The Government has announced that it intends to participate in an international year in 2027 to celebrate Norman culture and the 1,000th anniversary of the birth of William the Conqueror.
Minister for Housing James Browne, himself of Norman heritage, said the year will acknowledge the huge impact that the Normans had on Ireland and other parts of Europe.
However, Sinn Féin TD Aengus Ó Snodaigh described the plans as “offensive” given the “legacy of William’s successors invading and subjugating Ireland in the name of his English crown”.
So who is right and who is wrong?
The Irish Times sought the views of four experts:
- Seán Duffy is professor of medieval Irish history in Trinity College Dublin (TCD).
- Brendan Smith is professor of medieval history at the University of Bristol.
- Conor Kostick is a historian and the author of Strongbow: The Norman Invasion of Ireland.
- Sparky Booker is an assistant professor in medieval Irish history at Dublin City University.
Should Ireland participate in such celebrations?
Seán Duffy: Yes, of course. Celebrating Norman culture – its scholars, architects and artists, the intellectual curiosity that gave rise to the medieval universities – is not the same as celebrating the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland and, contrary to what Deputy Aengus Ó Snodaigh has implied, nobody is proposing to do that.
What is proposed is that the Norman cultural achievement be marked in 2027 in those parts of Europe which experienced it, in the same way that we value the achievement of ancient Greece or Rome, of Charlemagne and his Carolingian empire, or of Renaissance Florence under the Medici.
Brendan Smith: It is a bit of a stretch. Ireland-Normandy contacts by the time Ireland was invaded in 1169 were slight. “Norman culture” is a tricky concept. The culture the Normans invigorated and exported everywhere from Palestine to Pembrokeshire was French. There wasn’t much that was specifically “Norman” about it.
Conor Kostick: No [to celebrating William]. The guide to answering this question is in his name, William the Bastard, as he was known until he crushed his opponents. Should we celebrate Ireland’s Norman heritage? Definitely. As with every period of settlement in Ireland – for example, the Vikings – the people who came here eventually made an important contribution to the development of our country, even if they first came to plunder.
To what extent were the Anglo-Normans who arrived in Ireland from 1169 Anglo and/or Norman?
Seán Duffy: The simple answer is that – almost without exception – whenever any of the so-called Normans who came to Ireland refer to themselves, they call themselves not Norman but English. What they mean by that is more complicated. They are not referring to what we might call ethnic identity, but rather asserting their political allegiance to the crown of England.
The problem with painting everyone with the “Norman” brush is that many of those who began arriving in Ireland in the late 1160s had probably never set foot in Normandy.
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We don’t know for certain because, to our shame, the kind of large-scale research we need to conduct into individual family origins – tracing the background of the Barrys, Costellos, Cusacks, Dillons, Joyces, Keatings, Powers, Purcells, Roches, Tobins and so many others – still hasn’t been done. My hope is that one outcome of the Government’s commitment to marking the Year of the Normans is that we start to get answers to such questions through detailed scholarly research.
Brendan Smith: Some of the early conquerors of Ireland, such as Strongbow, had estates in Normandy as well as in England and Wales, but they were in a minority. All of them, from lord to peasant, regardless of what language they spoke, identified themselves as “English”, by which they meant they were subjects of the king of England and thus entitled to use English common law. The word “Norman” is almost entirely absent from contemporary accounts of what happened in Ireland between 1169 and 1171.
Sparky Booker: The answer to how “Norman” these “Anglo-Normans” were ... depends on the moment in time you are asking about as well as what aspect of their culture – language, architecture, law, politics – you focus on. This is one reason that, in my own work as a historian who primarily works on the later period, the 14th and 15th centuries, I use the term “English of Ireland” rather than “Anglo-Norman”.
Were the Normans who arrived in Ireland civilisers, conquerors or both?
Seán Duffy: One would be hard-pressed to demonstrate a single instance of the “civilising” effects of the invasion because it was not about bringing civilisation, whatever its advocates at the time or since have averred.
Brendan Smith: The invaders certainly portrayed themselves as bringing civilisation to a barbarian country. The papacy reinforced this message by praising King Henry II – who had only recently brought about the murder of Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury – for bringing true Christianity to a people who, in religious terms, had lost their way.
