404. Norman Conquest: Colonising Ireland (Part 4)

How did the Normans conquer the Celts on the fringes of their territory after 1066? What led to the events of the Norman Conquest of Ireland, which still affects the nation’s politics today? And how did the Norman invasion of Wales change the landscape through the building of new castles? In Episode 4, William Dalrymple is joined by Marc Morris, author of The Norman Conquest and The Anglo-Saxons, to discuss the lesser-known history of the Norman Invasion… Brought to you by Attio. Try Attio for free at attio.com/empire Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com. Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Charlie Rodwell Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:16Speaker 00

  In the last episodes of Empire, we've talked about the familiar story, the relatively familiar story of the Battle of Hastings and William the Conqueror coming, defeating Harold, the arrow in the eye and all that stuff. We're going into much less well-known territory today, but arguably more important because this is the moment that the Normans move into Scotland, conquer Wales, build all those amazing fortresses on the Welsh border. And finally, Strongbow takes Ireland, captures Dublin and begins the English conquest of Ireland. A wound whose pain is still being felt today. I'm on my own with our wonderful friend, Mark Morris. Mark, welcome back to the show.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me back.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  Well, last time we had such fun and got so chatty about the Harrying of the North and Doomsday book that we barely had mention of the really important events which take place towards the end of William the Conqueror's reign and his successor's reign. When the Norman influence or arms spill over into the Celtic fringe, beyond the Harrying of the North, beyond Cumbria, the whole business of the Normans in Scotland, which is a peaceful infiltration rather than a conquest, but which is incredibly important for Scotland's history. The slightly different story of the Normans in Wales.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  And anyone that's wandered around the Welsh border country will know there's magnificent Norman castles with their keeps and their deep ditches which still act as a kind of boundary in the landscape between the two countries. We're going to be talking about all that. And then in the second half, we're going to look at the bit of Norman history that arguably has left the most current wounds, which is still current history because it's the story of the Normans in Ireland. And the wounds opened up by Strongbow and his followers arguably have never been healed.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  They continue to fester even to this day, or certainly we're still feeling some of the last aftershocks of that conquest. So really important stuff. And I think it's material which is much less well known than the story of the Battle of Hastings, which many of us study at school, but arguably just as important. And Mark, this is something you've been working on for a book in the last few years.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  Yes, too many years, really. My publishers would say. For me, the dynamic of, let's say, the people who lived in England after the conquest, whatever we call them, pushing north and west in search of not just conquest for its own sake, but in search of profit, in search of more land. That is the dominant dynamic of those three centuries until you get to the Black Death, when all of a sudden you lose maybe half the population and all of a sudden that population pressure disappears. And the English expansion suddenly becomes a contraction.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  I think this is stuff that will come as a bit of a surprise to most listeners. This is not stuff we study at school in the British curriculum. And even if you're getting a bit of it in your Irish or your Scottish curriculum, Scottish and Irish and Welsh listeners, I suspect you won't know the other bits of the Celtic world which were affected. So this hopefully will pull the whole thing together. Now, I'd like to start, Mark, with one of the main sources, William of Malmesbury, because he sort of creates an intellectual justification in a way for the Norman conquest in that he calls the Celts on the edge of Norman territory barbarians. And he focuses particularly on the fact that they still have slaves.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  This is an important part of his rhetoric.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, people who listened to the previous episode might remember just at the very end, I said, two of the things that the Normans introduced immediately after 1066 were chivalry in the sense of not killing your opponents when they surrender, sparing them, ransoming them, maybe letting them go free if they promised to be good. And the other side of that is slavery, which the Normans had done in the past when they were Vikings, but hadn't done for a generation before the conquest and didn't do afterwards. In a way that all the people in Britain and Ireland, all the peoples in Britain and Ireland, whether they were Anglo Saxons or Scots or Irish or Welsh, slavery as an institution and war as slave hunt was very much the normal way of doing things. And the Normans end that quite quickly.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  And so you get to, to finally get to the point you wanted to start at, William of Malmesbury. You get to a point, William of Malmesbury is writing in the 1120s. And so this is 50 or 60 years after the initial Norman onslaught.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  Sitting in Wiltshire in the west of England.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's in western England, yes, Wessex. These new attitudes have now in England have become the norm. They've percolated down from the aristocracy and everyone accepts the fact that, oh, we used to do slavery. We don't do it anymore. We used to do politically, we don't do that anymore. But they're looking at their neighbors and say, well, these guys do exactly what we used to do. And that's one very important factor, sort of moral factor, if you like. There are lots of other things that the main one, I think, or one of the main planks of Malmesbury's argument is it's an economic shift because in the course of the 10th and the 11th centuries, England had really stolen a march on its insular neighbors in all kinds of ways, like having an abundant silver coinage, having towns with thousands, if not tens of thousands of people,

