Commonly moved to war

“The war between the Geraldines and Walter de Burgh, Earl of Ulster.”

 - John Clyn’s Annals of Ireland for the year 1264

At the end of 1264 the Geraldines and de Burghs were at war. At first the conflict was limited to Connacht, where the Geraldines held prisoners in the castles of Lea and Dunamase, while Walter de Burgh attacked and seized Geraldine castles and manors.

Dunamase castle

The war quickly became more widespread. Geoffrey Geneville, justiciar of Ireland while his colleague Richard de la Rochelle was a Geraldine prisoner, prepared Dublin Castle to withstand a siege. He spent a total of £342 on improving its defences, while the royal castle at Arklow was similarly provisioned. Geneville wrote to the king, informing him that ‘the land was commonly moved to war’ and ‘there was common war in those parts’.

The alarm of the English government is exposed in letters of 16 February 1265, which asked the archbishop of Dublin to deal with ‘the discord between the nobles and magnates of that land, whereby great danger may ensue to the king and Edward his son and the whole land of Ireland’. He was also commanded to take the king’s castles into his hand and munition them. The archbishop sent a bleak report back to London, describing the ‘great dissensions’ in Ireland.

By the late spring of 1265 the whole country was in a state of civil war. This grim situation was rescued by Geneville, who raised an army to march against the Geraldines. Geneville’s show of force persuaded the dissidents to come to terms, and in mid-April the rival parties agreed to meet at Dublin to discuss peace terms. They agreed to a set of ordinances whereby all persons ‘disseised and expelled from their lands and tenements during the aforesaid disturbances shall recover their lands and tenements without writ or plea’.

The agreement severed the alliance of the Geraldines with Simon de Montfort - the Geraldines had never been more than skin-deep allies anyway - and released the Anglo-Irish nobles of Ireland to cross the sea and join Prince Edward in time for the battle of Evesham. Geneville’s pacification of Ireland, therefore, had a direct influence on the course of the civil war in England.

Horse boys

As well as raising large numbers of Welsh infantry for the 1301 campaign, Edward I also exploited the resources of Ireland. The Plantagenets treated the lordship of Ireland as a combination of food factory and recruitment ground; they seldom bothered to visit, and no English king set foot in the country between the reigns of King John and Richard II.

The purveyance in Ireland was to consist of:

3200 quarters of wheat 300 quarters of oats
2000 quarters of malt 500 quarters of beans and peas
200 casks of new wine
10,000 hard fish and 5 lasts of herring

Half of the above was to be sent to Skinburness, the port near Carlisle, and half to a port on the isle of Arran. Since 1298 the isle had been held for Edward I by Sir Hugh Bisset of Antrim, an Irish pirate who earned his knighthood by keeping the Irish Sea clear of Scottish ships. The stores were distributed to the garrisons of Lochmaben, Dumfries and Ayre, as well as the army of the Prince of Wales at Carlisle.

The king also wanted Irish soldiers, and lots of them. He was especially fond of hobelars or ‘horse boys’, light horse ideally suited to the difficult terrain of Ireland and Scotland. Edward’s justiciar of Ireland, John Wogan, haggled over terms of service with the Irish nobility. They drove a hard bargain, and the eventual arrangement was complicated. In return for pardon of two-thirds of their debts at the Exchequer, the Irish nobles agreed to serve in Scotland for 100 days. The remaining one-third would be allowed as wages or as compensation for loss of horses in the campaign. If this did not suffice, Edward guaranteed to pay extra cash to make up the deficit.

The Earl of Ulster, Richard de Burgh, refused to come to terms. Edward had practically begged for his support, informing Burgh that he relied on him “more than any other man in the land for many reasons”. Burgh was fully aware of the king’s desperate need for Irish troops, and wanted to extract the best possible terms for himself.

Even without Burgh’s support, an Irish army of 120 men-at-arms, 178 hobelars and 1200 infantry sailed for Scotland on 9 July in a fleet of 74 ships. They landed at Arran, and went on to join Prince Edward and his Welsh army at Carlisle. All of the Irish served in exchange for remission of debt, and the surviving wage-roll shows how highly the king valued their services: the infantry were paid 6d (pence) a day, three times the normal wage of English or Welsh footsoldiers. One of their troop-leaders, Donald Ruath Macarthi, was also granted an extra pardon of £100 of his debts.

Meanwhile the Earl of Ulster tired of playing politics, and sent a smaller Irish force to Scotland to join the king. This consisted of 4 knights, 42 men-at-arms, 39 squires, 86 hobelars and 128 infantry. These men, led by Eustace de Poer and Thomas de Mandeville, were in pay from 1 July.

[Second pic above is a modern sculpture of an Irish galloglass at Roscommon]

Galloglass

A poetic description of a galloglass warrior in Ireland, from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen:

"All armed in a coat of iron plate,
Of great defence to ward the deadly fear,
And on his head a steel cap did wear
Of colour rusty brown, but sure and strong;
And in his hand an huge pole-axe did bear,
With which to wont his fight, to justify his wrong."

 Spenser, a colonial administrator in Ireland as well as a poet, knew the galloglass well. He was writing in the 16th century but his account could apply just as well to the galloglass of the medieval era.

Their first certain appearance in Irish history is apparently in the Annals of Loch Cé for 1259, which records a band of eight score óglaigh (young warriors) as part of the escort of the daughter of Lord Dugall MacRory of Garmoran, Argyll, on the occasion of her wedding to Aodh O'Connor of Connacht. Attached is a pic of stone carvings of galloglass on a tomb at the Dominican Priory of St Mary in Roscommon.

The best kisser in the kingdom...

Christopher Hibbert's description of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Charles I's nephew and dashing cavalry officer. Woof, woof!

"Yet Rupert was far more than a rough, handsome soldier of fortune with a taste for fancy clothes, fringed boots, feathered hats, scarlet sashes and long curled hair; he was more than a cavalry leader of undeniable skill and courage. He was highly intelligent, a remarkable linguist, an artist of uncommon merit, a man with an inventive skill and curiosity of mind that was to give as much pleasure to his later years of sickness and premature old age as the several mistresses who visited him in his rooms at Windsor Castle."