English Conquest Research Articles

From Kingdom to Colony: Framing the English Conquest of Ireland

Abstract This article offers a new way of framing the English conquest of Ireland by focusing on the development of a kingdom of Ireland both before and after the invasion of 1169. It thus spans the historiographical divides that tend to partition Irish history at the point of the English invasion, and which also frequently disaggregate the study of British and Irish history. By exploring the complexity of Irish political society and culture before 1169, one can see how King Henry II sought to use its structures to facilitate his annexation of ‘the kingdom of Ireland’ in 1171–2. This included the Church, which offered Henry’s dynasty the ideological support and legitimacy it had once provided for Gaelic kings of Ireland. Paying attention to the numerous references to the ‘kingdom of Ireland’ in the records of the English government also highlights the processes by which Henry’s son John and his successors sought to Anglicise this kingdom by imposing England’s laws, institutions and political culture upon it. Crucially, ultimate control of these structures remained with the administration in England, so in this way Ireland was transformed from a kingdom to a colony. Recognising this liminal period in the development of Anglo-Ireland provides context for the emerging colonial community in Ireland, as well as strategies of resistance and compromise employed by the Gaelic Irish under English rule.

S. Stefano al Monte Celio, Donnchad mac Briain and papal legates in Ireland, 1064–1203

AbstractIn 1064, Donnchad mac Briain, son of Brian Bóroma and deposed claimant to the kingship of Ireland, went on pilgrimage to Rome, where he was buried in the important basilica and martyr shrine of S. Stefano Rotondo on the Caelian Hill. More than a century later, in the transformative period 1176–1203 which followed the English conquest of Ireland, the papal legati a latere sent with full legatine authority and jurisdiction in Ireland appear to have been drawn exclusively from the church of S. Stefano. This article first considers the circumstances and symbolism of Donnchad's pilgrimage and burial, alongside its long-term impact on Hiberno-Papal relations and on the papacy's conceptions of Irish sovereignty in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It also explores the careers and missions of the cardinal priests and papal legates of S. Stefano to the peripheries of Latin Christendom in the long twelfth century, including at least one legate in Ireland, Gerard, who has hitherto awaited formal identification. Based on the legatine evidence, it suggests that in the decades of the English invasion, the papacy began using the burial site of the heir to arguably the last effective king of Ireland as part of a conscious and consistent rhetorical strategy, allowing it to dispose matters of sovereignty in Ireland.

Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch-Hunting, and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World, 1647–1693

Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch-Hunting, and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World, 1647–1693

Agriculture and the Integration of British Colonial Migrants in Early Modern Ireland

Abstract This article offers a critical re-examination of Early Modern migrations to Ireland and their effect on farming practices, c.1580–1660. During and after the English conquest of Ireland, tens and eventually hundreds of thousands of settlers arrived from Britain. Focusing on Munster and to a lesser extent Ulster, I argue they were not greeted with an agricultural tabula rasa ripe for ‘improvement’. In contrast to what Tudor writers claimed, and what some scholars today have assumed, cereal cultivation and field enclosure already formed important elements in the agricultural landscape. Changes clearly took place, but English, Welsh and Scots settlers also made some remarkable adaptations by accepting local breeds of livestock and relying economically on forms of semi-mobile pastoralism that earlier writers had decried. Looking outside Ireland helps to evaluate their actions, since livestock mobility was widespread in contemporary European pastoralism, and if anything contributed to, rather than conflicted with, the commercialisation of farming.

Repeating Englands: The Transatlantic Archipelago and Early Modern Britain

abstract: In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English conquest narratives set in the Americas and popular entertainments increasingly represented a unified Britain through the figure of a “repeating England”: an insular refuge in an inchoate ocean of dangers that linked the work of English homemakers to colonial settlers. This article charts that development in two parts. It begins in the late sixteenth century, when conquest writers like George Peckham and John Hutchinson were exchanging the geographic insularity of earlier English self-representation for a model that viewed Englishness not as genealogical or place-based, but as archipelagic and mobile, maintained in and across English homes on both sides of the Atlantic. Englishness here is not a geographic context but a blueprint for producing and possessing an English place through the labors of English “planters.” Jacobean entertainments by Thomas Dekker and John Middleton then drew on this earlier conquest writing to stage Britishness through perspectival techniques that unified subjects in radically different viewing positions and made Britishness a matter of perspective. By following these repeating Englands from page to stage and from Ireland to the Americas, this analysis shows how English writers created a unified Britain from colonial materials and represented Britishness as an extension of settler identity.

