New World, Lost Worlds

In Ireland also several distinct societies shared the same island. Ireland was a land of many lordships,
with many marches in between them. Once there had been high kings of Ireland, invested by sacred
rites in hallowed places. The Anglo-Norman invasion of the twelth century had usurped these kingships and intruded the claims of another king, the king of England, who as Lord of Ireland claimed jurisdiction over the whole island and thought to be high king himself. It Henry VII had
visited his lordship of Ireland - though no Tudor monarch ever went there - he would have encountered a world remote from anything he knew. The island was divided - not neatly, for nothing here was straightforward - between the Gaedhil (the native Irish) and the Gaill (the settlers). To the
Irish, the English of Ireland - the Anglo-Irish descendants of the first invaders of the twelth-century
conquest - were Gaill (foreign); they were bound by the same statues and to the same allegiance as
the English of England, and spoke English, yet they were also clearly distinct from the English of
England, for they were born in Ireland, and most also spoke Irish. The English of Ireland lived in
close but uneasy proximity to a culture profoundly different from their own.
The Gaedhealtacht, or Gaeldom of the native Irish, had its own ancient language, laws and culture,
its own Christian traditions. And even hostile foreign observers in the late middle ages allowed that
the Irish, though 'wild', were also good Christians. Hereditary bards were custodians and celebrants
of the royal past of the Gaelic ruling dynasties.
Using poetic conventions five or six centuries old, the bard evoked and eulogized the hospitality, piety, justice and martial prowess of his Gaelic lord and patron, and the fertility of the land during his rule.
Historians recorded the genealogies and descent of the chiefly families. Hereditary judges were guardians of immemorial, seemingly unchanging laws. The late medieval Gaelic world extended beyond the land of Ireland to the highlands and islands of western Scotland, divided only by the
narrow North Channel. Gaelic Scotland and Ireland shared a common language and culture and,
regardless of whether they lived in Scotland or Ireland, the people might be termed 'Irishy'.
The inhabitants of Gaeldom recognized a common identity, and saw themselves as surrounded by Gaill. The MacDonald, John of Islay, fourth and last Lord of the Isles, whose great lordship stretched from the glens of Antrim in Ulster, along the west coast of Scotland from Kintyre to Glenelg, and
through the Hebrides, had aspired to be high king of all Ireland. When in 1493 the Scottish Crown
annexed his troublesome lordship and divided MacDonald's lands among his dependent chiefs, waves of migrants left Scotland for Ulster. Another wave followed in the 1540s after an abortive attempt
to resurrect the lordship. The presence of so many Scots in north-east Ulster unsettled the province
through most of the sixteenth century. The attempts by the government in Dublin to prevent intermarriage between Gaelic Scots and Irish, to contain the employment by Ulster lords of Scottish
redshanks (mercenary foot soldiers), and to drive the Scots from Ulster perennially failed.