Conor Kostick: Both. The Normans were warriors who used their advantage in military technique to muscle their way to control of southern Italy, Sicily, Antioch, England, much of Wales, and – the last of their conquests – the east of Ireland. They wanted control of the wealth being created by land and trade and, having got it, were very eager to consolidate by becoming respectable members of the culture they had invaded.
They were quick to marry into the local community, to secure religious approval via donations to the church, to appoint talented locals as administrators, to use local architectural styles.
Those who lost out when the Normans arrived in any region were the local elites, who were killed and replaced. Those who benefited were everyone else. This was very evident in Ireland where the poorest people in 1169 were slaves. Slavery was rampant in Ireland. The Normans abolished slavery.
Not that they were in favour of human rights. The Normans had learned that to farm grain efficiently it was better to use serfs, who kept a share of the crop and therefore had an incentive to improve the yields, than slaves.
Sparky Booker: Rather than either or both, I would say that neither civiliser nor conqueror is the best term for the Anglo-Normans. Military activity was indeed a key part of Anglo-Norman activity in Ireland in 1169 and for centuries afterwards, but their conquest of Ireland was never completed in the medieval period and Irish lords maintained control over significant areas of the island.
Is it the case that the English get all the blame for the ‘800 years of oppression’ and the Normans get none?
Seán Duffy: This is a classic example of our failure as a nation to dig deep into this invented past we have created. It entrenches a kind of nonsense. It was only in the 19th century that we began calling the invaders Normans – for two reasons, I think. One is the extraordinary popularity of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe (1819) which practically invented the myth of the Normans and made the Normans “sexy”. The second reason is less benign and had to do with Anglo-Irish relations.
In the 1840s, Daniel O’Connell became the first Irish nationalist leader to begin to repeat the refrain of 700 years of English oppression and it has remained a powerful message. In his statement on the Government plans to mark the Year of the Normans, Deputy Aengus Ó Snodaigh, no mathematician, referred to “900 years of occupation”.
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And one way in which unionist historians, from the late 19th century onwards, could subvert this nationalist axiom was to implant the idea that for the first half of this 700 years the newcomers were not English but French-speaking Normans. The reality is that – whatever their direct or indirect links to the actual Normans of Normandy – most of those who settled in Ireland after 1169 came either from England or Anglo-Norman settlements in Wales.
Brendan Smith: Not a Norman in sight in Ireland in 1169, so the fashion for calling the invaders “Normans” really reflects something else. Study of the past in Ireland and elsewhere became more professionalised in the late 19th century, and that’s when “the Normans” really take off in how Irish people thought about what had had happened in 1169. It avoided a whole range of sensitive issues to call the invaders “Normans” rather than call them what they called themselves: “English.”
If the Irish Government arranged a “celebration of 850 years of English culture in Ireland” in 2019 it escaped my attention.
Conor Costick: The oppression of Ireland by England really begins to accelerate when England becomes economically more powerful from the end of the 16th century. Back in 1169 we are looking more at a game of thrones between medieval kings and lords, rather than one nation trying to subjugate another into its economic growth. So I wouldn’t blame the Normans for English imperialism. After all, the Normans conquered England as well.
What do you feel about the statement made by Sinn Féin TD Aengus Ó’Snodaigh that King Charles III is in a line of English kings going back to William the Conqueror?
Seán Duffy: I am not remotely persuaded by Deputy Ó Snodaigh’s argument that we should ignore the Year of the Normans “with the North still under the descendants of William the Conqueror’s crown”. As of now, for good or ill there exists in these islands an entity whose official name is the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”.
No organ of this State denies that the “Normans” came to Ireland as conquerors. But as with Ireland’s extraordinarily mature and successful commemorations during the Decade of Centenaries, we can use the 2027 millennium to see where Ireland fits into the Norman world.
Conor Kostick: In essence, I don’t think this is correct. It gives the impression that Strongbow’s invasion was the foundation for later imperial conquest, settlement and occupation of Ireland. But it was a different era and the victorious Normans weren’t in Ireland to send wealth to the kingdom of England. They had come to stay.