• 7:44Speaker 03

  in the case of London, having proto-universities by the end of the 11th century and certainly universities into the 12th century, international trade, you know, big new Romanesque cathedrals.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  And the monasteries, not to be forgotten, they're very important, particularly in the north.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  All those things we talked about again in terms of the revolution that the conquest ushers in. But the fundamental thing even before the conquest was that England was precociously rich, united and powerful. You know, coinage is a very fundamental thing, you know, if you've got all this silver sort of sloshing around. And when you go to Scotland, Ireland and Wales, they don't even have coins. They don't mint coins. The only species they've got is imported or stolen, you know, filtered from England. These things hadn't been particularly noticeable in the course of the 10th century. They're very noticeable by the late 11th century. And by the 12th century, William of Malmesbury is happy to draw this distinction by saying, these people on just economic criteria alone are barbarians.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  And that was an important shift because previously, if you'd said to somebody, oh, these people are barbarians, your listener would have understood, oh, you mean they're non-Christian. They're the pagan men from the north who have been raiding for the last 200. No, no, no. Malmesbury's point was he was reviving a classical distinction, which was these people are barbarians because they don't meet the sort of socio-economic standards that we have. And that was a big shift. And if Malmesbury wasn't the first to do it, he was certainly the person who expressed it most stridently, most intelligently, most trenchantly.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  And this, of course, is a message which in various forms will continue and power the English conquest of the globe, this idea that the English are somehow more civilized, more clued in about the way things should be than the people around them. And it's an idea which leads to the British Empire ultimately.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, in this case, in a sort of a forerunner of that, which has been dubbed the first English empire, the English expanding into Ireland and Scotland and Wales. And, you know, without sort of wishing to side with Malmesbury, on an economic level, there's no denying his right, you know, that all these things apply. But what he then does is he puts a sort of a moral filter and says, well, the reason these people Aren't as productive as us is because they're lazy or they're feckless or they're not as Christian as they should be. So when you desperately greedily eyeing the lands to the north and west and thinking, well, we could farm that more productively. We could, you know, build castles there and have nice minorialised society. Then you start to come up with rationales for saying, and these people haven't done that because they're savages.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  And that's, that's, that therefore justifies us going in to take their lands and to subdue them.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  Really important point.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  In terms of the sort of the philosophy behind, you know, the, if you want to, that's probably a grand term. But in terms of the, um, the, the thought process behind these people who are doing the conquering, he's an imperialist writer.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  Mark, let's start with Scotland. And the first thing we'd say is that Scotland is a fairly new concept at this point. Before that, we've had pick land, we've had the Britons in, in the west. And we've had the, the Irish, muddlingly the Scotty, the Scots, uh, heading into, uh, first the west, uh, of Scotland. And then allowing and conquering the peaks. And with Kenneth MacAlpin, we get at the beginnings of a Scottish state. Now, by this stage, uh, that is quite well established by the time of the Norman conquest of England, doesn't it?

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I, as I wouldn't say Scotland is any newer a concept than England. But the point is that, um, there had been earlier, um, societies, earlier kingdoms. And the thing that throws everything into a state of chaos and confusion is the Vikings in the course of the late ninth and through the 10th century. The problem with Scotland is in England, when you see kingdoms that we know about, Mercia and Northumbria and East Anglia being destroyed. It's comparatively well documented, not least because Wessex survives and we have the Anglo Saxon Chronicle produced in Wessex. So we can see, not in as much detail as we'd like, but fair, we can see the, the outlines of this story and we can see what happens in England. The problem in Scotland is we don't, no, no good sources at all. But what, what we see.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  At the same time that England is emerging is the emergence of a new kingdom, the kingdom of the Scots. The crucial thing to point out for, you know, for someone like me who was new to it about five years ago, is that the kingdom of the Scots originally is very small, just as Wessex is initially small and becomes a larger kingdom called England. Scotland, when people refer to it in the first instance, is just the area to the north of the, well, it's the, the Tay Basin really. So it's only about, you know, 50 miles wide and about the same north to south. It doesn't extend any further south than the line where Scotland is at its narrowest point, the fourth Clyde line between those two furths.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  And there's this big area of what they call debatable land, isn't there, between the two, which, which is more or less semi-independent?

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, this is, so you've got, if you, if you measure from the, say, the north, the north of Yorkshire to the fourth Clyde line, it's about 120, 150 miles.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Where I spent all my childhood, the kingdom of Northumbria.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  There you go. And you'll know there, but, but even if you say Northumbria to people, they think of the modern county. Whereas the kingdom of Northumbria is vast and extensive.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Many of us would call it the most beautiful and, and civilised part of the country, between the, the, the fourth and the number, exactly.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  But maybe not so much if you're living in the 11th century. But it's, uh, but one of the things, one of the, the problems for Northumbria is it's been sort of muddling along for the last hundred years or so. As I guess kind of a client kingdom, we're very poorly informed about this region, but it's sort of like they're doing their own thing, as you say, semi-independent, but occasionally kowtowing either to England or to Scotland. And what happens in the wake of the Norman conquest is the Normans, being Normans, is they go in hard, kind of with castles and colonisation. And the Scots seem to sort of match them blow for blow. So that middle kingdom that's neither Scotland nor England is kind of ground between these two big millstones.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  And by the end of the 11th century, it's gone, you know, and there's a new, these two kingdoms now, England and obviously the much, much smaller, much less powerful, much less prosperous kingdom of Scotland is, is kind of rubbing up against expansionary Norman England.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  But initially having some quite sort of successful forries southwards, that there isn't a sense that the Scots are, are easy, easy pickings for the Normans?

