The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

                                                    SOVEREIGNTY IN IRELAND

Told that the King sent him greetings, Brian O'Connor of Offaly replied with derision: 'What king?'
and said that he hoped that within that year, 1528, he would see the king of England without jurisdiction in Ireland. The O'Connors of Offaly, on the border of the Pale, strong in a fastness surrounded by almost impenetrable bog and forest, had extended their lordship over their Gaelic Irish neighbours - the O'Dunnes of Iregan, O'Dempseys of Clanmaliere and MacMorishes of Irry - and imposed tribute. They were a constant threat on the borders of Counties Kildare and Meath, and the Dublin exchequer paid an annual black rent £40 to save the Pale from their raids. O'Connor was the chief Gaelic ally of the 8th Earl of Kildare, and his son-in-law. Lords like the O'Connors, who had once offered hospitality to thousands and summoned the poets or Ireland to feast, seemed unlikely
to submit to the English king. In 1528 O'Connor captured the vice-deputy, Lord Delvin and began the
hostilities known as O'Connor's Wars, perhaps in collusion with his Fitzgerald relations. Yet Brian was
the last lord of Offaly before the ruin of his family and the plantation of his territory in the mid sixteenth century. The king of England began to make real his claim to rule over the whole of Ireland.
Once Ireland had had sacral kings, invested by sacred rites at hallowed places - like the Hill of Tara,
or the Stone of Tullaghoge - in symbolic marriage to the territory and its people. But high kings were later replaced by 'chieftains', 'captains of their nations', whose relationship to the land and people had
changed. The essential concept of sovereignty came to lie in the 'name' (the surname), and the lord's
personal headship of his own kin. At the inaugration stone, on a hill where chiefs had immemorially
been inaugrated, the new chief would be named by the clan name - O'Neill, O'Donnell or Maguire -
and proclaimed by those who now consented to his leadership. As he was handed the 'rod of ownership', the new chief entered possession of his lands. It was O'Sullivan Mór, chief vassal of MacCarthy Mór, who placed the white rod in th hand of this paramount chief of Munster. By the sixteenth century all the land rights within a territory were so dependent upon the will of the lord that
he held the land as his demesne, the free landowning subjects who inhabited it being regarded as his tenants. An Irish lordship did not lie in the ownership of a closed and defined territory, but was a complex of rights, tributes and authority. The paramount chiefs had overlordship rather than ownership of a territory. So O'Neill of Tyrone demanded tribute and services from the ecclesiastical tenants of Armagh, although the Church was owner of the estates. In the later middle ages the O'Connor lords of Carbury exerted powers of overlordship over the lesser lords of Sligo - O'Hara of Leyny, the MacDonaghs of Tirerrill and the O'Dowds of Tirreagh - but by the end of the fifteenth century the greater lordships of O'Donnell and of the MacWilliam and Clanrickard Burkes struggled for the control of northern Connacht, and ultimately for overlordship of the whole western province.
Soon O'Donnell of Tirconnell was ascendant, and imposed a heavy and ruthless military supremacy.
He swept through the lordships, burning crops and driving off cattle of those who resisted paying his
tribute. The overlords imposed their own candidates as chiefs of lesser lordships. Where once O'Cahan
had been inaugrated by his own ollamb, or master of poetry, by the end of the sixteenth century he was installed by O'Neill. Overlordship without ownership rested upon the power of the lords to enforce
the submission of lesser lords. In 1539 the O'Connor chief of Sligo was bound to provide military service to O'Donnell, to submit to his 'counsel' in all matters, to hand over control of the castle and town of Sligo, and to assist O'Connor's lordship. In this world of Gaelic lordship the custom of buying
the protection (sláinte) of a lord became prevalent. If any injury were done to the person whom the lord protected, it was as though the injury was done to the lord himself, and fines were exacted.
The 9th Earl of Kildare imposed fines of sixty or seventy cows for the breaking of his protection -
slánuigheacht, 'slanyaght' or sanctuary. By such 'buyings' lesser lords could appeal over the head of
their own lord for the protection of a greater. Such lordship rested less on loyalty than on 'fort mayne', the strong hand. Succession to a lordship was not by simple right of inheritance.