The Irish Receipt Roll of 1301–2: Data Science and Medieval Exchequer Practice

The English conquest and colonisation of Ireland, which began in the years around 1170 was accompanied by the introduction of an administrative system based on English models. From the point of view of the crown, perhaps the most important of the new offices of government that it established was the exchequer, which coordinated the financial exploitation of its Irish lordship. The exchequer generated a vast quantity of written documents recording its operations. This paper subjects one such document, detailing the sums received at the exchequer for the year 1301–2, to data science techniques in order to gain added insight into the routine functioning of the financial arm of English government in its oldest colony. It thereby also reveals previously unrecognised patterns in the nature of English power in Ireland. The purpose of the paper is not to assess the state of Irish finances in the early fourteenth century, but rather to argue that a deep reading of a single document produced by an elaborate bureaucratic system, combined with data science visualizations, can help to generate new research questions in relation to a substantial body of financial records which are soon to become more widely available to both scholars and the general public.

A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Space, 700–1250

A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Space, 700–1250

The economics and ethics of Celtic Ireland

For thousands of years the Gaelic speaking territories of north-western Europe were home to a polycentric legal order that has been of great interest to Austro-libertarian theorists in the field of free-market legal reform (Rothbard, For a New Liberty, 1970). This ancient legal system, known as «Brehon law» after the caste of professional judges called Brehons who wrote and upheld the laws, was best preserved on the island of Ireland where it remained in place from pre-history up until the 17th century.
 To understand the economics and ethics of this early Irish legal system one must first detach oneself from the modern setting of ultra-individualistic liberal-socialist Europe. It is impossible to explain Brehon law without simultaneously introducing the reader to the social, political and cultural set-up within which the system of Brehon law existed or what Prof von Mises would have called its thymology.2 For example, there were multiple competing legal schools co-existing in ancient Ireland, a point that might instantly confuse many readers unless one explains how such institutions were radically different in both theory and practice from their modern counterparts. The Brehon legal system also advanced a scholarly oral tradition and a unique legal language of its own which took over seven years to master. As a result there are few surviving legal texts so I shall be drawing heavily upon manuscripts from the 14th-16th centuries detailing the period from the 7th-8th centuries. These texts include wisdom texts, sagas, praise-poetry, saints’ lives, and monastic rules which were recorded and preserved by a class of professional poets who held the most powerful position in Irish society at the time.
 Let me first introduce the political setting of the period in question. The basic territorial area in ancient Ireland was the túath which may best be understood as the tribal lands of an extended family. There was on average approximately 150 kings or chieftains who ruled their respective túatha. Some kings were the subjects of other kings in a system of over-lordship but many kingdoms formed trade and, as we shall see, rights granting treaties with each other. Although there were at times powerful kings who held whole provinces under their authority, no king ever became the Ard Rí or «high king» of all Ireland. During this time the Irish population hovered around 400,000 inhabitants and the size of each kingdom was typically 3,000 people. Ireland was densely forested until after the English conquest of Ireland and the on-set of the industrial revolution and the population during the reign of Brehon law was largely rural with exceptions for the many monasteries and the occasional Viking settlements in later periods.

Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire by Alan Gallay

Reviewed by: Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire by Alan Gallay Cecelia Moore Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire. By Alan Gallay (New York: Basic Books, 2019. Pp. xiv, 560. $40.00, ISBN 978-1-5416-4579-0.) Alan Gallay's new book, Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire, challenges the myths and representations of Sir Walter Raleigh to offer a fresh analysis of the iconic Elizabethan courtier. Ralegh (his own preferred spelling) has been the subject of numerous biographies and historical works and is familiar to many from popular depictions in novels, movies, plays, and more. Gallay has returned to the primary sources to explore the cultural influences that informed Ralegh's role in colonization and conquest in Ireland and the Americas. The author's aim is to present "an origin story of empire far different from what we have imagined," and thus to provide "new context for understanding its legacies" (p. 5). Gallay has used his broad knowledge of primary sources and scholarly works in this biography, which also draws from his studies of the Indian slave trade. Walter Ralegh has an interwoven narrative that revisits the same period as it moves between locales and documents to connect the various aspects of Ralegh's career. Gallay relies on the reader to have some knowledge of the story; however, a timeline would have been helpful for quick reference. The United States has memorialized Ralegh as a founder from the beginning of the nation, nowhere more so than in North Carolina. Revolutionary-era state leaders named their new capital city for him. Nineteenth-century elites embraced the account of his so-called lost colony on Roanoke as an origin story of a white, English, Christian nation. In this mythology Ralegh became the representative for an imagined heritage of Anglo-white supremacy that served to justify the continued oppression of African Americans. In Walter Ralegh, Gallay argues that this depiction has covered over the cultural forces that shaped Ralegh's worldview and erased his elemental role in the development of England's sixteenth-century plans for empire. Colonization was just one strategy the English Crown used to challenge Spain's dominance of the Atlantic world. The English also used piracy and outright war. Ralegh was involved in all of it from 1578, when he joined his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert in a naval expedition, to his execution in 1618. The narrative connects Ralegh's court activities, military exploits, and colonization efforts in the Americas and Ireland. Ralegh was the architect who crafted the moral and legal justifications for English conquest. Gallay argues that Ralegh's view of empire did not have the racial features that came later. Instead, Ralegh believed that England would be improved by exposure to other cultures, that "empire would be an act of co-creation," where each partner benefited the other (p. 12). Gallay shows how Hermeticism, a movement that linked knowledge of the physical world to a greater understanding of the mystical realm, informed this theory. Ralegh sought to chronicle the languages and society of the Native peoples of the Americas because this work added to a [End Page 321] greater knowledge of the world. His vision was an English empire that included both Indians and English. The beauty of Ralegh's own writing and his utopian vision can mask the brutality of England's actions. Even as Gallay strips away the fictions about Ralegh's life for a fresh examination of his ideas, the author reminds readers that much of what Ralegh and his compatriots wrote was itself public relations to advance their cause. They positioned themselves for European audiences as the antithesis of the Spanish, and they wooed Native peoples as allies when their forces were not powerful enough to subdue opposition. By the time of Ralegh's death in 1618, English ships had looted more than a thousand Spanish ships and ports, launched unprovoked attacks on Indigenous societies, traded in enslaved Africans and Native Americans, and brutally put down multiple uprisings in Ireland. Ralegh might have argued that English colonization could be a humane force, as Gallay notes, yet the trajectory of English conquest remained exploitative and murderous. Less than a year after Ralegh's death...

Towns and trade routes in the Indus valley before the english conquest

The article traces the history of towns, trade and trade routes that ran through three regions of the Indus Valley – Sindh, Baluchistan and West Punjab with adjacent lands of eastern Pashtuns. Pakistan consists now of these areas and, according to the author of the article,has a special geographical position of transitory, intermediate type, being located between India, on one hand, and the Middle East, on the other. In addition, its northern borders lead to the mainland of Asia, while the southern shores connect it with the world ocean. Taking advantage of factual data found in the works published by agents and military officers of the British East India Company and research done later the author characterizes the nomenclature and value of imported and exported goods, gives estimates of the urban population, its confessional, professional and caste structure. Special attention is paid to Karachi, “maritime gates” of the region, and to Shikarpur, playing the similar role in the land trade by linking the Indus valley with Afghanistan and via it with Persia and Central Asia. The author underlines that the geographical intermediateness has played a significant role in the historical destiny of the region and its impact can be observed until today, most vividly in the shape of the investment project called “China Pakistan Economic Corridor”. Although the bulk of the material in the article deals with the situation in the first half of the 19th century,it is preceded by short notes concerning historically more distant epochs(the campaign of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, the conquest of the region by Muslims in the early 8th century AD, period of the Mughal Empire).

