Abstract
The English king's Lordship of Ireland in the Middle Ages was a land of constant, small-scale war. This was a characteristic inherited from the Irish past, where tribute-warfare was endemic, and perpetuated because of the incompleteness of the conquest and the limited effectiveness of the Dublin government. The pastoral emphasis of Irish rural society ensured that cattle-raiding was a chief feature of military life. It was a way of pursuing local disputes; on a grander scale, it was a means by which Gaelic Irish and Anglo-Irish magnates asserted their power by exacting submission and hostages and imposing services. The ‘official’ wars, with which this book is concerned, were mostly of a similar type: the normal aim of the king's ministers who conducted them was not so much to occupy or (as was more to the point in the later Middle Ages) reoccupy land, as to exercise lordship.
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