireland like Wales is a country of many kings perhaps not as many as some books would have you believe but there's at least half a dozen really strong contenders and one of them or they are perpetually at loggerheads in the middle of the 1160s one of them the king of Leinster Dermot McMurrah is driven into exile by his rivals and winds up at the court of Henry II. And Henry II still has neither the time nor the resources to devote to a conquest of Ireland,

39:32but basically says, as we are led to believe by Gerald of Wales, who's writing the propaganda version of all of this, sure, go ahead. I can't help you, but you have license to recruit men within my realm. And he finds no shortage of men in South West Wales, not least the Fitzgeralds, who are ready because the Welsh, by this point, are pushing back. And so they're looking for easier pickings. And the Fitzgeralds are among the first to go. What they really need, though, is a big player, not just the sort of small fry that they are or medium-sized fry and they get um the um sort of somewhat embarrassed earl richard uh declare who is in financial trouble but can nevertheless still command command fairly large resources

40:17he is able to sail to ireland in 1169 i think it is it's uh he I think on the 23rd of August, 1170 is the day that Strongbow arrives on the coast. So in the wake of earlier sort of incursions by the Fitzgeralds, he comes in to sort of really sort of deliver the killer blow with several thousand men in 1170. And within a very short space of time, he's taken Dublin. And the crucial thing here is this is more success than they had anticipated, certainly more success than Henry II had anticipated, because they don't simply go back and reinstate the exiled Dermot McMurrah. Strongbow is promised, or at some point a deal is done, whereby he marries McMurray's daughter, Dermot's daughter, and is promised the succession of the Kingdom of Leinster.

41:15And then, as I say, has taken Dublin, which is a really, really powerful city. It's the most prosperous trading city in Ireland, isn't it? Viking foundation. And not least because of a very, very thriving Irish sea slave trade. It's the entrepot for all these slaves that have been taken out of Wales and etc. So this sets us up for what we're going to see for many centuries to come, which is Dublin as an English bridgehead in the Irish countryside with Englishmen sailing across from Wales or from England and landing in Dublin and looking out from there into the Celtic lands beyond and thinking covetously, this looks nice. Yeah, and a lot of land is taken very, very quickly. So Leinster falls, as I say, Meath to the north,

41:57the sort of smaller kingdom, which is the sort of, but nevertheless very prosperous and productive, which is like the hinterland of Dublin. The crucial thing here is Henry II himself intervenes, because he is aghast at the idea that these men are sort of like, it's perhaps a phrase I'm going to end up overusing, but it's like they are kind of Danny and Peachy types. They are the men who wouldn't want to be kings. This is a Kipling reference, Danny and Peachy Carnahan, from The Man Who Would Be King. Exactly, and like the Michael C kipling reference uh danny and peachy conahan uh from the man who would be king exactly and if you like the michael caine sean connery film they're not little men

42:30they don't want to be subjects of the king of england they want to go beyond the frontier across the mountains and rule in their own right and henry ii is having none of it so he leads a big expedition in 11 uh 71 72 and sort of know, imposes his fiat on Ireland. And had he stayed there longer, as was his intention, he might well have succeeded in subduing the whole country. But what he does by leaving early is leave a country that is half conquered at best. And we get some fairly unpleasant sort of henchmen turning up at this point. There's a character, Hugh de Lacy, who who's described as short hairy and muscular with a burn scar down one side of his face he's granted meath yes he's I mean that that characterization

43:11you um you mentioned is from the pen of Gerald of Wales who writes a sort of a it's kind of a chronicle but it's also a as an apology it's a defense of the English invasion of Ireland which clearly lots of other people at the time were saying I'm not so sure about this because these people are Christians and we should you know we're slaughtering lots of them and this shouldn't be not in my name type thing is what various English monks and others are saying and Gerald is very strident in various passages saying other people will tell you differently and they don't know what they're talking about and he's producing all these kind of pseudo-legalistic reasons as to why, or pseudo-historical reasons,

43:50why that this is a justifiable invasion. And this also is the beginning of English racism against the Irish, because we get in Gerald's Topography of Ireland a frankly racist depiction of the Irish as a filthy people, wallowing in vice, living on beasts and living like beasts. Barbarous, literally barbarous, a notorious tale. I mean, William of Malmesbury had said similar things, but hadn't sort of seen the Irish up close. But Gerald is, you know, devoting page after page to this kind of thing and has various kind of quite salacious tales about you know kings having inauguration rites in which they have sex with horses or you know tale after tale which kind of don't really command credibility but he assures his readers this is exactly what

