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By Root 2385 0

monarch and the O’Connor High King had even made a new treaty dividing the island between them, rather as it had been divided into the two halves of Leth Cuinn and Leth Moga, north and south, in times before. All over the English-occupied territory, the Norman motte and bailey castles started to appear. Big wooden palisades enclosed a high earthwork mound crowned with a timber keep. These stout little working forts certainly dominated the estates, the new manors that Strongbow and his followers had set up. But had it stopped at that? Of course not. The Irish were unhappy; the settlers were greedy for still more land. Before long the truce had broken down and the lords of the borderland manors were raiding into the High King’s domain, stealing territory. Ironically, during this process, Strongbow, who had been the cause of it all, had died. But that had made no difference. The land grabbing had developed a momentum of its own. One aristocratic adventurer named de Courcy had even raced into Ulster and seized a little kingdom for himself up there.

These events in the borderlands had not much affected Gilpatrick’s family in the relative quiet of Dublin; but a new development was to have profound consequences for his brother. For in the year 1185, Ireland had received a second royal visit; not from Henry, this time, but from his youngest son.

Prince John had none of the glamour of his elder brother, Richard the Lionheart. All his life he seemed to make enemies. He was clever but tactless; he did everything by fits and starts. Arriving in Ireland and meeting Irish chiefs whose dress and flowing beards he thought funny, the young man mocked them to their faces and cheerfully insulted them. But behind this arrogance and vulgarity lay another, darker calculation. Prince John cared nothing for the feelings of the Irish: he had come to impose order, and with him he brought ruthless henchmen with names like de Burgh, and the family of administrators known as the Butlers, who were very good at imposing order indeed.

For occupied Ireland was to be administered on English lines: ancient tribal territories were to be administered as baronies; townlands, like the English hundreds, were to be set up. The seats of modest chieftains would become the fortified manors of English armed knights. English courts, English taxes, English customs, even English counties were planned. There were also the further contingents of knights, many of them friends of the prince, who must be given Irish estates. And if that meant kicking a few more of the Irish off their land, Prince John couldn’t have cared less.

Amongst those who had suffered had been Ailred the Palmer. One day he had suddenly been informed that his holdings to the west of the city, which supported the hospital, had been given to two Englishmen of Prince John’s acquaintance; and although both his son, Harold, and the grandson of Doyle were by now important men in Dublin, not even their influence had been able to prevent it. But within months, the kindly Palmer and his wife, instead of giving way to anger, had persuaded both the men who had obtained his land to grant most of it back to the hospital, which received a formal blessing from the Pope himself soon afterwards. “So you see,” his wife sweetly declared, “in the end everything turned out for the best.”

If only his brother could have been as wise, thought Gilpatrick. But was it, he asked himself, partly his fault? Had he been too busy with Church affairs to realise the danger his brother was in?

When King Henry had taken the ancient lands of the Ui Fergusa, he had split them into two great manors, north and south. The northern manor was still held by Baggot; the southern had remained in his brother’s hands. To his brother’s way of thinking, therefore, he was still the chief. And the fact that he had never fully understood his new status, Gilpatrick considered, was partly because of wishful thinking, but also because, as an Irishman, he could not comprehend one important feature of European feudal life: the absentee landlord.

It was