Review article of the following: THREE ARMIES IN BRITAIN: THE IRISH CAMPAIGN OF RICHARD II AND THE USURPATION OF HENRY IV, 1397–1399. By Douglas Biggs. Pp xvi + 295, illus. Leiden: Brill, 2006. €110 hardback (History of Warfare, vol. 39). INQUISITIONS AND EXTENTS OF MEDIEVAL IRELAND. Edited by PaulDryburgh and Brendan Smith.Pp vi, 290. Kew: List and Index Society, 2007. Distributed to subscribers: £17 members, £22.50 non-members paperback (List and Index Society, vol. 320). DE COURCY: ANGLO-NORMANS IN IRELAND, ENGLAND AND FRANCE IN THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES. Pp 205, illus. By Steve Flanders. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008. €55 hardback. IRELAND AND WALES IN THE MIDDLE AGES. Edited by Karen Jankulak and Jonathan M. Wooding. Pp 296.Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007. €55 hardback. MEDIEVAL IRELAND: TERRITORIAL, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DIVISIONS. By Paul MacCotter. Pp 320, illus. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008. €55 hardback. MANX KINGSHIP IN ITS IRISH SEA SETTING, 1187–1229: KING RÖGNVALDR AND THE CROVAN DYNASTY. Pp 254, illus. By R. Andrew McDonald. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007. €55 hardback. IRELAND AND THE ENGLISH WORLD IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF ROBIN FRAME. Pp xii + 241. Edited by Brendan Smith. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. £50 hardback. THE ANNALS OF IRELAND BY FRIAR JOHN CLYN. Edited by Bernadette Williams. Pp 303. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007. €65 hardback.

The British Isles are an archipelago formed mainly by the islands of Great Britain and Ireland. For over eight centuries, disputes and conflicts between the English and the Irish people have been intense, revealing certain continuity and structural tension. This study aimed to analyze Anglo-Irish relations from a historical and geographical perspective. To do so, it begins with the geographic specificities that characterize the British Isles, to understand how they have shaped the relations between the people of these islands.

One of the defining characteristics of the early medieval period across much Europe is the emergence of kingdoms. Alongside this change in conceptions of civil community and collective identity, the crystallisation of governmental apparatus capable of sustaining and administering those kingdoms, and the development of Latin Christian culture, religious and ethnic identities, were equally formative and inter-linked in shaping the notional nationalities that remain the building blocks of modern European society and politics. The basis of many of these major social changes is the nature, shape and stability of local territories, through which identities were negotiated, kingdoms were built, regimes articulated, and even ecclesiastical hierarchies administered. Yet, how and when these local territories came into existence, and indeed, how they changed through the medieval period, has not often enough been considered or holistically understood. These issues are as true of the Irish Sea region as they are of the rest of medieval Europe. territories in the irish sea region The nature of evidence for the localities in early medieval Ireland, Scotland and Wales differs fundamentally from the Anglo-Saxon, Carolingian or Iberian

English Ireland may not have been set apart entirely from political developments in late-medieval Europe, but neither were its politics without their own distinctive flavour. Two of the most familiar structural features of Irish politics in the centuries after the English invasion are the island’s status as a lordship separate from, but dependent upon, the English Crown; and the division of the island into two peoples. Historians seek to understand and explain dependency and division by describing Ireland as a classic colonial situation. The problem with the colonial paradigm is not that it is wrong, but that, by itself, it explains too much and too little. What is most interesting about Ireland as a specimen of European political ideas in action is that the characteristics of dependency and division sat awkwardly – indeed, sat increasingly awkwardly – in the evolving thought-world of late-medieval Europe. This was the era when the ‘state’ was emerging as something more than an idea and was beginning to coalesce with conceptions of nationhood. As Andrea Ruddick has shown, the kingdom of England was being conceptualized in the late Middle Ages as a defined physical space that supplied the homeland of a distinct people. How, then, was one to define the status of those of the king’s English lieges who resided outside the realm yet claimed the liberties of freeborn Englishmen as their birth right? Since the king could not perform his office in person, how much of his sovereign authority devolved upon his representative in Ireland, who took an oath of office based upon the coronation oath? What were the king’s duties, whether of care or correction, towards the native inhabitants of Ireland whom the settlers had displaced and disenfranchised? And finally – a question prior to all of these – by what right did the monarch of England claim to rule Ireland in the first place?