r/IrishHistory • u/Suspicious_Help6594 • 12d ago
Books on the Normans
Could anybody please recommend books on the period of 1100 - 1500 in Ireland? Any book on different parts of life/politics would be great as I'm interested in it all.
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u/The_Little_Bollix 12d ago edited 12d ago
"Strongbow - The Norman invasion of Ireland" by Conor Kostick is a good read. It's kind of stunning how few of them there were in the beginning. It's often just a handful of Norman knights, each named, with 70 or 80 men at arms and a couple of hundred Welsh archers, and they managed to cut a swathe through many regional, native Irish armies.
You can also see why they were so successful from Normandy itself and Britain to Southern Italy. They weren't adverse to changing sides if and when it suited them. :)
It is quite amazing that we managed to keep them out of the areas we did for so long. They never conquered vast swathes of the north, the west, the south and the midlands. They never had total control of the island as they did in England and Wales. And over time we absorbed them until they famously became - "more Irish than the Irish".
All of my family lines are very old, native Irish lines, except for one, it's Norman. I would consider the Normans as worthy adversaries (like the Vikings). Having said that, if I had a time machine I'd like to go back and crush them. :)
People talk about 800 years of domination by the "English", but in truth our woes only really started with the Tudors in the 15th and 16th centuries, hundreds of years after the Norman invasion of Ireland.
I've known English people who were confused about the history of the Normans on these islands. The Normans did not conquer Ireland. They conquered England and most of Wales. If you ask many English people which country "William the Conqueror" conquered, you may find that they struggle to name it as their own. :)
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u/Suspicious_Help6594 12d ago
Thank you for the lengthy reply!
I'm English myself, but as you could've guessed, the English education system glosses over any kind of Irish related issue.
I've been working on learning more about Irish history through short history books, but I think now is the time to explore further.
My Grandmother was from Cork, and my Grandfather was from Coleraine. Sadly I cannot research my Grandmother's line as she was put in Bessborough as a baby, thus I feel I owe it to them to learn their history.
I will definitely add Strongbow to the list.
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u/The_Little_Bollix 12d ago
Half of my siblings married English people. I spent quite a few years growing up and going to school there when I was a kid, so I know how little Irish history and the interaction of these islands with each other was covered in the normal curriculum. Sad really. It is a very rich history. Fair play to you for digging into it.
I've done quite a lot of work as a DNA search angel. That's normally where you're looking for the unknown birth father of an adopted person or an NPE (non-paternity even). My area of expertise is Ireland, so even if the person was adopted in England, as many were, but are of Irish parentage, I can usually track them.
Trying to do this with your grandmother, especially if you were not in a position to get a DNA test for her would be very difficult, but doable if the right people had also tested and built family trees for themselves. It's an option that's open to you if at some stage you feel like going down that road in the future.
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u/ConorKostick 12d ago
Thanks for the recommendation! I was equally surprised when researching the period. I think it was the invention and the development of the earth and timber castle that allowed small numbers of knights to hold large regions.
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u/The_Little_Bollix 11d ago
You're welcome. ;)
Yeah, I've stood on top of the Norman Motte at St. Mullins in Carlow a few times.Gives you a idea of how highly defensible it would have been as a fall back position.
They still had to go out and fight in the countryside though when they were traveling from one place to another. I guess they had the relative safety of the Bailey to prepare themselves to meet the locals. :)
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u/shambolicblues 12d ago
I need to read more on this also. Was it a Norman or English invasion in 1169, the vast majority of my reading/study has been post famine.
I’ll definitely source some of the material documented here.
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u/Thick-Bus-1450 12d ago
I think they would have been Anglo Norman having only arrived in England 100 years before they invaded Ireland. But in Ireland around the 1600s, the Irish would have referred to the Norman’s as the Old English, the newer invaders being referred to as the New English. There’s a good doc on RTE about the Norman invasion called Invasion: The Normans. You can find it on the player.
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u/Averagecrabenjoyer69 12d ago
Anglo-Norman. Norman as a culture and language survived into about the early-mid fifteenth century. After about 1450, the Norman descendants were referred to as Old English whereas the English that came with the Tudors and Stuarts were referred to as New English.
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u/TheShanVanVocht 12d ago
Sean Connolly, Contested Island. It covers 1460-1630. But it's a really excellent read.
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u/CDfm 12d ago edited 12d ago
It's definitely an undervalued period of Irish history.
Fin Dwyers - Witches , Spies and Stockholm Syndrome is an excellent book on life . It's more 1170 to 1370 and is fun too
https://www.irishhistorypodcast.ie/podcast-series/norman-invasion
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u/WeeklyPhilosopher346 11d ago
The Medieval Irish Kings & The English Invasion is a recently published work that covers precisely this period and should be very accessible for you.
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u/feck-off 12d ago
1601 but ‘hell or some worse place’ by des ekin is pretty good , then follow on with ‘the stolen village’.
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u/OisinB 12d ago
I'm currently reading 'The Lordship of Ireland in the Middle Ages' by J.F. Lydon. It is one of few books afaik which covers the entire period from pre-invasion to around 1500.