• 14:08Speaker 03

  No, well, apart from anything else, if you're ruling a kingdom from, from London or Winchester, as the Normans are, then Scotland is obviously a long way away. So it's far easier to, to, to raid into Northumbria from, uh, say Edinburgh than it is to go and stop people raiding Northumbria if you're raising armies in southern England. So that has to be a very major royal expedition. Um, and the Scots have been raid, they've clearly been raiding into Northumbria for, for decades.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  There's a Hexham Chronicle that says there's not a hamlet or a hut in Scotland without an English slave.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Well, that's, that takes us back to the initial point that their economy is, is based on sort of war as slave hunt. And they don't have any, anything in the way of coins. So what you promise to your, your, your, your powerful men, your powerful, um, heads of clans is in, in four years' time, or, or that we, it's been five years since we did a, a, a previous great raid. This summer, we're going to go on a great raid and we can fill our boots, you know, we can go home with thousands of captives all chained or roped together. And, you know, make a fortune. And that's, that's the, the primary purpose of, of the Scottish kingship is to facilitate that transfer of wealth. And of course, that brings them, um, up against the, the Normans who would rather do things differently.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  So into this picture comes another fly in the ointment, which is refugees from the Anglo Saxon Royal House coming north to Scotland. Edgar the Athling, uh, who we mentioned last time, and I wrongly said he died in Hungary. He dies, as you suggested, in the West Country. So interesting characters to dwell on there. Uh, the last male heir of the House of Wessex and his mother and sisters, um, including, um, Margaret, who became Saint Margaret. I remember as a young, good Catholic boy, uh, on the altar at church, uh, as a, as a teenager, celebrating the moment that Margaret became a saint.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Edgar is to remind people, the, um, the man with the strongest blood claim to the English throne. Uh, he's the, he's a, a great nephew of Edward the Confessor. He's a, you know, called Athling because he's a member of the House of Wessex. He's throne worthy. And when the rebellions start immediately after the conquest, um, because he's, he's complicit in them. He flees north and eventually when William comes north, the leaders of that rebellion ultimately end up fleeing to Scotland for, for sort of, um, political refuge, as you say. And very quickly, um, their, their fortunes are linked, as you said, by Ed, Edgar's sister, we don't know whether she's older or younger, but his sister Margaret is, is snapped up by Malcolm. Malcolm the Third, the King of Scots.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Malcolm Canmore.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  Malcolm Canmore, if you wish, yes. This, I think, is one of the reasons that William personally feels the need to intervene. Because all of a sudden Malcolm has linked his dynasty with the old English dynasty. So potentially the children of that marriage.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  Have a right to the throne of England.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Have the right to the throne. So William is quite quick, once, you know, once he's dealt with rebellions in England. Uh, the first thing he does is to lead an army right into Scotland. And it's not up to the border, it's right into the heart of the kingdom of Scots. He crosses the, the fourth, probably at Stirling, and, and there's a treaty signed at a place called Abernethy. This is the beginnings of a sort of, if you like, the sort of in, in English as much as Norman, English infiltration into the, the Scottish house and the Anglicisation of the Scottish house, which had previously been purely native. Now we have a queen who is Anglo Hungarian. Starts making all these kind of changes in terms of like religious practice at the core, introducing Benedictine monks, um, introducing manners and customs and ways of doing things.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  One of the reasons that Margaret is such an interesting character is we have a contemporary biography written of her. So, you know, allowing for all the, the biases and, you know, propaganda, uh, like qualities to that biography. It's, it's wonderfully unique because it's, there are very few women in stories like this, you know, women get underrepresented in general in the Middle Ages, especially when it comes to stories of kind of blood and thunder and conquest and colonisation. But she is, it is, is one of the ways in which, uh, Scotland starts to change. One of the things you can see that is very, very striking, for the next decade or so, their successors, uh, her eldest children with Malcolm are all given English names. So she has a son called Edward and she has a son called Edgar and she has a son called Athelstan.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  And these, these, these kings are sort of also rank kings, they die out quite quickly. But you could have had a situation where it was quite hard to tell apart the kings of pre-conquests England and post-conquest Scotland, because they are, they are sharing the same Anglo Saxon names.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  And of course, they also share a, a language that, uh, English is spoken as certainly as far north as the further forth. Uh, and, uh, and you have a whole load of English place names right through the Lothians and the borders, right up to at least to further forth, where you could begin to get names like Abernethy, which are, are peak Celtic names.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Yes. Um, I mean, I think one of the difficulties they have though is that Malcolm isn't speaking, um, English, he's speaking Gaelic. Um, so they have difficulties communicating at first. But anyway, so Edgar, um, via Edgar Margaret, very important in sort of, um, sort of setting the Scottish monarchy on a different path. But I suspect the other thing we should talk about is the, the next generation.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  So this is David the First of Scotland who we're talking about here. I grew up very much being taught that David was the man who brought sort of European civilisation in, in quotes to, to, uh, to Scotland and particularly the very beautiful border abbeys, which I spent a lot of my childhood pottering around. Jedburgh, Kelso, uh, Melrose, these beautiful, beautiful Cistercian abbeys are very much David's creation, aren't they?

