John Horace Round

“ If we cannot agree with this able champion in viewing the warfare he describes as a healthy process of evolution, we may at least gladly admit that some knowledge of this dark period, lighted only by the lurid torch of rapine and internecine strife, is as essential to a right understanding of the Anglo-Norman settlement as is the study of English history, for some generations before the Conquest, the necessary prelude to a comprehension of the Norman Conquest itself. ”

“ In time there rose on every side those strongholds of which the crumbling ruins long bore witness to the harassed lives of the alien lords of the land. Dreading the perils of the cloud-swept glens, and creeping from rock to rock within sound of that troubled sea, the “Barons of Ulster,” in their eyries, perched on the basalt crags, wrought about the land a belt of conquest of which we have the noblest relic in the wild glory of Dunluce. Their heirs still lingered on, four centuries later, clinging “in great poverty and peril” to the lands their ancestors had won. ”

“ This, then, up to now has been the sum total of our knowledge: a commune was granted to London in October, 1191; the ferm of the city was, simultaneously, reduced from over £500 to the old £300, as granted by Henry I.; and the Mayor of London first meets us in the spring of 1193. Of the nature of the commune we know nothing; of its very existence after the autumn of 1191, we are in equal ignorance. ”

“ Writing within twenty years of earl Richard’s landing, he had already to lament that the Irish had learnt from their foes the use of the bow, and had so greatly improved their tactics that the easy victories of the early invaders were no longer possible: by castles alone could their successors hope to hold the land.
In the conquest of Ulster we have, perhaps, the most striking exploit of the whole invasion. ”

“ In all this internecine conflict the only motive that can clearly be traced is the passionate desire for vengeance. To glut that desire Dermot was ready, not only to call in the alien against his fellow-countrymen, but even to promise ‘Strongbow’ the succession to Leinster and his followers landed possessions, which he could only do at the cost of enraging his own kinsmen and subjects. Giraldus, indeed, is at pains to justify the position of the English in Ireland, and to claim that it was virtually brought about by consent rather than by conquest. ”

“ But in the meanwhile, the great movement in favour of municipal liberties, which was so prominent a feature of the stirring 12th century, was spreading like wildfire through France and Flanders, and London, which, since the coming of the Normans, had become far more cosmopolitan, was steadily imbibing from foreign traders the spirit and enthusiasm of the age. ”

“ Nor will those who are acquainted with Irish society in the past reject as improbable the statement of Giraldus that the clergy, though greatly distinguished by their chastity and fervent devotion to divine service, were apt to spend their evenings in drinking somewhat deeply. But even to this he is careful to add, there were found honourable exceptions. The important fact to be remembered is that, if Ireland had once been a centre of Christianity, a bright star in a heathen age, its church had deteriorated, not advanced, amidst the ceaseless and murderous strife of native rule. ”

“ Hitherto I have mainly spoken of Sussex, because it is in that county that place-names can be best studied; the Essex evidence is chiefly of value for the contrast it presents. The principal contrast, and one to which I invite particular attention, is this: confining ourselves to the names I am concerned with—the ings, hams, and tons—we find that in Essex several parishes have only a single place-name between them, while in Sussex, on the contrary, a single parish may contain several of these place-names, each of them, surely, at one time representing a distinct local unit. ”

“ We went to Ireland because her people were engaged in cutting one another’s throats; we are there now because, if we left, they would all be breaking one another’s heads. When an eminent patriot is good enough to inform us of his desire, but for the presence of a British judge, to wring a brother patriot’s neck, we are reminded that the sacred fire still burns in Celtic breasts. ”

“ To say that the Anglo-Norman settlement, with its conquest, or rather half conquest, of the country, proved a blessing to Ireland, is a proposition that no one, probably, would care to maintain. Why this should have been so is one of those fascinating problems that must ever arouse the speculation and stir the interest of the student. The far earlier Scandinavian settlements in Normandy and in Eastern England have little in common with the exploits of Strongbow’s daring band. Sicily in every way affords a closer parallel. ”

“ It is the fine saying of a brilliant scholar, I mean Professor Maitland, that “the most wonderful of all palimpsests is the map of England, could we but decipher it.” [10] But the study of place-names has this in common with the study of Domesday Book. The local worker, the man who writes the history of his own parish, is as ready to explain the name it bears as he is to interpret the Domesday formulæ relating to it in the Great Survey, without possessing in either case that knowledge of the subject as a whole which is required for its treatment in detail. ”

“ For the cause of this state of things we should have to go back to the origins of our history, to show that the genius of the Anglo-Saxon system was ill-adapted, or rather, wholly unsuitable, to urban life; that, while of unconquerable persistence and strength in small, manageable rural communities, it was bound to, and did, break down when applied to large and growing towns, whose life lay not in agriculture, but in trade. ”

“ It is not, however, for the Conquest only that this knowledge of the true state of Ireland ought to be acquired. The light it throws on the Irish people, their inherited and unchangeable tendencies, is of value from the parallel it presents to the latest modern developments. ”

