Gaelic Ireland's English frontiers in the late Middle Ages

Abstract

Frontiers' or 'borderlands' offer a useful conceptual framework for the exploration of Irish history in the late Middle Ages. Insufficient scholarly attention, however, has been devoted to the study of the Gaelic polity - the 'other side' of the frontiers that existed in late medieval Ireland between regions of Gaelic and English political, social and cultural domination. What follows seeks to begin a broad reconceptualisa- tion of the study of the Gaelic world and its frontiers by approaching these frontiers from a contemporary Gaelic perspective and by scrutinising contemporary Gaelic terminology used to describe borders. In this study, Ireland emerges as the historic and cultural centre of a wider Gaelic world, or Gaedhealtacht, which extended to parts of Scotland. The exploration of Gaelic Ireland's English frontiers presents a more complete picture of society in late medieval Ireland and sets Gaelic society in Ireland apart from its counterpart across the North Channel. Introduction One might expect that a consequence of the continued existence of an international border on an island as small as Ireland would be the interest of its historians in the study of frontiers or borderlands. That the border separating the Republic of Ireland from Northern Ireland would serve both as a reminder of the divisions - political, linguistic and economic - in Ireland's past and as a starting point for understand- ing them. Yet the study of Ireland's frontiers has not figured prominently in most accounts of Irish history. This is especially true of nationalist histories, which would seek to underscore the unity of 'Ireland' throughout history so as to show that the modern border is unhistorical and artificial. The approach of historians to the late medieval period, however, represents a partial exception to this tendency to overlook frontiers. This period - standing as it did between the emergence in Ireland of poli- tical and cultural frontiers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the steady dis- appearance of frontiers under the later Tudors - has been approached, more than any other period in Irish history perhaps, through the exploration of its borders. Since Robin Frame's memorable description over 30 years ago of the medieval lordship of Ireland as a land of many marches (as frontiers were then commonly known in