The Norman Invasion of 1169: The Invitation That Changed Ireland

Billy Galligan

The Invitation That Changed Ireland Forever — The Norman Invasion of 1169 Every great disaster in history has a beginning. And more often than not, that beginning is someone making a decision that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. In 1166, an Irish king made one of those decisions. And the consequences are still being felt today. His name was Dermot MacMurrough. King of Leinster. Ambitious, ruthless, and by 1166 — desperate. He had made too many enemies among the other Irish kings, kidnapped the wrong man's wife, and found himself driven into exile by a coalition of Gaelic lords led by Rory O'Connor, the High King of Ireland. Dermot MacMurrough had lost everything. So he did what desperate men have always done. He went looking for help wherever he could find it. He crossed to England and eventually to France, where he found King Henry II — ruler of England and a vast empire stretching across much of France and Wales. Henry didn't send his own forces. But he gave MacMurrough something almost as valuable. Permission to recruit from among his subjects. The door was open. MacMurrough walked through it. He found his champion in a Norman lord from Wales — Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke. History knows him better as Strongbow. The deal was straightforward. Strongbow would bring his army to Ireland, help MacMurrough reclaim Leinster, and in return he would receive Dermot's daughter Aoife in marriage and the right to inherit the Kingdom of Leinster on Dermot's death. On the first of May 1169, the first Norman forces landed on the coast of Wexford. Thirty knights, sixty men-at-arms, and three hundred archers. The lightly clad Irish, relying on traditional weapons and tactics, found themselves facing something they had never encountered before — heavily armoured Norman knights in disciplined formation. Wexford fell quickly. The shock of what had arrived on Irish shores rippled across the island. Strongbow himself arrived in 1170. He took Waterford. He marched on Dublin and took that too. He married Aoife MacMurrough in Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin in 1170 — a moment immortalised in one of Ireland's most famous paintings by Daniel Maclise, showing the Norman lord and the Irish princess in the shadow of conquest. And then in May of 1171, Dermot MacMurrough died. The man who had started it all — the king who had invited the Normans in — was gone. Strongbow claimed Leinster as promised. And in doing so, he had accumulated enormous power on an island just across the water from England. That worried King Henry II considerably. Henry feared that Strongbow was becoming too powerful, too independent. He also had the papal blessing to bring Ireland under English authority — Pope Adrian IV, the only English Pope in history, had issued a document called Laudabiliter back in 1155 granting Henry lordship over Ireland. Henry had not acted on it then. Now he had his reason. In October 1171, Henry II landed in Waterford with a large army — the first King of England to set foot on Irish soil. He was not coming to conquer in the traditional sense. He was coming to assert authority. Over Strongbow and the Norman lords. And over the Irish kings, many of whom — wary of Strongbow's growing power — submitted to Henry as the lesser of two threats. By the time Henry left in 1172, he had declared himself Lord of Ireland. The island had been drawn into the orbit of the English Crown. It would remain there for the next seven and a half centuries. The Normans who stayed in Ireland are a fascinating story in themselves. Over the following generations, many of them became — as the phrase goes — more Irish than the Irish themselves. They intermarried, learned the language, adopted Gaelic customs, and became powerful lords who owed loyalty to neither Dublin nor London in any meaningful way. The English Crown's grip on Ireland began to weaken almost as soon as it was established. By the late 14th and early 15th centuries, direct English control had shrunk dramatically. Most of the island was divided between the great Anglo-Irish lords and the Gaelic chieftains who had never surrendered. The English Crown effectively controlled only a strip of land along the east coast around Dublin — covering parts of what are now counties Dublin, Kildare, Meath and Louth. This area became known as The Pale. The term comes from the Latin word palus — meaning stake, as in a fence stake. A palisade. The area within the fence. The first recorded use of the term in Ireland dates to around 1446. By the mid-15th century it was the common description for this fortified enclave of English rule surrounded by an Ireland it could no longer control. And from that geography came one of the most enduring phrases in the English language. To be beyond the pale — meaning outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour, outside the rules of civilised society — comes directly from this period. If you were beyond the Pale in medieval Ireland, you were literally outside the area of English law and order, out in the wild Gaelic lands where different rules applied. So what is the legacy of 1169? It is a complicated one. The Norman invasion brought new architecture, new legal structures, new towns and trade routes. Many of the great medieval castles that dot the Irish landscape — Trim, Kilkenny, Dublin Castle itself — are Norman in origin. The Normans changed Ireland irrevocably. But it also began the long, fractured, often brutal relationship between Ireland and England that would define Irish history for centuries. The resentment of conquest. The struggle for land, language and identity. The plantation, the rebellion, the famine, the fight for independence — all of it has roots in the moment Dermot MacMurrough went looking for help and found Strongbow. History is full of decisions that seemed reasonable at the time. Dermot MacMurrough wanted his kingdom back. He could not have known that the forces he invited in would never fully leave. And in Irish history, that invitation has never quite been forgiven. Sure, it's only history. But this particular history shaped everything that came after it.