The last Earl of Ulster is murdered, 1333. The De Burgos and other Anglo-Normans assume Irish names and habits.
In 1326 the Red Earl of Ulster retired into the monastery of Athassel, where he died soon afterwards. His great power descended to his grandson William, who was murdered at or near Carrickfergus in 1333 by the Mandevilles and other Ulster colonists. By his wife, Maud Plantagenet, great-grand-daughter of Henry III., he left one child, Elizabeth, who was only a few months old at the date of his murder. Twenty years afterwards she married Lionel Duke of Clarence, and became ancestress of the Tudors and Stuarts. The Earldom of Ulster thus ultimately merged in the Crown. But the Irish De Burgos refused to acknowledge a baby, who, as a royal ward, would be brought up independently of them; and they preferred to follow the sons of Sir William, the Red Earl’s brother. William the elder assumed the title of MacWilliam Uachtar, or the Upper, took all Galway for his portion, and became ancestor of the Clanricarde family. His brother, Sir Edmund, as MacWilliam Iochtar, or the Lower, took Mayo, and founded the family which bears that title. They threw off their allegiance to England, and became more Irish than the Irish. They reappear in the sixteenth century under the modern name of Burke. About the same time several other Anglo-Normans assumed Irish names. The Stauntons became MacAveelys; the Berminghams MacFeoris; the D’Exeters, MacJordans; the Barretts, MacAndrews, MacThomins, MacRoberts, and MacPaddins; the Nangles, MacCostelloes; the Mayo Prendergasts, MacMaurices. The De Burgos themselves had many subordinate branches, each with its peculiar Irish name, as MacDavid, MacPhilbin, MacShoneen, MacGibbon, MacWalter, and MacRaymond. Nor was the practice confined to Connaught. Some of the Leinster Fitzgeralds became MacThomases and MacBarons; and some of the same house in Munster were transfigured into MacGibbons, MacThomaisins, and MacEdmonds. Many other Anglo-Normans or English families were more or less completely transformed in the same way. It is only necessary to mention that the Wesleys or Wellesleys, who gave England its greatest captain, were sometimes called MacFabrenes; and that the Bissetts of Antrim, whose connections in Scotland gave the Tudors such trouble, may still be traced as Makeons. In the district near Dublin, which got the name of the English Pale, some Irish residents took English names, and the practice was encouraged by a statute of Edward IV. There is probably no country in Europe where the population is so thoroughly mixed as it is in Ireland.
Edward III. creates three great earldoms: Kildare, Desmond, and Ormonde.
As the Earls of Ulster disappear, other families attain prominence, and the earlier Tudor history is mainly occupied with the struggles of three earldoms, created in the first half of the fourteenth century. The name Geraldine, to which Giraldus Cambrensis gave a more extended signification, was in later times confined to the descendants of Maurice Fitzgerald, one of Nesta’s many sons. One branch was firmly settled in Kildare before the death of Henry II., and in the reign of Edward I. the head of it was John Fitz-Thomas, whose dissensions with William de Vesci, Lord of Kildare, ended in an appeal to the King, and a challenge to the trial by combat. Fitz-Thomas was the challenger, and on his adversary failing to appear, he received a royal grant of De Vesci’s lands. In 1316 Edward II. created him Earl of Kildare, and the Duke of Leinster is descended from him. During most of the fifteenth century, and for the first third of the sixteenth, this was on the whole the most powerful family in Ireland. The Earls of Kildare commanded the whole strength of that county, and its proximity to Dublin often enabled them to control the government. Meath was too much divided for its proprietors to act as a counterpoise, and the strength of the rival house of Ormonde lay at a distance from the capital, and was exposed to attacks from another branch of the Geraldines, whose chief was created Earl of Desmond in 1329. The Desmonds first rose at the expense of the MacCarthies in Kerry. A marriage with the heiress of Fitz-Anthony brought them the western half of the county Waterford and other large estates. This lady’s son married the heiress of the Cogans, and her great property in Cork was added to the rest. The Desmonds never became quite so completely Hibernicised as the De Burgos; but they attained something very like independence, and more than once proved too strong for the government. The third great earldom was founded in the person of Edmund Butler, who was created Earl of Carrick in 1315; the better known title of Ormonde being conferred on his son James in 1328. The founder of the family was Theobald Fitz-Walter, who accompanied Henry II. to Ireland, and was by him made hereditary butler with a grant of the prisage of wines. The name of office was adopted by his descendants, who derived great advantage from the grant. Ormonde is properly the northern part of Tipperary, but the earls became palatine lords of nearly all the county, and owners of vast estates in Kilkenny and Wexford. Their principal castles were Kilkenny, Gowran, Carrick-on-Suir, and Arklow. The possession of the latter place gave them ready access to England, and through all turns of weal and woe they ever remained faithful to the Crown. If regard be had to the length of time that it retained eminence, or to the average ability of its chiefs, or to its comparative civilisation in rude times, the House of Ormonde must be accounted the most distinguished of the Anglo-Norman families of Ireland.
Towns in Ireland: Dublin and Drogheda.
The native Irish had no regular towns. The Anglo-Normans took possession of those founded by the Ostmen, which were all on the coast, and founded many others, of which only three or four, and those not the most important, were at a distance from navigable rivers. Athassel in Tipperary is sometimes called a town, but it never became a municipality, and can have been little more than an aggregation of poor houses about the great monastery, and there may have been other similar cases. Dublin obtained its first charter from Henry II. in 1171 or 1172, and Drogheda from Henry III. in 1229.
‘Dublin and Drogheda,’ says the historian of the Irish capital, ‘were neither distinctly English nor Irish. Their citizens, as tax-contributing and acknowledged subjects of England, relied on her for protection against oppressive Anglo-Norman nobles and hostile natives. The Irish—unless Anglicised—had no legal part in these communities, but continuous mutual intercourse was sustained by the advantages derived from traffic.’ ‘In our documents,’ adds the same writer, ‘Scandinavians or Ostmans but rarely appear, although in 1215 the latter people were of sufficient importance to have been associated with the English of Dublin by King John as parties to an inquiry held there by his justiciary. The proportion of the various national elements cannot be absolutely determined by the forms of names;’ for many names originated in personal peculiarities, many were translated from one language to another, and many Irishmen became denizens, and adopted an English patronymic. The ‘Irish town’ which exists outside the old bounds of Dublin, Limerick, Kilkenny, Clonmel, and other places, doubtless perpetuates the memory of a time when the natives congregated in the neighbourhood of civic communities to which they did not belong.35
Other towns: Limerick, Waterford, and Cork the chief.
What has been said of Dublin and Drogheda applies to the other cities and towns of Ireland. Limerick received its first charter from John in 1197, Waterford from the same prince in 1206, and Cork from Henry III. in 1242. These were the chief centres of trade and of English law in the south of Ireland. The less important municipalities owed their origin generally to some great noble, the Crown afterwards adopting them and granting fresh privileges. Kilkenny received a charter from the Earl Marshal between 1202 and 1218. New Ross, well situated at the junction of the Nore and Barrow, belonged to the same great man, and excited the jealousy of Waterford at least as early as 1215. Clonmel was included in a grant made by Henry II. to Otho de Grandison. It passed into the hands of the De Burgos, who probably incorporated it, and who received a royal grant to hold a fair there in 1225. Fethard, Callan, Gowran, and other inland towns were of less consequence, but were still distinctly English in origin and character. Youghal and Kinsale were also corporate towns. The latter received a charter from Edward III. in 1333, and the former, which had been long identified with the Desmond family, seems not to have been regularly incorporated till 1462. The Kinsale charter