• 19:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I mean, David has certainly come in for a certain amount of revisionism in the last 30 years or so. But I think that his importance to Scotland is still unrivalled in as much as. As you say, he is the conduit by which sort of not just Anglicisation, but the Europeanisation of of the Scottish monarchy and by extension Scottish society is really sort of set underway or massively increases. It was perhaps begun with his mother. The crucial thing is that David is is brought up at the Anglo Norman court. So he's brought up at the court of Henry I of England.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  He's sent southwards. Is it as a hostage or is it to sort of, you know, give him a good education further south? Or what's the idea there?

• 20:25Speaker 03

  It's because in the there are there are lots of politics which we haven't got time to get into, but because there is a sort of backlash after Margaret and Malcolm die and there are more conventionally Scottish Gaelic speaking kings and the Anglicised members of the Royal House have to flee south. It's kind of they go back the other way, the refugees, and they are refugees at the Norman court. And also because his sister, who's given the good Anglo Saxon name of Edith, marries Henry I of of of England. So this is William the Conqueror's son. So it all gets sort of genealogically very complicated. But we have an now we have an Anglo Scottish queen of of Anglo Norman England. He is Henry I's younger brother in law. And because he doesn't have any prospect in Scotland, he

• 21:07Speaker 03

  fights for Henry I in Normandy and he all effect to all intents and purposes becomes a sort of an honorary Anglo Norman knight or baron.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Now, it's not just him either, is it? Because he brings back with him to Scotland a whole load of people with rather familiar names like Stuart, like Baileal, and my wife's family, the Fraser's, who I was always brought up to believe were strawberry pickers, Fraser's from from Bordeaux, but I'm told that isn't a real etymology.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  I suspect not, but not apart from anything else, because that's that's based on their heraldry and we don't have heraldry and for another hundred years or so. The crucial point is that David, against all expectations, because he's the youngest child of Malcolm and Margaret, he's the, I think, the eighth child, he's got many, many older brothers who were king ahead of him. Because they all die off without heirs, he is suddenly and unexpectedly King of Scots from 1124. All of a sudden, therefore, we have a very Europeanised man in charge of Scotland. Also very pious, as you say, and he's founding lots of monasteries. I mean, there's a checklist of things I can run off that he does. He founds monasteries, which have previously been very, very few on the ground in Scotland.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  He founds more monasteries, I think, than any other European ruler of the Middle Ages. He founds new towns, boroughs, as they're known in Scotland. So he's founding places like Roxburgh, Edinburgh, he's is getting merchants to come in and set up shop.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  And this is really important for the economy of Scotland. This is, I mean, Roxburgh is one of the no longer exists as a town, it's just a ruin, but in its day was one of the great economic hubs of the north of Britain.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. And significantly, these are all in the first instance, the early decades of his reign, these are all south of the River Forth. So they're in the place called Lothian, which at the time was considered not part of the Kingdom of Scotland. It was land ruled by the King of Scots, but not of Scotland itself. So he's developing this bit of the intermediate zone, which is of course close to England, closer to the North Sea, closer to the continent. One of the things he's able to do is, because he's got lands in England given to him by Henry I, he's able to use the profits of those lands to found these new startups, if you like. That's exactly what they are, startups, new towns, new monasteries. Also, because one of the first things he does in when the Civil War of Stephen's reign kicks off is he seizes Carlisle, seizes Cumbria, and he's able to