44:36is going on in ireland that they are as he says a bestial people and so it's it's the this the ball that was set rolling by will of Malmesby half a century earlier is really now become this kind of avalanche of invective against these people. And it's all to justify the fact that, you know, if these people are, as Gerald of Wales might have said, untermenschen, then it's perfectly legitimate to take their lands and to force them into slavery or servitude or just to push them even further into the mountains or the bogs because this is our land now because you know we this is a a a justifiable you know god-granted um uh invasion anyone who wants to know more about the uh early english savagery in ireland um please go to our earlier uh episodes when we had an extraordinary series of Irish historians taking us through the incredibly bloody history that no one in England, Scotland and Wales is really taught about British atrocities in early Ireland. long before the Fenians, there is this terrible history of bloodshed with the English running amok

45:45and behaving like barbarians and massacring great swathes of the Irish population. Now, Mark, we're running out of time here now, but what I would want to know is why did Scotland, Wales and Ireland turn out so differently? They're all Celtic lands that have comparable paths but their histories of their norman uh periods are very different from each other yeah i think it's as i've already said with reference to wales and scotland is because when they go into scotland they see a polity that they can do business with and the kingdom of scotland you know thrives and you get into marriage between the English and Scottish royal houses, starting with Margaret and Malcolm and continued with Henry I and Edith Matilda,

46:33and going on throughout the 13th century, you have multiple kings of Scotland married to English princesses. And it's a story of collaboration too, isn't it? There's a great deal of Scottish noblemen collaborating with the English against the Scottish monarchy. they're getting on like a house on fire until of course you get edward i towards the end and that that really um sours the the whole relationship in terms of wales um as i said the main difference is that wales and ireland are are both rather than a single kingdom um a galaxy of competing uh you know tiny polities that you can divide and rule that you can take out one by one you can take out one so it's very easy to kind of go in and take out one. But the problem is,

47:27even if you turn one into a client kingdom for a short while, as soon as that king dies, his successors aren't interested. So because it's so inherently unstable, Wales, as a country, there is no sort of, you can't come up with a lasting peace that is going to endure from one decade to the next, endure from one decade to the next never mind one generation to the next and even more so with ireland and i think again to take the moral element out of it but just go back to a sort of simple economic uh contrast the contrasts you can see why they come up with these sort of terrible um moral judgments on them because there are there are there are vast gulfs in terms of the economic development one of the crucial things with ireland to remember is these other places

48:10in britain they had been romanized so there's at a very fundamental level this kind of oh well there's an old city here and there's roads you go to ireland and the romans never got across the irish sea or known only as traders not to settle so there's a huge difference here it's like when the english are going in they're literally kind of confronted with kind of like almost virgin forests so they're they're having to say well we're going to have to lay out new roads and we're going to have to lay out new manners we're going to have to europeanize this to a greater extent than than the other places which are sort of doing it themselves anyway to stay in the running as i say it's a bit off rather more than i thought i was i can't wait to read this book mark it's it's it's fascinating

48:50and this is stuff which as you say is much less well known and certainly in the case of ireland shapes the future in a way that is still very important to understand today now in the next episode uh we are getting our old friend Peter Frankopan, who always keeps Anita and I in our place and corrects our many errors as he sees fit. And Peter is going to be telling us about stuff that I think, again, is much less well known than Hastings and the story of William the Conqueror, which is the story of the Normans first in South Italy, Robert of Giscard conquering Puglia, then the extraordinary story of the Normans conquering the Arab Sicilian kingdom, the Fatimid kingdom in Sicily, and the story of Roger II, the baptized sultan

49:44and his extraordinary Capella Palatina, with its very Muslim-looking roof and its Byzantine mosaics. And finally, the furthest shore of all, we're following Beaumont, who has always been rather a hero of mine, but I know Peter Frankopan doesn't like at all this rather swaggery Norman conqueror, and I think Frank Pamp would probably call him a pirate, Bermond of Taranto, who ends up on the furthest shore of all, forming a Norman kingdom in Syria, the kingdom of Antioch. Next time on Empire with Peter Frank Pamp, I'll see you then. Goodbye from me, William de Rimpel you then goodbye from me william derimple and goodbye from me mark morris if you're building ai agents you should check out strands agents it's's an open source SDK for Python and TypeScript.

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