Towards a Characterization of ‘Race Law’ in Medieval Wales

ABSTRACT Welsh persons were subject to legal restrictions within and near Wales, from the point of local English conquest, c.1067–1283, until the 1536 Act of Union of England and Wales. In this article we outline modern scholars’ two main definitions of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ applicable to the middle ages, both ‘race’ as a structural relationship used to essentialize and disadvantage a group and ‘race’ as a package of presumed heritable physical, mental and moral traits. We then survey discriminatory laws in Wales, characterizing them as falling into four broad categories: security, economic freedom, political rights, and legal rights. The context, nature and evolution of laws within each category are discussed. We finish by testing whether this body of law amounts to ‘race law’ in light of the given definitions of ‘race’ and ‘racism’, concluding that it is race law by both definitions. An appendix of indicative race law is provided.

Imperial Political Economy and Its Discontents in Colonial New York City, 1664-1763

Based on the apparent incongruity between the ideology of liberty within the British Empire and the extensive trade regulations that governed its economic life, this article explores efforts to circumvent the Navigation Acts undertaken in New York or by its citizens between the English conquest and the end of the Seven Years War. It argues that a remarkably wide range of evasive measures were employed, forcing us to re-examine both what it meant to be “loyal” and the functioning of imperial political economy, one influential model of which even provided intellectual justification for extremely subversive behavior. The article demonstrates that licit activities aimed against the Navigation Acts could be highly damaging, while their illicit counterparts might support the spirit, if not the letter, of British imperial policy.

Dutch Reformed Congregationalism in New Netherland: The Case of Rev. Wilhelmus Grasmeer

Dutch Reformed Congregationalism in New Netherland:The Case of Rev. Wilhelmus Grasmeer Kenneth Shefsiek (bio) In 1642, Kiliaen van Rensselaer, patroon of Rensselaerswijck, contracted with Rev. Johannes Megapolensis Jr. to serve the religious needs of the colonists of the patroonship for a term of six years.1 At the time, Megapolensis was minister for the congregation at Schoorl in the Classis of Alkmaar, both of which had to formally dismiss him before he could take on a new charge.2 The Classis of Amsterdam, the regional church council in the Netherlands that had assumed a dominant role in religious affairs in New Netherland, also needed to draft a call to the minister, in accordance with special policies it established in 1636 regarding the appointment of colonial ministers.3 The classis penned such a call and instructed its deputies appointed to manage colonial affairs to assist Van Rensselaer and Megapolensis in expediting his dismissals.4 After receiving dismissals from both his consistory and classis,5 Megapolensis, his wife Machtelt, and their four children set sail in June 1642 for New Netherland, where he became only the third minister to serve in the colony. Megapolensis intended to serve in New Netherland only briefly, but he ultimately served there until his death in 1670, as the West India Company (WIC) hired him for the Manhattan congregation after his contract with the patroon expired.6 [End Page 319] The process by which Megapolensis came to serve in New Netherland reflected that which was followed in the Netherlands in accordance with the Church Order of Dort (DCO), the 1619 document that provided guidance for how ecclesiastical power within the Dutch Reformed church in the United Provinces should be defined and structured. This church order was grounded in an aversion to both ecclesiastical independence and hierarchy and therefore aimed to link church members, congregations, ministers, and governments in a tight-knit web of collaborative relationships. Slight adjustments were nevertheless made to account for the colonial situation, such as Megapolensis's appointment being only for a limited term and his being sent by the Classis of Amsterdam rather than being called directly by the congregation that he was to serve. Unfortunately, the calling of Dutch ministers in or for New Netherland did not always go so smoothly, particularly when ministers and colonial congregations acted independently of classical authority. This independence deeply troubled the Classis of Amsterdam, as it ran contrary to principles of Dutch Reformed church polity and had the potential to undermine the orderly development of the New Netherland church. As a form of congregationalism was developing in North America, alternatives were nevertheless possible, as the history of other Dutch colonies reveals. That no formalized solutions to counter congregationalism were developed for New Netherland set the stage for conflict that lasted for more than a century after the English conquest. Many Dutch Reformed ministers in the eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic interpreted the ongoing struggles as being the fault of those who refused to adhere to the Church Order of Dort and the directives of the Classis of Amsterdam, and in doing so, challenged the way it had always been. As the Classis of Amsterdam noted in 1743 to three prestigious ministers serving in New York, the "subordination," of the American churches and ministers to the Classis of Amsterdam, "has already existed from early times. When the provinces, wherein your congregations are situate, belonged to the Honorable West India Company, this relationship came into existence as a matter of course; and it remained unaltered after they passed under the power of England."7 Historians have generally interpreted the situation similarly.8 The ministers' understanding of the ecclesiastical history of the Dutch [End Page 320] Reformed church in America was nevertheless flawed. It was also built on what ministers rather than congregations did and thought, even though congregational power was integral to the Dutch Reformed church. Eighteenth-century ministers were not aware that New Netherland congregations had not always bowed to the power of the Classis of Amsterdam, nor that they had had legitimate grounds for not having done so. Those in the eighteenth century who therefore claimed that conflict arose because some American...