• 23:29Speaker 03

  exploit new silver mines which have been opened up in the previous decade or so. So for the first time in Scottish history, the Scots are striking their own silver coin.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Mark, just before we go to the break, this is just looking ahead, because this is something that will be a familiar landmark to many people around the world, Braveheart. Now, Braveheart has these Scottish nobles who are depicted as traitors to Scotland, and they are in fact people like the Baileals and the Bruces, who are Norman Arriveists, who who do look to the south and who do try to reach an accommodation with English. So that, though Braveheart is very poor history, the fact that there's an aristocracy which is looking southwards and is sympathetic to the Norman court in the south is not is not false, is it? It's true.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  Well, no, there you see, the thing is, though, there are there are always people within the within a particular polity. I mean, the problem with Scotland in the in 1280s, when Braveheart notionally kicks off, is that you've got rival claims to the crown. And people with the best claim to the crown, who are the the the Baileos, Baileos, they are able to take a more independent line. The people who have the weaker claim to the throne, the Bruces, who ironically become the sort of the identified with the patriotic cause even more staunchly, in the first instance, for a couple of generations, they are quite happy to tell the kings of England whatever they want to hear because they're looking for English support to bolster their claim. But leaving all those politics aside, the one point I would make is that 200 years is a long time. By the time we

• 24:59Speaker 03

  get to to the late 13th century, this is more than two centuries after the Norman conquest, these people now consider themselves Scottish. They don't go around saying, oh, my great, great, great, great, great grandfather was a Norman, because they've been, there's loads of intermarriage with Gaelic families, there's loads of intermarriage with English families. Similarly, Edward I doesn't consider himself Norman either, he considers himself English.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  But although he considers himself Scottish, Braveheart, the real the real William Wallace is actually of British, that's Strathclyde, British stock, and he has no kilt, no woad, none of the kit that Mel Gibson wears.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  I'd go along with the no kilt, no woad, no sort of no Anglo Australian accent, but or US Australian accent, but or no dodgy Scottish accent perhaps. But I think that I mean, we know so little about Wallace's background, the fact that he's called Le Walleys, you know, I think neither here nor there. But my my point, and this is an important point I have to make in the book, is that people's national identities shift quite quickly. I mean, you listening to me and the way I talk and the books I write about, you'd assume I was English. In fact, you know, my father was a Dubliner and I hold the only passport I hold is an Irish one. But I'm not, you know, I don't present as if if I lived in Boston, I might say, oh, yes, I'm Marco Morris and a long, long line of Irishmen, you know. So people's people's, where where where people's identity like

• 26:21Speaker 03

  can shift very quickly. And in the case of the Normans, which is obviously what the main theme of this episode is, the Normans are very good at sort of integrating themselves out of existence. They're not like the Romans, they don't come in and say, we're the Romans, this is Roman law, this is Roman society, you will you will bend to our way of doing things. The Normans go in and very quickly, wherever they go, whether it's the Mediterranean or whether it's England, they're very quick to say, within a couple of generations, oh, well, you know, I grew up in Yorkshire, so I'm basically English now.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  Now, we're going to take a break now. In the second half, we're going to go into more violent intrusions into the Celtic fringe, when the Normans invade Wales and fatally Ireland.

• 27:07Speaker 04

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• 27:42Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Now, with Wales, Mark Morris, we have a very different story of the relatively peaceful integration of the Normans into into the Scottish polity. But in Wales, they come with swords and modern bailey castles, not with invitations. Take us there.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  Well, yes. So in the so Wales and England have been have been sort of, you know, hostile for centuries.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  Offa's Dyke is built to keep the Welsh out, isn't it?

• 28:05Speaker 03

  Offa's Dyke, exactly. Well, for whatever reason, it's a it's a it's a line in the sand, isn't it? Or more than that. But anyway, the when the Normans arrive, there are Anglo Saxon rebellions going on and they are being they are seeking help, the Anglo Saxon rebels, from the the multiple Welsh kingdoms in Wales. So in the first instance, when the Normans go in to what we would later call the March of Wales, the borderland, they are planting castles really just to sort of put a cordon sanitaire between these polities to the west.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  This is like the kind of Israeli separation wall between Israel and the West Bank.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  If you say so. But anyway, so that's the first instance. Going forward, because as I say, one of the things that the key chief dynamic of this whole period is, the population of England is exploding from the middle of the 11th century, and there are all of a sudden, you know, 50%, 60% more people that that are looking for land. So they're going into Wales, particularly along the north coast and the south coast, looking for the most fertile bits to steal for themselves.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  And we complained in the Scottish part of this story about the lack of sources, but we have a very opinionated, very well educated and well briefed figure to tell us about Wales in in the person of Gerald of Wales and his whole family. Tell us about them.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Well, we have we have that as well. I mean, the sources for Wales for this period are very good. We've got some some some a family of monks as well, writing, or a family of priests writing in in Keridigian on the Welsh on the West Welsh coast. Gerald of Wales is is a couple of generations later, he's he's he writes these kind of travelogues almost. He's like a sort of Bill Bryson of the late 12th century, writing about Wales and Ireland and and his travels in these countries with a very kind of, you know, Sort of insightful eye, very prejudiced eye. But his family, so to take it back to the sort of early stages of the conquest, he's the grandson of another Gerald, who's called Gerald of Windsor. And Gerald of Windsor is the man who's put in South West Wales by Henry the First,

