County Louth Archaeological and History Society

Colonisation and Conquest in Medieval Ireland: The English in Louth, 1170-1330 by BrendanSmithReview by: Seán DuffyJournal of the County Louth Archaeological and Historical Society, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1998), p.306Published by: County Louth Archaeological and History SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27729836 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 05:49

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

County Louth Archaeological and History Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to Journal of the County Louth Archaeological and Historical Society.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.129 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 05:49:30 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS COLONISATION AND CONQUEST IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND: THE ENGLISH IN LOUTH, 1170-1330. By Brendan

Smith. Pp xvi + 189. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1999. ?35.00 stg.

To mark the new millennium Dundalgan Press produced a beautiful reprint of one of the earliest and most important books ever written on the subject of County Louth, Thomas Wright's Louthiana (1748), a precocious study of the county's ancient and medieval monuments. Coincidentally, at just about the same time Cambridge University Press have published another book on medieval Louth which will surely also stand the test of time. It is by Brendan Smith, a scholar who has become

perhaps the greatest living authority on County Louth in the later medieval period, and whose work will already be familiar to

members of this Society and readers of this Journal (for which he expresses some very generous words of praise in his list of

acknowledgements). It is a fascinating book which says almost the last word on its subject - 'almost' because, despite the

author's exhaustive researches of the archives, both published and unpublished, it is extraordinary to think that the mysterious 'De Verd?n Rebellion' which broke out in the county in 1312 remains as mysterious as ever. There must be a missing link

somewhere along the line.

The same is surely the case with regard to the famous Bruce Invasion, especially where County Louth is concerned. The

county suffered enormously during the Scottish campaigns of 1315-18, but presumably not merely because it lay directly on

Bruce's path south. It has for long seemed to this reviewer that the answer to the Bruce onslaught on Louth lies in the affairs

of Meath. The great power-base built up by the de Lacy family in Meath was dissipated when the senior branch of the family died out in the male line, and it was divided in two, one half eventually going to the powerful English Marcher baron, Roger

Mortimer, and the other half to the de Verdons who had built the town of Dundalk and already owned much of County Louth.

During Edward Bruce's time in Ireland he was supported by the disinherited and embittered remnants of the de Lacys, who

joined him in attacking de Verd?n and Mortimer lands, until both the de Lacys and Bruce got their comeuppance at the battle

of Fochart in October 1318: only this explains why the army assembled by the de Verdons to confront the Scots was led by John

de Bermingham, a man from Offaly with no previous connection with Louth but who had spent years at war with the de Lacys on the Offaly-Meath frontier and supporting Roger Mortimer's interests there.

Also present at the battle of Fochart was a Louthman called John de Cusack who claimed that he had with him 'the best

of his own surname and lineage'. On the face of it, this looks likes evidence that in parts of the county at least some of the

English settlers were starting to band together in extended kin-groups for the purposes of warfare or self-defence, not unlike

native Irish dynasties and English colonists elsewhere in Ireland in this period who found that, when it came to the crunch, ties

of blood were stronger than the remedies offered by government. But it is something which Dr Smith is reluctant to accept (p. 126) and the picture of the English community in medieval Louth which he presents is one which has more in common with

the settlers' original homelands across the Irish Sea.

Debate will no doubt continue on that particular subject, but its parameters will henceforth be dictated by this fine book.

It is a book about the first English settlers in Co Louth, about the de Verdons who defended their new conquests, first from

Castletown Mount and later from Castle Roche, and their cousins the Clintons who came to Louth from a place called Coleshill

in Warwickshire, about the Bitterley family who moved from a village of that name in Shropshire to Linns in Co Louth, and are now the Butterleys, about the great English baronial family of Pipard, whose descendants are scattered about Louth to this

day as Peppers, about the Gernons who are also still with us, even though many more of them are masquerading as Garlands

and Gartlan(d)s and their town, Gernonstown, is lost, except in the Irish version, to its modern name Castlebellingham. If you want to find out more about these people, and about the early history of the county which they shaped, buy this book. It is not

cheap, and complete newcomers may find parts of it heavy going, but it may be the most important book on the history of

County Louth that you will ever read.

Sean Duffy

PRIESTS AND PRELATES OF ARMAGH IN THE AGE OF REFORMATIONS, 1518-1558. By Henry A. Jefferies. Pp 213. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 1997. ?35.00.

It has long been a truism of Irish historiography that many of the gaps in our knowledge of both church and laity alike

in the later medieval period could be filled by a careful study of the documentary registers maintained by the contemporary

archbishops of Armagh. In 1946, Dundalgan Press published such a study in Aubrey Gwynn's The medieval province of

Armagh, which, of course, as its name indicates, deals not only with the archdiocese but with all of its suffragan sees, and the

subtitle of which, 1470-1545, reveals a rather narrower time-span than the title itself promises. Precisely fifty-one years on, another detailed examination has now appeared, focused exclusively, though, on the archdiocese itself, during a more

problematic period, arguably the most critical in its history, that of the Henrician and Marian Reformations. The registers of the

incumbent archbishops, Primates Cromer and Dowdall, are fully exploited, along with a large body of other materials, published and unpublished, to furnish us with a very intricate and convincing re-assessment of the state of the church in the primatial see

during the Reformation period. A study such as this is inevitably complex, but in Armagh's case the complexity is doubled as a result of one

historical accident: when the English attempted to conquer Ireland in the late twelfth century, they spread northwards from

Dublin to Meath, and eventually to Co Louth, but they never succeeded in overrunning what are now Counties Armagh and

306

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.129 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 05:49:30 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions