♪♪
In the late 12th century,
foreign armed forces invaded Ireland.
We remember them as the Anglo-Normans.
The Anglo-Normans could see that there were massive gains
to be made in Ireland,
and they knew that it was an untapped resource.
Allez! Allez!
The consequences of all this was that Ireland
would be changed forever.
The newcomers laid down the template for our modern nation.
Now, science reveals more about them
and how they drew Ireland closer to the continent than ever before.
The Anglo-Normans brought us closer to Europe.
Yet today, England is further from Europe than it was back then.
But in the autumn of 1170, everything still hung in the balance
because the invaders had yet to capture
Ireland's largest and wealthiest city:
Dublin.
♪♪
In August 1170,
a foreign army besieged and captured Waterford.
Its commander's name remains etched in the nation's memory:
Strongbow.
Allez.
He came not at his own behest,
but at that of an Irish ruler.
In a real-life Game of Thrones,
Dermot Mac Morrough had been ousted from his Kingdom of Leinster.
He was desperate to win it back.
Strongbow was offered the kinship of Leinster by Dermot Mac Morrough.
That was part of the deal that secured his assistance.
He married Mac Morrough's daughter, Aoife,
And with that, he was Dermot Mac Morrough's successor.
But for now,
Strongbow was Dermot's heir in name only.
To secure his inheritance,
He had to capture Ireland's largest city.
I think the Dublin population would have
been absolutely terrified to hear of all the Anglo-Normans coming.
It would have been a frantic effort to try and get into the city walls,
and he had to make it in before the gates closed.
Archeologist Lindsay Simpson
is an expert on Dublin's medieval defenses.
Well, Dublin was very well protected with the city walls.
You can see it here behind me,
probably about seven meters high at this point,
and it's a formidable defense.
You can see how difficult yourself it would be to get up here.
It's got a burm coming out, which is an incline.
We're also standing in a very deep, mucky, water-filled moat.
So you can't get horses up.
It's very hard to get ladders up
because we're actually dealing with water.
And the only thing they could really do is try and identify a weak spot,
a corner or an angle that they maybe go in and undermine.
And other than that, the only other way was to really try
and trick their way in or force their way into one of the city gates
because that was where the city was vulnerable.
The exact circumstances remain a mystery,
but somehow the Anglo-Normans got past the walls.
The contemporary sources tell us that it was a surprise assault.
They must have gained access into the gate.
But once that happened, and once they were in,
the sources record there was a considerable slaughter.
The Anglo-Normans take Dublin, and everything is going to plan.
They have now got Wexford, Waterford,
Dublin, and it seems only a matter of time
before Dermot's Kingdom will be rightfully restored to him.
But Dermot would not live to see his dream fulfilled.
In May 1171, he died suddenly at Ferns.
It's said he lies buried here near the monastery he founded,
St. Mary's Abbey.
The broken shaft of a high cross marks his grave.
To this day,
we remember Dermot as a traitor,
the man who ushered in the invaders,
leading to centuries of foreign occupation.
But does he deserve this dark reputation?
There have been attempts by historians,
especially in the last generation or two, to try to rehabilitate him.
In one sense, he was a progressive figure,
but in many other respects,
quite a negative person, an unpopular person.
On one particular occasion,
he either murdered or he blinded
17 of the under kings and nobles of Leinster.
That was literally unprecedented,
and it was widely condemned in Ireland at the time.
There's no doubt about it that Dermot Mac Morrough is a
brutal king.
He's clearly also a very capable, a very ambitious,
and a very talented individual.
I don't think he is quite the antichrist
that people have called him out to be,
and nor do I think he's quite the scapegoat that he's been cast as.
I think it's really important not to view
Dermot through the lens of what happens to Ireland later.
Ireland under the British Empire does suffer terribly.
So if we look back and say Dermot is responsible for that,
then of course, he's a traitor.
But I think that's a mistake.
There's hundreds of years in between these events,
and there's all to play for still in Irish politics.
Dermot's death sent a shockwave through Ireland.
The dead king's relatives now disputed
Strongbow's claim to Leinster,
and soon the Anglo-Normans faced an even greater challenge.
On the outskirts of Dublin,
the Westlink Bridge soars over the River Liffey and its lush valley.
The M50 motorway runs for 45 kilometres,
almost surrounding the city.
In 1171, an Irish high king set up camp not far from here.
He also surrounded the city, not with roads,
but with men.
Dublin was placed on were a siege by the high king, Rory O'Connor,
and he gathered together all of his vassals,
all of the kings throughout the country,
and they encircled Dublin at that stage.
Three of the Irish kings led armies to Clontarf,
Kilmainham, and Dalkey,
a fleet of 30 ships in Dublin Bay cut off escape by sea.
Rory O'Connor himself took up position at the hill of Castleknock,
around seven kilometres from the city.
This is a very ancient site.
It's a natural hillock, which at some stage in probably late
prehistory was ringed by ramparts and made into some fortress,
some citadel.
This would have been well known
to everybody in the period of the Anglican-Norman invasion.
And I think you could imagine Rory standing where I am today,
talking to his forces and reminding them of the history
of this place and the mission that they were going to embark on.
The Irish forces outnumbered Strongbow's army.
Archeologist, Tadhg O'Keefe,
believes Rory O'Connor was confident of success.
My suspicion is that Rory felt he was on a roll.
He'd been traveling across Meath, burning castles,
and probably felt emboldened to attack Dublin.
So when he came here to Castleknock and
got his army together and was thinking, I'll get this done.
This is not a problem.
And of course, it turns out it was a problem.
So this is the original northern wall of the medieval city,
the wall that dates to 1100.
And this is the wall that was the barrier
to Rory O'Connor taking the city.
At that early stage, the River Liffey would have been lapping
up against the base of the wall here at high tide.
So that's the picture that would have
faced Rory O'Connor when trying to take the city in 1170.
Rather than attack the powerful walls,
O'Connor gambled on achieving a bloodless victory.
So the strategy of Rory O'Connor was to besiege the city,
so all the city would have been surrounded.
But it was particularly serious on this northern side,
because this is where the supplies were being unloaded,
where the ships were coming in.
All that activity stops.
You have to imagine the city wall now becomes a prison.
It's almost like a Jewish ghetto.
The people are hemmed in.
They can't get in, and they can't get out,
and they get no food supplies in.
The water source were very limited.
The River Liffey is tidal, so it's brown,
and it's contaminating the water supply.
The population of Dublin was probably
quite considerable at that stage, so crammed into the city walls.
It wouldn't have taken very long
for the conditions to be pretty dire...
Uisce. Uisce le thoil. Uisce.
With his water supply's dwindling,
Strongbow had no choice but to confront the situation.
He sent two envoys to O'Connor's camp to discuss peace terms.
The Archbishop of Dublin,
Laurence O'Toole,
and the Flemish mercenary,
Maurice de Prendergast.
O'Toole was one of the most respected churchmen of the day,
while de Prendegast was a trusted associate of Strongbow.
But the deal they offered did not impress.
So Strongbow makes an offer to Rory O'Connor
that Strongbow will hold Leinster,
but Rory O'Connor will be Overlord.
And O'Connor, perhaps surprisingly,
turns down this offer and says, no.
Strongbow can hold just Wexford, Waterford, and Dublin,
and perhaps a little of their hinterland,
but that he would hold the rest of Leinster
and indeed the rest of the country.
Rory O'Connor was confident that Strongbow would accept his terms.
After all, his enemies were surrounded and desperate for water.
O'Connor was willing to compromise with these new invaders,
and in particular, he was willing to allow
them to hold on to the towns,
but I think it was too little too late at that stage.
The Anglo-Normans could see that
there were massive gains to be made in Ireland,
and they knew that it was as an untapped resource,
the whole of Ireland was potentially up for grabs.
Strongbow's followers have come on this adventure
on the understanding that they are going to get the conquered land.
They are going to set themselves up with a castle, with a manor,
with income, and therefore, the stakes are high.
It's all or nothing, really.
They would rather go down fighting
than retreat with a tail between their legs.
♪♪
I suspect that Strongbow, when the negotiations didn't happen,
was okay with that, but I doubt very much that he ever feared that
he was going to be beaten by an Irish army coming in from the west.
These Anglo-Norman mercenaries had
descended from a long line of fighters, of warriors.
They had practice in warfare in all sorts
of different terrains with new techniques, with new weaponry.
And while the Irish were no fools when it came to the art of warfare,
they were a long way behind their Anglo-Norman enemies.
So if you're looking at these events from a perspective
of wanting an Irish victory,
there's just two different types of warfare come into conflict.
And on the whole, the Norman one is the more effective one.
A good bowman, firstly,
you've got tremendous upper body strength.
It takes quite a bit of energy to draw a bow.
And these bowmen were incredible.
They were the machine gunners of the Middle Ages.
You've got very little protection against them,
and they're quite terrifying, particularly if the people you're
attacking aren't familiar with this type of warfare.
♪ ♪
Fortune favoured the daring surprise attack.
Strongbow and his Lieutenant, Raymond le Gros,
caught the Irish completely off guard,
killing many and scattering the rest.
They now had undisputed control of Dublin.
That was really a turning point,
because once they had secured control of Dublin,
there wasn't any going back from that point onward.
And that was the event that turned it into an international affair.
Now, Strongbow and his men ran Dublin.
That was headline news throughout Northwestern Europe,
and that was a really landmark event
in the Anglo-Norman seizure of Ireland.
The Normans were in the ascendancy.
And Strongbow now stood a real chance of becoming king,
not just of Leinster,
but of Ireland, a prospect that worried his overlord, Henry II.
From Henry's perspective, the events in Ireland are deeply disturbing.
A Norman rival, high king of Ireland,
would have been an enormous problem for the English Crown.
So Henry has to rush over to Ireland. It's really important.
It's a big priority.
1171, Henry II was one of Europe's most powerful monarchs.
He controlled England, much of Wales, and over half of France.
Five years earlier, Henry had given Dermot Mac Morrough permission
to recruit Norman allies for his campaign in Ireland.
Now Dermot was dead, and Henry longed to add Ireland to his empire.
In a remote corner of South Wales,
stand the mighty towers of Pembroke Castle.
In a land known for its medieval strongholds,
this is one of the greatest.
In the autumn of 1171,
Henry II went to Pembroke with one thing on his mind.
The king was determined to take control of the situation in Ireland.
But to do so, he had to make peace with an old enemy.
Strongbow, throughout Henry's reign, had really been out of favour.
Strongbow was heir to the Earls of Pembroke,
who had helped subdue Wales.
Henry was denied buying him Pembroke as his inheritance.
So when Strongbow did go to Ireland
and won for himself an independent kingdom,
which is what happened in Leinster,
this must have been shocking to Henry.
Here is a senior vassal who has gone to Ireland against
his specific instruction and is now moving close towards
the possibility of becoming a high king of Ireland.
The king summons Strongbow to Pembroke.
When the two men met there in October 1171,
no one could say what the outcome would be.
There's a lot of antagonism between the two of them.
But as often happens politically,
both men realised that the best way for them to gain success
in their aspirations was to work together.
A deal was reached.
Henry would take possession of Dublin, Wexford, and Waterford.
In return, he'd allow Strongbow to rule Leinster,
subject to his over lordship.
But Henry didn't trust this to happen in his absence.
He decided to go to Ireland in person,
and in such a way that no one would question his authority.
The king had given orders for a huge army to assemble.
In nearby Milford Haven,
hundreds of ships lay waiting to transport them.
On the 16th of October,
Henry's fleet set sail.
The next day, they reached Waterford Harbour.
The sailors hauled the ships onto the beach,
and then 4,000 soldiers disembarked.
With them were 500 knights,
led by the king himself.
It was the most powerful army Ireland had ever seen.
Strongbow had returned with Henry.
Soon afterwards, he formally submitted to him.
So too did all the Anglo-Normans and almost all the Irish Kings.
Henry II arrives in Ireland in 1171 with a huge force
by the standards of the day,
and nobody stands against him.
He doesn't have to engage in combat.
Everyone sees his army and submits.
That might seem odd, but one has to understand
the context of Henry II's arrival in Ireland.
Henry was compared by contemporaries to Alexander the Great.
He was someone who controlled territories
from the Pyrenees up to the border with Scotland.
He arrived at the head of a massive army.
So there was little prospect
that Rory O'Connor or the other Irish Kings, who, let's not forget,
had just been routed in Dublin in September,
would be able to muster up support and face him on the battlefield.
With winter closing in, Henry took up residence in Dublin.
This was now a royal city,
and the king wanted to populate it with loyal citizens.
Henry II had a good relationship with the citizens of Bristol,
so Henry granted to the citizens
significant holdings in Dublin to basically
reward them for their loyalty, but also build
on their existing knowledge through trade connections with Ireland.
The Bristolians were some of the first settlers
to arrive following the invasion.
In 2023, archeologists discovered
fascinating remnants of their presence in Dublin.
We're here on Bride Street,
carrying out an excavation in advance
of a redevelopment of a block.
We're finding potentially small cellars or under crops
that would have set beneath buildings.
And we're talking about the late 12th century,
early 13th century.
It shows us that the Normans may have
been coming in and inhabiting
and taking on buildings that were already here.
This type of ceramic here is very rare,
a survival of a full intact wine jug
from probably the early 13th century.
These two faces, as you can see,
they're actually the spouts for wine jugs,
for very ornate wine jugs.
And we know by the fabric, and by the shape,
and by the typology that they're from Bristol,
and they're coming in around the same time
as this influx of people from Bristol
after Henry II grants Dublin to the Bristolians.
♪♪
Another discovery opened an even bigger window
into the settlers' lives.
It's connected with Henry II's other reason for coming to Ireland.
One of the most controversial events of the Middle Ages.
A murder in a cathedral.
Henry had made his former friend, Thomas Becket,
Archbishop of Canterbury, in the expectation that he would be
a friend who would enable him to control the church.
Thomas Becket suddenly developed notions of the entitlement
of the church to be independent of royal authority,
which meant that he immediately fell out with Henry II.
Their feud was acrimonious,
and it built and built until Henry,
an exasperated King Henry,
uttered words that are lost in time, but seemingly saying,
How can these knights surrounding me
let a lowborn clerk treat me like this?
Four of Henry's knights took the hint.
They went to Canterbury, burst into the cathedral,
and murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury
in his own the cathedral.
We have eyewitness accounts of this that were spread throughout Europe.
It caused a scandal because the King of England
seemingly had had the Archbishop of Canterbury murdered.
Henry's Irish expedition in 1171 was therefore very well-timed.
He wants to come, of course,
to make sure that his subjects submit to him,
but he also wanted a distraction
from the controversy privacy surrounding the murder of Beckett.
And coming to Ireland and presenting himself
as a great advocate on the side of church reform
would have helped to rehabilitate his image after the murder.
The King ensured that Dublin would long remember the slain Archbishop.
St. Catherine's Park in the middle of the Liberties in Dublin.
This was the site of one of the largest
and most well-endowed monasteries in Ireland at the time.
The Abbey would have been composed of primarily a huge central church.
We're talking a very prestigious building.
It would have challenged in size and opulence the likes of
St. Patrick's Cathedral and Christ Church Cathedral.
Coming off the southern side was a cloister,
and then the usual old buildings set off that,
the refectories and the dorm trees for the canons were in the abbey.
This magnificent foundation was the Abbey of St. Thomas the Martyr,
founded by Henry the second to atone for the killing of Thomas Becket.
Today's street names are the only visible signs that ever stood here.
But other signs lie concealed to eat the ground.
In 2018, archeologist Paul Duffy
investigated a site off Thomas Street and made an extraordinary discovery.
We had the opportunity to conduct quite
a large scale excavation on the site just behind us here.
We were quite shocked by the amount of burials that we came across.
The archeologists uncovered the burials of 124 individuals.
They had found the Abbey Graveyard.
Maeve Tobin is an osteo-archeologist,
specialising in the study of human remains.
She had the Thomas Street skeleton analysed and discover their origins.
They were radiocarbon dated to between
the 12th century and the 13th century,
which coincides with the first 100 years of the Abbey of St. Thomas.
So what we're looking at is the first generation of Anglo-Norman
citizens of Dublin moving into the area and settling in the area.
Now, there were a few individuals of note.
There were two individuals who had a perforated scalp shell.
And that's a sign that these individuals
had made the Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.
And that's remarkable if you consider that pilgrims today,
starting off on their route to Santiago,
are leaving down the road here from the St. James's Gate.
As it was then, it still is now.
It was an arduous journey, and it wasn't undertaken lightly.
They had suffered some osteoarthritis,
a lot of heavy or hard living,
possibly irritated or exasperated by the pilgrimage.
Their teeth both show very heavy wear patterns,
and perhaps this indicates that they lived
on a very different diet for the period
of the months that they were away on pilgrimage.
Analysis reveals some interesting trends about the settlers
and how they compare with Ireland's native inhabitants.
The osteological analysis has showed us
that this community were much healthier.
They lived healthier lifestyles.
They had access to a wider food space
than their contemporaries in rural Ireland at the time.
They lived less arduous lifestyles.
Their bodies were subject to less intensive labour.
Studies like this suggest that soon after the invasion,
Ireland became a two-tier society.
Foreign settlers enjoyed greater status than the native Irish.
For centuries, these inequalities would
colour the politics of a troubled island.
But for Henry II, Ireland would soon be a distant consideration.
In April 1172,
the King of England departed these shores, never to return.
Henry's departure raised a stark question:
who would control Ireland in his absence?
Strongbow seemed the most likely candidate.
Once sidelined and penniless, he now ruled Leinster,
Ireland's largest and wealthiest region.
But Strongbow did not live long to enjoy his success.
He died a few years later
and was buried in Dublin's Christchurch Cathedral.
Other than Dermot Mac Morrough himself,
Strongbow was the man most associated with the invasion.
His name was written into Irish history,
never to be erased.
But his death left a power vacuum,
and soon another Anglo-Norman Lord filled it.
His name was Hugh de Lacy.
His family originally came from Lassay in Normandy,
hence the name.
And he was a trusted confidante and a supporter of Henry II.
And Henry calls Hugh de Lacy to him,
and he grants him by charter the whole
of the ancient Kingdom of Meath,
which stretches all the way from the Irish Sea to the Shannon,
800,000 or 850,000 acres or so.
♪♪
When he was granted the Kingdom of Meath,
it was a parchment lordship.
It hadn't been conquered.
That territory was claimed by Tiernan O'Rourke,
the King of Bréifne.
Hugh arranged for a parlay to be held
at the Hill of Ward with Tiernan O'Rourke.
In 1172,
the two men and their retinue arrived to speak at the hill,
incidentally said to be the home of Halloween in Ireland,
and there certainly were fireworks because a fight, a row,
an altercation between the two groups,
and ultimately, Tiernan O'Rourke is killed.
This was a message to any of those who stood in Hugh's way.
This is what will happen to you.
Tiernan O'Rourke's other quarrel with Dermot Mac Morrough
had precipitated the Anglo-Norman invasion.
Now, just a few years later, both Both he and Dermot were dead.
We start to see a new wave of settlers coming in,
a new wave of people in charge taking the reins.
Hugh de Lacy has clearly become a big player.
Hugh de Lacy needs to select an administrative centre,
a hub, and he chooses Trim on the banks of the Boyne for this.
And Hugh de Lacy selected the site on high ground,
overlooking the river for his new castle.
De Lacy's power increased so much
that he became Ireland's King in all but name.
But in 1186,
his career met a swift and sudden end.
Hugh de Lacy was building a castle in Durrow.
The Anglo-Normans
chose to build castles at ancient monastic sites
if they were available because these
were places of importance to the local people.
The evidence that we have is that
he went down into the ditch of the castle.
He was called in by an Irishman who was involved in digging the ditch,
and the Irishman then pulled out an axe and chopped his head off.
A man like De Lacy is always going to pick up plenty of enemies.
He wasn't short of people who were willing to assassinate him.
De Lacy had suffered a degrading end, but he left an important legacy,
not just in Ireland, but also on the continent.
There's a very long-standing connection
between Ireland and France.
That was clearly strengthened under the Anglo-Normans.
The Anglo-Normans accelerated a process of Europeanising.
With the invasion of 1169,
we are nearer to Europe than we've been before.
♪♪
The town of Évreux in Normandy has a long and turbulent history.
Past centuries have seen it ravaged by war and fire.
But some medieval buildings still remain.
Among them, the Church of Saint-Touran,
once home to a community of Benedictine monks.
Archivist, Thomas Roche,
is exploring its unique link with Ireland,
recorded in a medieval church manuscript.
Anglo-Norman lords keep familial
and feudal connections with Normandy.
In 1173, Hugh de Lacy came to Normandy,
and he took opportunity to strengthen this Norman connection.
And he gave churches, lands, woods,
to religious houses to which his family was already connected.
The church manuscript records one such transaction.
Here is the Cartulaire of Saint Taurin.
Here is the earliest known text of the charter
by which Hugh de Lacy,
Hugo de Lassy,
gave to the Church of Saint Taurin, the churches of Fore in Westmeath,
which was the site of an old Gaelic Monastery.
So there was this transfer of property
from Gaelic establishments to Norman ones.
The monks of Saint-Taurin built a great Abbey at Fore.
For centuries,
it would serve as a daughter house of their monastery in Évreux.
The monks introduced French practices to Ireland.
They even built a dovecote to house their pigeons,
a valuable source of food and fertiliser.
Today, Fore and Saint-Taurin stand testament to a forgotten history.
I think one of the great ironies
of history, of Irish history,
is that the Anglo-Normans brought us closer to Europe than we'd been.
Yet today, England is further from Europe than it was back then.
The Franco-Irish connection is certainly
something that's been overlooked,
probably because it's been overshadowed
by the Anglo-Irish affairs of the intervening centuries.
There's a very long-standing connection between
Ireland and France.
That was clearly strengthened under
the Anglo-Normans through the late 12th and into the 13th century.
A Frenchman named Geoffrey de Geneville
helped temper this connection.
Geoffrey de Geneville was from Joinville,
in the northeast of France.
His older brother was Jean de Joinville,
who was the historian and friend of Saint Louis or King Louis.
Geoffrey, in 1252, becomes Lord of Meath.
He moves to Trim.
On the outskirts of Trim,
archeologists investigate a plot of land.
They're digging up the remains of the Black Friary,
a Dominican monastery founded by Geoffrey de Geneville.
De Geneville endowed the Dominicans with the lands here.
They set up their friary,
and we have discovered that it's probably
one of the largest Dominican friaries that was built in Ireland.
The footprint is about 80 meters from north to and there
were two cloisters or courtyards, church, extensive buildings.
We're sitting just outside the north precinct
and the northern boundary of the precinct.
The archeologists have discovered many artifacts here,
including pottery from the winemaking Saint-Ange region, near Bordeaux.
We have a reconstruction jug,
simply to show what a complete jug would have looked like
because we find so many broken bits of pottery.
Wine merchants would be bringing in barrels and barrels of wine
and handing out jugs of wine as a free sample.
So you'd get your free Saint-Ange jug with your wine.
Geoffrey de Geneville died in 1314.
He was buried in the Church of the friary at Trim.
De Geneville was one a number of individuals
who came not just to hold land,
but to live and live out the rest of their lives here in Ireland.
This created a bond between Ireland and France
that has existed right down to the present day.
What's interesting about our perception
of the Anglo-Normans is that we probably
wait too much the Anglo bit as opposed to the Norman bit.
And we forget that for several generations,
these people still had a primary focus on France.
France was the homeland.
I mean, even the Court of Henry,
and we're talking a long time after William the Conqueror,
was French-speaking.
The French bit was very important.
But in time, the invaders would enact harsh policies in Ireland.
Ultimately,
the position of the invaders hardened towards the native Irish,
and they did become second-class citizens in their own land.
In 1185,
a scholar and clergyman called Gerald of Wales visited Ireland.
He wrote a book about the invasion that had just taken place,
and another about the country itself.
Gerald's writings are a vital source of knowledge,
but they portray the Irish in very unflattering terms.
The Irish are a rude people,
subsisting on the produce of their cattle only,
and living themselves like beings.
A people that has not yet departed from
the primitive habits of pastoral life.
This people then is truly barbarous.
Indeed, all their habits are barbarisms.
Whatever natural gifts they possess are excellent,
but in whatever requires industry,
they are worthless.
According to Gerald, Ireland and the Irish
were both in need of conquest to justify
the conquest that had just taken place.
So according to Gerald, the Irish were lazy.
They were at a lower level of civilisation than the English,
so they needed a helping hand to build up.
Ireland, on the other hand, was a land ripe for cultivation,
and it was only because of the laziness of the Irish,
these barbarians, these irreligious barbarians,
that it wasn't meeting its true potential.
He wants to justify the actions of Henry II.
He wants to justify the actions of his own relations in Ireland.
To do this,
he makes the Irish seem both barbaric and like bad Christians.
He says they are Christians in name, pagans in fact.
We don't have other evidence that this is the case.
He's just trying to make the Anglo- Norman invasion seem justified.
In 1199, Henry II's son, John, became king of England.
Under his rule,
the anti-Irish bias would be written into law.
King John, when installing an English
administration in Ireland, cap this off in 1210 by declaring
that English law should be the only law within Ireland.
Differentiation between those with access to English law,
mostly the settlers, and those who did not
have access to English law, mostly the Irish, was a big problem.
So if an Englishman killed an Irishman,
then they would merely have to pay a fine.
Whereas if an Irishman killed an Englishman,
he would have forfeited his own life.
Ireland was conquered.
The Irish people were conquered,
and they did become second-class citizens in their own country.
It is the case that they were denied access to the law.
So the idea that a rich hybrid culture
might have developed between the two,
where the Irish gained some of the benefits,
and the Anglo-Normans might blend productively with the native Irish,
that moment, if you like, was lost in Ireland.
The invasion also had consequences far beyond our shores.
It may even have changed European history.
At the height of his power,
Henry II controlled over half of France,
as well as most of Britain and Ireland.
Historians call this the Angevin Empire.
But under King John's rule, the empire started to fall apart.
In 1204, John lost Normandy to the king of France.
So the heart of the Angevin Empire had
been torn out with the loss of Normandy.
And so from 1204, John tried to replicate
in Ireland the administration that he enjoyed in England,
with the expressed intention of extracting
as much income from Ireland as possible
to be sent to France to recapture what he had lost.
So John ordered that a strong castle be built in Dublin
to house the treasury, to house the administration.
They're trying to recover all of these estates
that they've lost in France.
And how do you do that?
How do you fund these campaigns?
Well, if you've opened up new access to Irish supplies,
Leinster is producing vast amounts
of wheat and oats and barley that can be exported to France.
So they bring grain from Ireland to facilitate the campaigns of English
kings, intent upon recovering their ancestral lands in France.
Ireland produced maybe a 10th of the revenue
that the Kingdom of England could.
Most of that revenue went to fund the Crown's Wars, first in Normandy,
and in Poitou, and eventually, Gascony.
But of course, Ireland's contribution
was more than money to those wars.
Irish contingents also served in the English King's armies in France.
In 1337, the struggle between England and France
escalated into a long and bitter conflict, the Hundred Years War.
The fighting dragged on for decades until at last,
Joan of Arc inspired the French to victory.
On both sides,
the Hundred Years War cemented a sense of national identity.
It helped create two separate nations,
France and England.
But if the Anglo-Normans hadn't invaded Ireland,
history might have been very different.
The conquest of Ireland added another element to political
instability in Europe that meant this conflict between England
and France raged on for a lot longer than it would have done otherwise.
Of English Kings did use the resources
from Ireland to fund their wars in France and led to this
very messy series of battles that we call the Hundred Years War.
Not all the invasion's consequences were negative
because the Anglo-Normans helped create the Ireland we know today.
In terms of the impacts,
a shift to more intensive and more arable agriculture,
the clearance of a lot of forest,
and increased urbanisation.
We can see it in the landscape and street scapes around us.
Most of our major towns were established or expanded
by the Anglo-Normans.
Our language, both English and Irish,
are heavily influenced by Norman French.
We can look back at this as 850 years of oppression,
but it's a much more complicated
and nuanced picture than some people would have us believe.
The Anglo-Norman invasion,
all we can talk about is whether it was a big thing or a small thing.
And it was a big thing in terms of the way in which it changed Ireland.
Ireland today is predominantly, for good or ill,
an English-speaking country.
We're a common law country.
The basis of our law, it is English common law.
We're a parliamentary democracy.
And I suppose thinking, if you think of most Irish people,
most of our primary loyalty is not to the country,
it's to our county.
I know the GAA is primarily responsible
for strong county loyalty.
Well, those counties are English introductions.
The majority were English units of administration.
The Anglo-Normans really did reshape Ireland.
The villages, most of them have got medieval origins.
So we're living the Anglo-Norman imprint
every single day of our lives.
Every time we use the roads,
every time we see a medieval church and a grave yard and a castle,
this is the imprint the Anglo- Normans have left
on the country.
And yet their most striking legacy appears not in our surroundings,
but in something much more personal.
Many, apparently, typical Irish names
like Siobhán and Sinéad,
and even Sean are, in fact,
Anglo-Norman names or Norman-French names.
But an Irish speaker meeting a French speaker
in the late 12th century,
when told that that person's name is Jean,
would almost certainly say Sean.
And that's why we don't have the name Sean before the 12th century,
because that name doesn't arrive until
the Anglo-Normans in the 1160s and 1170s.
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Subtitling RTÉ 2024.