• 30:03Speaker 03

  sort of try and clamp clamp down on the area after Welsh rebellions. And he's the man who establishes, or if he not establishes, then, you know, develops very quickly from humble beginnings, Pembroke Castle in the in the extreme South West. And crucially, again, I'm saying in reference to the Normans in other areas, they integrate very quickly. What Gerald of Wales does is he marries the daughter of the pre the the last king of South West Wales, the last king of Deihoybath, Rees of Deihoybath, Rees Ap Tudor. And so his descendants are, well, are they Welsh? Are they English? Are they Normans? You know, they've got this very interesting opinion of themselves. And they basically, Gerald of Wales basically says, well, we're the best of all three worlds.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  You know, we have this sort of fighting, you know, ability from our Norman ancestors. And we have this kind of wileness and tenaciousness from the Welsh. So he's he's he's sort of has a very interesting identity at a point where identities are in flux. But he's he's one of our best informed sources for what is, you know, I think, one of the most fascinating periods in in Welsh history.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  And and just to encourage people to go to see the remains here. Some of the most spectacular castles and medieval ruins in Northern Europe are the Welsh Marcha castles. They are remarkable objects.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  And and the other thing is the density of of of castle building in this period is because, you know, when when you're in England, England, as I've said repeatedly, is a kind of a precociously united, well governed, centralised state from the late 10th century onwards. That's absolutely the opposite is true in Wales. And this is the key to understanding the difference between Wales and Scotland is Scotland, although that there are the outlying bits of it, you know, beyond the core, are all sort of more or less independent. So Murray in the north and, you know, Galloway to the south west and Lothian to the south. There's a kingdom at the core of Scotland that the Normans can do business with and negotiate with. If not as equals, then kind of like as country cousins, you know.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  Whereas when they look at Wales, there is no polity that they consider worthy of buying into. So they're not going to marry their daughters in the first instance to the King of Gwynedd or the King of Deihoybath, or maybe the, you know, Baron like Gerald of Windsor will. But there's no sense of we can sort of enter this polity and it will be a kind of a host for our ambitions. They just go in and say, they're our rivals and we'll just take this by force. And we'll just push them into the sea, you know. So that's why you get just such a vast number of castles being built. And also, as with Scotland, in this more controlled way that is happening with David of Scotland, they are planting new towns, they are building new monasteries. And very crucially, they are bringing in peasant colonisers, peasant colonists.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  And this is one of the very poorly documented things. Because chroniclers, for the most part, aren't interested in the doings of peasants. But none of this sticks, none of this conquest holds if you don't bring in English farmers to do the kind of grunt work of conquest, laying out new manners, laying out new fields, you know, all the all the hard graft. It's no good just building a castle and then sort of, you know, riding out and trying to compel the Welsh to to mineralise. So they and and this is the thing that drives everything is the land hunger from people in England who have got not enough land to keep their families alive. In every case, both in Wales and in Scotland and ultimately in Ireland, these new landlords are able to say, I've built a castle, I've built a church, I've built a new town.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  And if you come here and live in this attractively named new place, then then you will not have to pay rent for the first 10 years. Or you won't have to pay, you know, your rent will be a peppercorn rent, literally.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  And and it is, in in every sense, colonisation. It's not just a military seizure of land, but you're settling people on that land and encouraging them to move there from elsewhere and speak your language and and fly your flag.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  And I think it's it's it it really boils down to, of course, you know, ethnic identities and and sheer kicks, you know, daring do of, you know, this is what we are brought up from boyhood to do as knights is to kind of go and, you know, conquer and build castles, et cetera. And so you can get a very kind of a sense of a sort of a boy's own history when you read older histories of this period. But the fundamental thing is, as I say, population explosion, land hunger and and this this, what one historian, the late and much missed Professor Sir Rees Davis, called a second tidal wave of Anglicisation. So in other sense, the first tidal wave was the English arriving in Britain in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries and spreading over the the lowland parts of Britain.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  And this is a new sort of the the the English sort of spilling over those boundaries, such is their hunger at this point for more land, into the less desirable parts in terms of, obviously, Scotland, Wales and Ireland have more upland. There's, you know, there's a lot of the land is not good enough quality to be be worth conquering. But they're going for the best bits in these in these countries and claiming them for themselves.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  Now, it doesn't stop in Wales, does it? Because in Wales, there is a man who very much wants to move further still into the Celtic world of the West. And that is Richard de Clare, known as Strongbow. Take us there.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, he, again, there's a little bit of backstory there because people have been looking at Ireland since the beginning of the 12th century, if not earlier. I mean, William Rufus, at the end of the 11th century, the conqueror's first successor as King of England, he is said to have stood on the coast of Pembrokeshire and fantasised about building a bridge of boats across the Irish Sea to conquer Ireland. By the time you get to the middle of the 12th century, Henry the Second, right at the start of his reign, is applying to the Pope for permission to conquer Ireland and is is all set to go until he's distracted by other business in his sprawling kind of, you know, cross-channel empire. So the idea of of, you know, Ireland is the next stage in the in the next part of the frontier that we're going to colonise, that's there very strongly.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  What sort of finally sort of tips it over and sort of makes it a viable proposition is infighting amongst the kings of Ireland. Because Ireland, like Wales, is a country of many kings. Perhaps not as many as some books would have you believe, but there's at least half a dozen really strong contenders. And one of them, or they are perpetually at loggerheads. In the middle of the 1160s, one of them, the King of Leinster, Dermot McMurra, is driven into exile by his rivals and winds up at the court of Henry the Second. And Henry the Second still has neither the time nor the resources to devote to a conquest of Ireland. But basically says, as we are led to believe by Gerald of Wales, who's writing the propaganda version of all of this.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  Sure, go ahead, I can't help you, but you have licence to recruit men within my my realm. And he finds no shortage of men in South West Wales, not least the Fitzgeralds, who are ready, because because the Welsh by this point are pushing back. And so they're looking for easier pickings. And the Fitzgeralds are among the first to go. What they really need, though, is a big player, not just of, you know, the sort of small fry that they are or medium sized fry. And they get the sort of somewhat embarrassed Earl Richard de Clare, who is in financial trouble, but can nevertheless still command command fairly large resources. He is able to sail to Ireland in 1169, I think it is.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  It's that he, I think, on the 23rd of August 1170 is the day that Strongbow arrives on the coast.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. So in the wake of earlier sort of incursions by the Fitzgeralds, he comes in to sort of really sort of deliver the killer blow with several thousand men in 1170. And within a very short space of time, he's taken Dublin. And the crucial thing here is this is this is more success than they had anticipated. Certainly more success than Henry the Second had anticipated. Because they don't simply go back and and reinstate the exiled Dermot McMurra. Strongbow is promised, or at some point, a deal is done whereby he marries McMurra's daughter, Dermot's daughter, and is promised the succession of the Kingdom of Leinster.