The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature. Edited by Geraint Evans and Helen Fulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xxix+825.

<i>The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature</i>. Edited by Geraint Evans and Helen Fulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xxix+825.

Toward a New Moral Understanding of the Tudor Conquest of Ireland

The English conquest of Ireland during the sixteenth century was accompanied by extreme violence. Historians remain divided on the motivations behind this violence. This article argues that the English violence in Ireland may be attributed to four main factors: the fear of foreign Catholic intervention through Ireland; the methods by which Irish rebels chose to fight; decisions made by English officials in London to not fund English forces in Ireland at a reasonable level while demanding that English officials in Ireland keep Ireland under control; and the creation of a system by which many of those who made the plans never had to see the suffering they inflicted. The troops who carried out the plans had to choose between their own survival and moral behaviors that placed their survival at risk.

The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire, by Carla Gardina Pestana

The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire, by Carla Gardina Pestana

The Materiality of Fishing, Property, and Labor in Western Massachusetts

This article explores the complexities of property and competing regimes of value in the colonial and Federal periods. The end of the 18th century saw a growing privatization of previously common resources as part of the emergence of a broadly, if unevenly, constituted capitalist mode of production in western Massachusetts. Excavations at the Frary House/Barnard Tavern in rural Deerfield, Massachusetts, provide a seemingly mundane index of this broad social change in the differential presence of fish scales in trash pits at the site. Anadromous fish have been a means of subsistence for indigenous communities who lived along the Connecticut River valley for thousands of years, but following English colonization and conquest, they became caught up in broader anxieties and struggles over the nature of work, property, and social and material value. This article documents some of these struggles in the region, as a reminder that consumption and subsistence are never isolated from broader social and structural processes.

Toward a New Moral Understanding of the Tudor Conquest of Ireland

The English conquest of Ireland during the sixteenth century was accompanied by extreme violence. Historians remain divided on the motivations behind this violence. This article argues that the English violence in Ireland may be attributed to four main factors: the fear of foreign Catholic intervention through Ireland; the methods by which Irish rebels chose to fight; decisions made by English officials in London to not fund English forces in Ireland at a reasonable level while demanding that English officials in Ireland keep Ireland under control; and the creation of a system by which many of those who made the plans never had to see the suffering they inflicted. The troops who carried out the plans had to choose between their own survival and moral behaviors that placed their survival at risk.

Freebooters and Free Traders: English Colonial Prize Jurisdiction in the West Indies 1655–1670

Abstract Colonial prize courts provided two significant contributions to the English imperial efforts in the West Indies. First, they played a key role in the enforcement of the new colonial power’s own trade monopoly against foreign interlopers and smugglers. Secondly, they helped the newcomer empire to rein in the buccaneers and capers who had populated the Caribbean for decades and to re-deploy them as commissioned privateers. This paper explores in detail the emergence of the British colonial prize jurisdiction after the English conquest of Jamaica in 1655. It shows how colonial prize courts emerged organically from the English expansion in the West Indies, with powers and duties assigned incrementally to colonial administrators to address the practical needs of the growing empire in breaking the Spanish trade monopoly and establishing its own.

The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire, by Carla Gardina Pestana

The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire, by Carla Gardina Pestana