Norman Irish
Norman Irish or Hiberno-Normans is a modern term for the descendants of Norman settlers who arrived during the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century. Most came from England and Wales. They are distinguished from the native Gaelic Irish, although some Normans eventually became Gaelicised. The Hiberno-Normans were a feudal aristocracy and merchant oligarchy which controlled the Lordship of Ireland. The Hiberno-Normans were associated with the Gregorian Reform of the Catholic Church in Ireland and contributed to the emergence of a Hiberno-English dialect.
Some of the most prominent Hiberno-Norman families were the Burkes, Butlers, and FitzGeralds. One of the most common Irish surnames, Walsh, derives from Welsh Normans who arrived in Ireland as part of this group. Some Norman families were said to have become "more Irish than the Irish themselves" by merging culturally and intermarrying with the Gaels.
The dominance of the Catholic Hiberno-Normans waned during the 16th century English Reformation, when the Protestant "New English" elite settled in Ireland. The Hiberno-Normans came to be known as the Old English at this time. Many Norman-Irish families spread throughout the world as part of the Irish diaspora. Following the Glorious Revolution, many Old English families promoted unity with the Gaels under the denominator of "Irish Catholic", while others were assimilated into a new Irish Protestant identity, which also included later settler groups such as the Ulster Scots and Huguenots.
Nomenclature
By the late 12th century, the distinction between the Saxon and Norman populations of England was beginning to dissolve. Contemporary sources refer to the invaders who crossed the Irish Sea at this time simply as "the English". It has therefore been questioned whether the term Norman is appropriate in an Irish context. According to Robin Frame, "for historians studying language and elite culture, 'Anglo‐Norman' or 'Anglo‐French' is a defensible alternative; for those concerned with politics, government, and national consciousness, 'English' is probably the least inaccurate way of describing those involved in the invasions of 1167–71 and the colonization that followed". Nevertheless, a range of terms continue in use, including Norman, Anglo‐Norman, Cambro‐Norman, and Hiberno-Norman.In the 16th century, when the Tudor conquest brought a new wave of incomers to Ireland, the descendants of those who had arrived in the Middle Ages came to be known as the Old English, in contrast to the New English.
History
Normans in medieval Ireland
Traditionally, London-based Anglo-Norman governments expected the Normans in the Lordship of Ireland to promote the interests of the Kingdom of England, through the use of the English language, law, trade, currency, social customs, and farming methods. The Norman community in Ireland was, however, never monolithic. In some areas, especially in the Pale around Dublin, and in relatively urbanised communities in Kilkenny, Limerick, Cork and south Wexford, people spoke the English language, used English law, and in some respects lived in a manner similar to that found in England.However, in the provinces, the Normans in Ireland were at times indistinguishable from the surrounding Gaelic lords and chieftains. Dynasties such as the Fitzgeralds, Butlers, Burkes, and Wall clans adopted the native language, legal system, and other customs such as fostering and intermarriage with the Gaelic Irish and the patronage of Irish poetry and music. Such people became regarded as "more Irish than the Irish themselves" as a result of this process. The most accurate name for the Gaelicised Anglo-Irish throughout the late medieval period was Hiberno-Norman, a name which captures the distinctive blended culture which this community created and within which it operated until the Tudor conquest. In an effort to halt the ongoing Gaelicisation of the Anglo-Irish community, the Irish Parliament passed the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1367, which among other things banned the use of the Irish language, the wearing of Irish clothes, as well as prohibiting the Gaelic Irish from living within walled towns.
The Pale
Despite these efforts, by 1515, one official lamented, that "all the common people of the said half counties that obeyeth the King's laws, for the most part be of Irish birth, of Irish habit, and of Irish language." English administrators such as Fynes Moryson, writing in the last years of the sixteenth century, shared the latter view of the Anglo-Irish: "the English Irish and the very citizens though they could speak English as well as we, yet commonly speak Irish among themselves, and were hardly induced by our familiar conversation to speak English with us". Moryson's views on the cultural fluidity of the so-called English Pale were echoed by other commentators such as Richard Stanihurst who, while protesting the Englishness of the Palesmen in 1577, opined that "Irish was universally gaggled in the English Pale".Beyond the Pale, the term 'English', if and when it was applied, referred to a thin layer of landowners and nobility, who ruled over Gaelic Irish freeholders and tenants. The division between the Pale and the rest of Ireland was therefore in reality not rigid or impermeable, but rather one of gradual cultural and economic differences across wide areas. Consequently, the English identity expressed by representatives of the Pale when writing in English to the English Crown often contrasted radically with their cultural affinities and kinship ties to the Gaelic world around them, and this difference between their cultural reality and their expressed identity is a central reason for the Old English's later support of Roman Catholicism. There was no religious division in medieval Ireland, beyond the requirement that English-born prelates should run the Irish church. However, most of the pre-16th century inhabitants of Ireland continued their allegiance to Roman Catholicism, following the Henrician Reformation of the 1530s, even after the establishment of the Anglican Catholic Church of Ireland.
