New World, Lost Worlds

The town of Ireland were the heartlands of the Englishry. Their citizens spoke English, wore English dress, lived in houses like those in English towns, had well-ordered civic governments, prosperous trade and thriving religious institutions. There were about fifty towns of any size in early sixteenth-century Ireland; their inhabitants composing about one-tenth of the whole population of the island.
Dublin, the royal capital, and the home of two cathedrals, was the largest city in Ireland and included most of Leinster in its hinterland. By the late sixteenth century its population was perhaps 6,000. It was the main port for the whole east coast. Like other Irish towns, Dublin was governed by a
wealthy patriciate which dominated civic life through its ascendancy in the merchant guilds and
its monopoly of office holding. A few families, closely tied by intermarriage, seemed to pass the
city offices of mayor, sheriff, and alderman among themselves, although they were duly elected
by the citizenry. In Galway, the second city of Ireland, fifteen merchant families formed so powerful
and self-perpetuating an oligarchy that from 1484 until the mid seventeenth century only one
mayor was elected from outside the group. Within these small, closed communities a strong sense
of civic identity grew, fostered by a deep awareness of their difference from their Gaelic neighbours.
By 1500 many of the coastal towns were isolated behind their defensible walls, dependent upon the
sea for trade. It was usually easier for towns to send goods beyond Ireland then to each other, such
were the difficulties of travel, but town merchants - 'grey merchants' - did buy and sell among the Irish. Inland towns were often overawed by local lords, as Galway was by the Clanrickard Burkes.
Athenry in County Galway and Kilmallock in County Limerick were both razed and rebuilt during
sixteenth century. In the towns municipal and private philanthropy provided almshouses, hospitals
and schools. In 1599 Sir John Harington wrote of his escape from the rigour of the army camp in
Roscommon and of his arrival in the town of Galway, where his English translation of Aristo's epic romance, Orlando Furioso, was being read by the young ladies of the town. Tudor governors in
Dublin and Westminster always looked upon the Anglo-Irish of the towns as upholders of civility against the forces of Gaelic barbarism.
The Gaelic Irish lords had been driven back at the twelth-century conquest, but that conquest had
never been completed; the lords had reclaimed much of what had been lost, and most of Ireland
was still theirs. Power in Gaelic Ireland was highly fragmented; there was no collective central authority, no governmental institutions. Each lordship was its own small society, with its own
particular history, celebrated by its bards. Gaelic Ireland was ruled by lords whose power was
dynastic and particularist, tribal rather than territorial, and lay in their personal headship of their
own clans. The chieftains of the Gaelic ruling dynasties were always seeking to extend their overlordship and to become provincial kings once again. To the English king's claims to overlordship
they were oblivious, and he could never be sovereign where the Irish chieftains held their lands and lordships and administered their own law without reference to him. In Gaelic Ireland lordship lay
in the control of people rather than of territory: where a chief of a lesser sept (a branch of a clan) feared a lord sufficiently to rise with him, seek his protection or pay him tribute, then effectively
he was subject. Yet he could appeal over the head of his own immediate lord to secure the protection
of a more powerful lord, as indemnity against the lesser lord's oppression or neglect. In Ulster the O'Neill was lord of all the septs withint Tyrone, but claimed authority also over the uirrithe (sub-kings) who were overlords over their own people: over O'Cahan, MacMahon of Oriel, Maguire of Fermanagh, and O'Reilly of Breifne.
It was the intense competition between and within the Gaelic dynasties which had invited invasion
in the first place. That competition continued, and it was not only the Yorkists who had a parricidal history. Between the O'Neills of Tyrone and the O'Donnells of Tirconnell lay an old contention over
the tribute of Inishowen and for overlordship of Ulster. And withint the clans of O'Neill and O'Donnell there was intense rivalry too. One sept of O'Neills was habitually hostile to the ruling O'Neills and consequently allied with the O'Donnells. In 1493 Conn O'Neill was murdered by his half-brother,
Henry Og, who made himself chief - the O'Neill - with the support of another branch of the family,
the Sliocht Airt. Henry Og was in turn murdered in 1498 by Conn's sons, 'in revenge of their father'.
There was civil war too among the Maguires of Fermanagh, after long peace. In 1484 at the altar of
the church if Aghalurcher, Gillapatrick Maguire, the chosen successor to his father, the chief, was
slaughtered by his own five brothers. Almost every page of the Irish annals tells of murder within
the ruling dynasties. Internecine struggles and raids between lordships were frequent; the consequence
of a Gaelic inheritance system where succession was not the automatic right of the eldest son,
and the lack of any institutions of central government to control the warfare and violence which characterized political relations between lords who were concerned not only to extend their power
but to defend their rights. But there was instability and rivalry too among the Anglo-Irish feudal lords who lived on the borders of the Gaelic world. In 1487 the 9th Earl of Desmond was murdered 'by his own people', allegedly at the instigation of his brother John Fitzgerald.