Ulster and the Isles in the Fifteenth Century: The Lordship of the Clann Domhnaill of Antrim

Abstract

Ulster and the Isles in the Fifteenth Century: The Lordship of the Clann Domhnaill of Antrim. By SIMON KINGSTON (Dublin: Four Courts P., 2004; pp. 256. Eur 55). ONE of the more important consequences of the frequently unsatisfactory debate surrounding the ‘new British history’ has been the impetus which it has afforded to bilateral Irish-Scottish studies. Such study has involved both comparative analysis and investigation of contacts between Ireland and Scotland. In both respects the later medieval period has proved problematic since, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Ireland and Scotland appear to have followed different models of political development. In Scotland, concerted, if not always successful, attempts were made to extend royal power—and historians have largely preoccupied themselves with the uneasy relationship between the crown and the leading magnates. In Ireland, by contrast, royal power was in retreat and the period between the Bruce invasion and Poynings' law remains a surprisingly neglected field of study. Moreover, while Ireland witnessed its Gaelic revival, most of Scotland (at first sight) turned its back on the Irish Sea, in favour of political, commercial and cultural engagement with continental Europe. Simon Kingston's monograph constitutes an attempt to reconnect Ireland and Scotland historiographically, through an analysis of the MacDonald territories which spanned the North Channel. Indeed, although he argues that the Antrim MacDonalds had ‘become local’ by the 1390s, he advances the overarching thesis that ‘there is no alternative’ to understanding the Ulster branch of the family in its wider Scottish-Irish context.