|
|
|
and so on and so on… What the annalist did not know was that Cathal Crobhderg was the last great Gaelic king ever to rule in Ireland. Cathal had survived because he was careful to make arrangements with the English kings and royal governors, pay annual rent to the Crown, and obtain papal approval for his authority. Aedh, his heir by feudal law, lacked his father’s wisdom and soon he was in conflict with relatives and neighbouring barons alike. The full-scale conquest of Connacht ensued.
In 1235 a great invasion force was put together by a Co Tipperary baron, Richard de Burgo. The war was taken to the Atlantic Ocean and naval engagements involving O’Flahertys and O’Malleys were at their fiercest around the numerous islands of Clew Bay. After ravaging Murrisk and Achill Island in north Mayo, the invaders advanced northwards and inland to make an assault on the island fortress of the Rock on Lough Key in Roscommon, as the Annals of Connacht relate:
Then a fleet of ships with galleries and siege engines came to the lake, and they mounted a catapult on a small platform and many stones were hurled by it into the Rock. And since they could not take it by this means they made numerous vessels out of the houses of Ardcarne, collected all the fuel of the district and putting it on board these rafts set it alight. They bound empty barrels about these rafts to keep them afloat, and sent one of their larger ships, protected by a roof of planking, to tow the rafts to the Rock and so set it afire.
But the people in the fortress were seized with fear and came out, and the Royal Governor put in a garrison of armed and armoured foreigners, well furnished with food and drink. They left the people of Connacht without food or clothing or cattle.
Though the O’Connors and their allies were able to recover the Rock for a time, their power was broken. The five cantreds or baronies nearest Athlone were reserved for King Henry III, but Richard de Burgo became the Lord of Connacht and the possessor of twenty-five cantreds. He built a great castle at Loughrea in east Galway and made it his principal manor. His allies included members of the fitzGerald and de Lacy families who acquired much of the land of Co Sligo. Even the remote Erris peninsula fell to the Barrett family. Maurice fitzGerald founded Sligo town and, around another de Burgo castle, the town of Galway began to grow, attracting Anglo-Norman merchant families, the fourteen most prominent becoming known as the ‘Tribes of Galway’.
In a desperate attempt to halt the Norman expansion, a famous agreement was made at Caoluisce, that is Belleek in Co Fermanagh, in 1258. There Aedh O’Connor of Connacht and Tadg O’Brian of Thomond ‘gave the kingship of the Gaels of Ireland to Brian O’Neill’. Brian was a descendant of what had been the most powerful dynasty in Ireland at the time of St Patrick, the Uí Néill, the descendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages. At one time the Uí Néill had ruled Meath and all of Ulster west of the river Bann. Now Brian, as King of Tír Eoghain, made a determined bid to revive the old glory days. In 1260, with a great Gaelic coalition behind him, Brian advanced into the Earldom of Ulster to do battle with the foreigners:
Aedh O’Connor went to join Brian O’Neill in the North, taking many of the chief men of Connacht with him. O’Neill and the chief men of Cenel Eoghain went, together with Aedh O’Connor, to Downpatrick to attack the Foreigners, and the Foreigners of that place defeated them both. Brian O’Neill, king of the Gaels of Ireland, was killed…
The death of Brian at the Battle of Down, along with dozens of high-born Gaelic commanders, seemed to end all hope of halting further conquest, but already some Gaelic rulers were beginning to recover lost territory – a process rapidly hastened by the invasion of Edward Bruce and the Scots.
|
| Back |
|