• 38:20Speaker 03

  And then, as I say, has taken Dublin, which is a really, really powerful city.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  It's the most prosperous trading city in Ireland, isn't it? Viking foundation.

• 38:30Speaker 03

  And not least because of a very, very thriving Irish Sea slave trade. It's the entrepot for all these slaves that have been taken out of Wales and et cetera.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  So this sets us up for what we're going to see for many centuries to come, which is Dublin as an English bridgehead in the Irish countryside, with Englishmen sailing across from Wales or from England and landing in Dublin and looking out from there into the Celtic lands beyond and thinking covetously, this looks nice.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, and a lot of land is taken very, very quickly. So Leinster falls, as I say, Meath to the north, the sort of smaller kingdom, which is the sort of, but nevertheless very prosperous and productive, which is like the hinterland of Dublin. The crucial thing here is Henry the Second himself intervenes because he is aghast at the idea that these these men are sort of like, perhaps a phrase I'm going to end up overusing, but it's like, they are kind of Danny and Peachy types. They are the men who wouldn't want to be kings.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  This is a Kipling reference, Danny and Peachy Carnahan, from The Man Who Would Be King.

• 39:37Speaker 03

  Exactly. And like the Michael Caine Sean Connery film, they're not little men. They don't want to be subjects of the King of England. They want to go beyond the frontier, across the mountains and rule in their own right. And Henry the Second is having none of it. So he leads a big expedition in 1171, 72 and sort of, you know, imposes his fiat on Ireland. And had he stayed there longer, as was his intention, he might well have succeeded in subduing the whole country. But what he does by leaving early is leave a country that is half conquered at best.

• 40:07Speaker 00

  And we get some fairly unpleasant sort of henchmen turning up at this point. There's a character Hugh de Lacy, who's described as short, hairy and muscular with a burn scar down one side of his face. He's granted Meath.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  Yes, I mean, that characterization you you mentioned is from the pen of Gerald of Wales, who writes a sort of, it's kind of a chronicle, but it's also an apology. It's a defense of the English invasion of Ireland, which clearly lots of other people at the time were saying, I'm not so sure about this because these people are Christians and we should, you know, we're slaughtering lots of them and this shouldn't be, not in my name type thing is what various English monks and others are saying. And Gerald is very strident in various passages, saying, other people will tell you differently and they don't know what they're talking about. And he's producing all these kind of pseudo legalistic reasons as to why, or pseudo historical reasons, why that this is a justifiable invasion.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  And this also is the beginning of English racism against the Irish. Because we get in Gerald's Topography of Ireland, a frankly racist depiction of the Irish as a filthy people, wallowing in vice, living on beasts and living like beasts, barbarous, literally barbarous, a notorious tale.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  I mean, William of Malmesbury had said similar things, but hadn't sort of seen the Irish up close. But Gerald is, you know, devoting page after page to this kind of thing and has various kind of quite salacious tales about, you know, kings having inauguration rights in which they have sex with horses or, you know, tale after tale, which kind of don't really command credibility, but he assures his readers, this is exactly what is going on in Ireland, that they are, as he says, a best deal people. And so it's the ball that was set rolling by William of Malmesbury half a century earlier is really now become this kind of avalanche of invective against these people. And it's all to justify the fact that, you know, if these people are, as Gerald of Wales would, might have