“ A glamour, picturesque, sentimental it may be, and yet dazzling in its splendour, surrounds an institution possessing so immemorial an antiquity that “Barons of the Exchequer” meet us alike in the days of our Norman kings and in those of Queen Victoria. Its [63] “tellers,” at least coeval with the Conquest, were only finally abolished some sixty years ago, while the Chancellor of the Exchequer is believed to represent that “clericus cancellarii” whose seat at the Exchequer of the second Henry was close to that of the official ancestor of the present secretary to the Treasury. ”

“ Whether Ireland, if left to herself, would even yet have emerged from the tribal stage of society becomes doubtful when we contemplate the persistence of the mores Hibernici. A comparison of the changes in our own people between the 12th century and the days of Queen Victoria—or even of Queen Elizabeth—and those discernible in the Irish people suggests relative stagnation. It clings to its [169] ways as the peasant clings to that patch of soil which he will not leave, and on which he can exist only in squalor and in want. ”

“ If we construct for ourselves a county map from Domesday, we shall miss the names of several villages, although often of antiquity; but, on the other hand, shall meet with the names of important manors, often extending into several parishes, often suggesting by their forms a name as old as the migration, yet now represented at most by some obscure manor, and perhaps only by a solitary farm, or even, it may be, a field. In Sussex, for instance, the ‘Basingham’ of Domesday cannot now be identified ”

“ We have here a remarkable group of men—Longchamp himself, whose fall, in 1191, was so closely connected with the birth of the commune, but who is here seen, in the hour of his pride, speaking of “our brother,” “our seneschal,” “our chamberlain,” “our chaplain,” “our almoner,” and “our clerks”; Bishop Hugh, who was next year to take the lead in expelling him from the Tower, as yet his stronghold; Henry of Cornhill and Richard Fitz Reiner, who had ceased but a few months before to be sheriffs of London, and who were to play so prominent a part at the crisis of 1191 ”

“ In Ireland, on the contrary, the new comers found no kindred system. Its tribal polity had placed between its people and themselves a gulf impassable because dividing two wholly different stages of civilization. With no common foundation on which to build, they could only hope to become Irish by cutting themselves off from their own people. ”

“ I trust that I have now sufficiently shown that even where ing genuinely enters into the composition of a place-name it is no proof of settlement by a clan. Kemble looked on the typical ‘mark’ as “a hundred heads of houses,” which he deemed “not at all an [21] extravagant supposition.” [33] I think that even at the present day a visit to the hams and tons of Sussex, and, in some cases, to the ings, would lead us in practice to the opposite conclusion, and would throw the gravest doubt on the theory of the village community. ”

“ Oman, he contradicts himself, not only in successive works, but even in a single chapter. A little clique of Oxford historians, mortified at my crushing exposé of Mr. Freeman’s vaunted accuracy, have endeavoured, without scruple, and with almost unconcealed anger, to silence me at any cost. And they cannot even wait until they have agreed among themselves. ”

“ It is known from the ‘Instituta Londoniæ’ that, so far back as the days of Æthelred, the men of Rouen had traded to London, bringing in their ships the wines of France, as well as that mysterious “craspice,” which it is the fashion to render “sturgeon,” although there is reason to believe that the term denoted the porpoise and even the whale. The charter of Henry, duke of the Normans, to the citizens of Rouen (1150–1) , brings out a fact unknown to English historians, by confirming to them their port at Dowgate, as they had held it from the days of Edward the Confessor. ”

“ For when we turn to the story of the attack on Dover Castle in 1067, we find Hugh de Montfort “the immediate commander of the castle”; [569] and are thus able to trace the “Warda Constabularii” back to the Conquest itself.
Thus the legend of John de Fiennes and his heirs, constables of the castle, together with its “constitutional significance,” is blown, as it were, into space, and should never, henceforth, be heard.
The “Honour of the Constable” passed to the Crown on the forfeiture of Henry of Essex (1163) ”

“ Even as we have been often told that Cromwell would have settled the Irish question, had only his ‘thorough’ policy been relentlessly pursued, so Giraldus justly reminds us that the first flood of conquest was checked by Henry II., when the work was only half done, and that Henry himself, in like manner, only put his hand to the plough to turn back at once and leave the work to others. Those others, again, were commissioned only to be recalled: the strong centralized administration that was shaping the English realm was never organized in Ireland ”

“ Precisely as at Hastings, the Normans—now the Anglo-Normans—enjoyed the enormous advantage derived from the use of the bow. Giraldus, whatever his defects, was a shrewd and sound observer; and he tells us of the demoralizing effect on the natives, in the early days of the conquest, of the arrows against which they had no means of defence. Careful investigation shows that each band of the invaders landed with a force of knights and archers, the latter being usually found in the proportion of ten to one. ”

“ But just as, at the conquest of England itself, Norman casuistry had enabled William to claim the succession by gift of his kinsman, and to forfeit as traitors all those who opposed that claim, and just as his followers, by Norman law, though standing in the shoes of English thegns, assumed the position of feudal lords, so, in Ireland, the new settlers looked at things from a feudal standpoint, and so originated that conflict of irreconcilable polities which has practically continued without intermission ever since. ”