The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

Violence was the sanction which ensured peace in this society, while also undermining it. There was a myth that the Irish left the sword hands of boys unchristened, so that they might give more lethal blows. By the later middle ages the lords no longer summoned their free subjects to take part in military expeditions ('risings out'), but turned instead to hiring mercenary troops: the galloglasses, axemen whose highest loyalty was to their paymasters; and the kerns, the Irish foot soldiers, whose ferocity and hardiness inspired admiration as well as terror. Lords did not arm their peasants, until Shane O'Neill, desperate to increase his fighting force in the 1560s, armed the peasants 'of his country' in Ulster. A lord possessing military power paid for by those subjects whom that same military force could suppress might be little inclined to consult the wishes of his subjects, except those of a few vassals who, like himself, led hired troops. These troops must be fed. When advisers in Westminster and Dublin thought of ways of reforming Gaelic Ireland they uniformly condemned one practice 'invented in hell'. This was 'coyne and livery': the lord's demand of hospitality for his soldiers and servants and their horses, where 'hospitality' might be accounted a euphemism for billeting by intimidation. Since in Gaelic Ireland a barter economy and subsistence agriculture prevailed, lords could hardly exact taxes in cash to pay their troops. Instead soldiers were billeted upon householders, especially poorer ones, and consumed their wages in kind. O'Neill billeted a standing army, the 'Bonaght of Ulster' upon his vassal chiefs. In this society, which glorified hospitality, every substantial tenant or vassal compulsory cuddies (night's suppers) and cosheries (lodging and victuals) to their immediate lords and his retinue. Since the traditional coshering season was in the winter and early spring, when food was scarcest and the provision of feasts most difficult, the lord who could demand this due particularly revealed his strength and rewarded his followers. In 1493 the Abbot of Mellifont complained to the Archbishop of Armagh of the extortion of coyne and livery by 'threats, terrorism, fury'. Here was oppression by lords upon people who were not their tenants, for no public purpose. The principle of taxation by consent hardly existed save where those who lived in the marches, on the edge of 'the land of war', admitted the need to pay for protection. Many Palesmen were driven to emigrate, to be replaced by Gaelic tenants. An Anglo-Irish tract of Henry VIII's reign lamented that 'the most part of all the English tenants had avoided the land'. The extortionate system of coyne and livery, adopted by the Anglo-Irish feudatories as well as the Gaelic lords, as both symptom and cause of its instability. 
One observer of the Gaelic polity at the beginning of the sixteenth century thought that he saw an unprecedented stability, and that the Irish chiefs were so successfully keeping their countries in peace that the people could even, unusually, till the fields. Yet while acknowledging the great power of the O'Brien of Toybrien in Clare, of MacCarthy Reagh of Carbery, Cormac Óg MacCarthy of Muskerry, MacCarthy Mór of Desmond and O'Donnell of Tirconnell, he saw their purpose as malign; to protect the people only in order to 'devour them . . . like as the greedy hound delivereth the sheep from the wolf'. Finding oppression rather than protection from their immediate lords, landholders began to look greater and greater lords in the hope of indemnity and justice. As the sixteenth century began, the paramount chiefs of the great ruling lineages were becoming more dominant still, at the expense of the weaker clans. Many Irish lordships had been undermined in the last part of the fifteenth century. Clan MacMahon had ruled east Breifne in Connacht, but after the death of the tanist in 1469 they were increasingly driven from the O'Reilly, until the last lord of the sept, Sean, was murdered by the son of the ruling O'Reilly in 1534. But the O'Reillys, too, looked for protection from a greater lord; not now from their territorial overlord, O'Neill, but from O'Donnell instead. The sixteenth-century overlords extended their protection - 'slantyaght' - over territories in which they held no land. Since this slantyaght was a protection usually extended by force, in return for tribute, it had to be defended, and defended fiercely, for whenever a chief failed to protect a subject chief against a rival, the victim must then change allegiances, with dangerous political consequences. The paramount chiefs asserted their power by progressing in person or sending a maor (collector of dues) into the lands of their vassal chiefs. So, in 1539 O'Connor of Sligo, vassal to O'Donnell, bound himself to go with O'Donnell's maor into Lower Connacht to impose his lordship and levy his tribute. The creation of great slantyaght networks, bound by mutual promises of protection in return for tribute and military service, not by territorial ties, marked Gaelic Ireland in the last days of the independent rule of the Gaelic chiefs, and determined its politics. But the greatest overlords were not the Gaelic chiefs, but the great Anglo-Irish feudatories, who had adapted Gaelic practices to those of their own society. No lords held greater power in Ireland than the Fitzgerald earls of Kildare. A score of Irish lords looked to Garret Mór, the 8th Earl, for protection. For the hosting (military expedition) to Knockdoe near Galway in 1504 against Ulick Burke of Clanrickard, Garret Mór brought the lords of Ulster and the midlands who owed him allegiance: members of the O'Neill clan of Tyrone, also of the O'Reillys of east Breifne, the MacMahons of Oriel, the O'Hanlons of south Armagh, the Magennises of Iveagh, the O'Connors of Offaly, and the O'Donnells of Tirconnell and known as the Four Masters, this was 'the charge of the royal heroes'. O'Kelly of Hy Many, the Mayo Burkes, MacDermot of Moylurg, O'Connor Roe and Hugh Roe O'Donnell also followed Kildare, together with lords from the Pale, and the victory was his. His and the king of England's, for Kildare was not only the overlord of Gaelic lords, but the royal Lord Deputy, and the expedition to the west had been to assert the authority of Henry VII, as Lord of Ireland. Garret Mór held the office of chief governor for thirty-three years, and his son Garret Óg inherited it in 1513, almost as part of his patrimony.
No lord since the high kings had held such power as Kildare. The 8th and 9th Earls had mastery of much of Ireland through their possession of great lands, their numerous tenantry, their command of soldiers, and their networks of clients, including many Gaelic lords around the Pale and far beyond. The rental book of Kildare in 1518 listed twenty-four Gaelic chiefs who paid him tribute. The 8th Earl's campaigning throughout the island left the lords in no doubt of Kildare power. 'Some sayeth,' it was reported in 1515, that there had never been such peace in 300 years; 'that the Irish enemies was never more adread of the king's Deputy than they be now.' The 8th Earl had exercised seemingly unlimited power in County Kildare, which he administered as a liberty, its officials appointed by him, its law either English or Irish, as the case required. There he imposed coyne and livery, but with the vital difference that it was by consent. The earls of Kildare were the extreme examples of English marcher lords, potentially overmighty and with the closest associations with English enemies in the 'land of war'. But they never doubted that their power and honour rested in their royal office. They neithed wanted nor sought the independence of a Gaelic paramount chief. The 9th Earl wrote to Henry VIII, whom he had served in their youth at the English court, protesting an allegiance which, if it ever failed, 'should be the destruction of me and my sequel for ever'.