• 42:07Speaker 03

  said, unta mention, then it's perfectly legitimate to take their lands and to force them into slavery or servitude, or just to push them even further into the mountains or the bogs, because this is our land now, because, you know, this is a justifiable, you know, God granted invasion.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Anyone who wants to know more about the early English savagery in Ireland, please go to our earlier episodes when we had an extraordinary series of Irish historians taking us through the incredibly bloody history that no one in England, Scotland and Wales is really taught about British atrocities in early Ireland, long before the troubles, long before the Irish, long before the Phoenians. There is this terrible history of bloodshed with the English running amok and behaving like barbarians and massacring great swathes of the Irish population. Now, Mark, we're running out of time here now, but what I would

• 43:07Speaker 00

  want to know is, why did Scotland, Wales and Ireland turn out so differently? They're all Celtic lands that have comparable paths, but their histories, their Norman periods are very different from each other.

• 43:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's, as I've already said with reference to Wales and Scotland, is because when they go into Scotland, they see a polity that they can do business with. And the kingdom of Scotland, you know, thrives and you get into marriage between the English and Scottish royal houses, starting with Margaret and Malcolm and continued with Henry the First and Edith Matilda and going on, you know, throughout the 13th century, you have multiple kings of Scotland married to English princesses.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  And it's a story of collaboration too, isn't it? There's a great deal of Scottish noblemen collaborating with the English against the Scottish monarchy.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's one of those, I mean, of course, there are points of contention all the way through, not least where the border is drawn between the two countries. So there's a running sore until you get to 1237, when that's resolved. But in the 13th century, they're getting on like a house on fire until, of course, you get Edward the First towards the end, and that really sours the whole relationship. In terms of Wales, as I said, the main difference is that Wales and Ireland are both, rather than a single kingdom, a galaxy of competing, you know, tiny polities.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  That you can divide and rule, that you can take out one by one.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  You can take out one. So it's very easy to kind of go in and take out one. But the problem is, even if you turn one into a client kingdom for a short while, as soon as that king dies, his successors aren't interested. So because it's so inherently unstable, Wales as a sort of, as a country, there is no sort of, you can't come up with a lasting peace that is going to endure from one decade to the next, never mind one generation to the next. And even more so with Ireland. And I think, again, to take the moral element out of it, but just go back to a sort of simple economic contrast, the contrasts, you can see why they come up with these sort of terrible moral judgments on them, because there are vast gulfs in terms of the economic development. One of the crucial things with

• 45:18Speaker 03

  Ireland to remember is these other places in Britain, they had been Romanized. So there's at a very fundamental level, this kind of, oh, there's an old city here and there's roads. You go to Ireland and the Romans never got across the Irish Sea, or only as traders, not to settle. So there's this huge difference here. It's like when the English are going in, they're literally kind of confronted with kind of like almost virgin forests. So they're having to say, well, we're going to have to lay out new roads and we're going to have to lay out new manners. We're going to have to Europeanize this to a greater extent than the other places, which are sort of doing it themselves anyway, to stay in the running. As I say, I bit off rather more than I thought I was.

• 45:57Speaker 00

  I can't wait to read this book, Mark. It's fascinating, and this is stuff, as you say, is much less well known, and certainly in the case of Ireland, shapes the future in a way that is still very important to understand today. Now, in the next episode, we are getting our old friend Peter Frankopan, who always keeps Anita and I in our place and corrects our many errors as he sees fit. And Peter is going to be telling us about stuff that I think, again, is much less well known than Hastings and the story of William the Conqueror, which is the story of the Normans first in South Italy, Robert Jiskar

• 46:39Speaker 00

  conquering Puglia, then the extraordinary story of the Normans conquering the Arab Sicilian kingdom, the Fatimid kingdom in Sicily, and the story of Roger the Second, the baptized Sultan and his extraordinary Capella Palatina with its very Muslim looking roof and its Byzantine mosaics. And finally, the further shore of all, we're following Bermond, who has always been rather a hero of mine, but I know Peter Frankopan doesn't like at all this, this rather swaggery Norman conqueror, and I think Frankopan would probably

• 47:18Speaker 00

  call him a pirate, Bermond of Taranto, who ends up on the further shore of all, forming a Norman kingdom in Syria, the Kingdom of Antioch. Next time on Empire with Peter Frankopan, I'll see you then. Goodbye from me, William Derempel.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  And goodbye from me, Mark Morris.