Tudor conquest and arrival of New English
In contrast to previous English settlers, the New English, that wave of settlers who came to Ireland from England during the Elizabethan era onwards as a result of the Tudor conquest of Ireland, were more self-consciously English, and were largely Protestant. To the New English, many of the Old Anglo-Irish were "degenerate", having "gone native" and adopted Irish customs as well as choosing to adhere to Roman Catholicism after the Crown's official split with Rome. The poet Edmund Spenser was one of the chief advocates of this view. He argued in A View of the Present State of Irelande that a failure to conquer Ireland fully in the past had led the Old generations of English settlers to become corrupted by the native Irish culture. In the course of the 16th century, the religious division had the effect of alienating most of the Old Anglo-Irish from the state, and bolstered by Jacobite reverts like the Dillons propelled them into making common cause with the Gaelic Irish under the Irish Catholic identity.The first confrontation between the Old English and the English government in Ireland came with the cess crisis of 1556–1583. During that period, the Pale community resisted paying for the English army sent to Ireland to put down a string of revolts which culminated in the Desmond Rebellions. The term "Old English" was coined at this time, as the Pale community emphasised their English identity and loyalty to the Stuart Crown and refusing to co-operate with the wishes of the Elizabeth's Parliament as represented in Ireland by the Lord Deputy of Ireland.
File:Gerald1583.jpg|thumb|left|Monument marking the site of the capture and execution of the Earl of Desmond James FitzMaurice FitzGerald in Glanageenty forest, County Kerry.
Originally, the conflict was a civil issue, as the Palesmen objected to paying new taxes that had not first been approved by them in the Parliament of Ireland. The dispute, however, also soon took on a religious dimension, especially after 1570, when Elizabeth I of England was excommunicated by Pope Pius V's papal bull Regnans in Excelsis. In response, Elizabeth banned the Jesuits from her realms as they were seen as being among the Papacy's most radical agents of the Counter-Reformation which, among other aims, sought to topple her from her thrones. Rebels such as James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald portrayed their rebellion as a "Holy War", and indeed received money and troops from the papal coffers. In the Second Desmond Rebellion, a prominent Pale lord, James Eustace, Viscount of Baltinglass, joined the rebels from religious motivation. Before the rebellion was over, several hundred Old English Palesmen had been arrested and sentenced to death, either for outright rebellion, or because they were suspected rebels because of their religious views. Most were eventually pardoned after paying fines of up to 100 pounds, a very large sum for the time. However, twenty landed gentlemen from some of the Pale's leading Old English families were executed; some of them "died in the manner of Catholic martyrs, proclaiming they were suffering for their religious beliefs".
This episode marked an important break between the Pale and the English regime in Ireland, and between the Old English and the New English.
Emerging Loyalism
In the subsequent Nine Years' War, the Pale and the Old English towns remained loyal; they were in favour of outward loyalty to the English Crown during another rebellion.However, it was the English Government's administration in Ireland along loyalist lines particularly following the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 that would lead to severing the main political ties between the Old English and England itself.
First, in 1609, Roman Catholics were banned from holding public office in Ireland forcing many Old English like the Dillons to outwardly adopt Anglican Catholicism. Then, in 1613, the constituencies of the Irish Parliament were changed so that the New English would have a slight majority in the Irish House of Commons. Thirdly, in the 1630s, many members of the Old English landowning class were forced to confirm the ancient title to their land-holdings often in the absence of title deeds, which resulted in some having to pay substantial fines to retain their property, while others ended up losing some or all of their land in this complex legal process.
The political response of the Old Anglo-Irish community was forced to go over the heads of the New English in Dublin and appeal directly to their sovereign in his role as King of Ireland which further disgruntled them.