Brendan Smith. Crisis and Survival in Late Medieval Ireland

Brendan Smith's central tenet in this book is that the English in Ireland were part of a larger English world. In doing so, he acknowledges an intellectual debt to the pioneering work of Robin Frame, whose work emphasized that Englishness did not end at the frontiers of England. What distinguishes Smith's work, though, are his chosen methods. Smith focuses on the English of Louth, a region in Ireland possessing both a coast and a deeper hinterland. Louth, through its ports, was an integral part of the medieval English maritime empire, in contrast to towns such as Ardee and Kells, which were located in the marches and exposed to the great Irish princely families of south Ulster. While Smith's approach is avowedly regional, his is also a study of English nobility, drawing upon the earlier work of K. B. McFarlane and Robert Rees Davies. Smith advocates that the history of medieval Ireland is very different when viewed through the prism of a regional case study, challenging old interpretations. Fortunately for Smith, the surviving medieval source material relating to the English of Louth is relatively plentiful in comparison to other parts of Ireland, although Smith freely admits that there are gaps in comparison to those available for the counties of England. Even so, he marshals the evidence with skill to set forth a convincing case for the Englishness of the Louth colony, drawing upon family deeds and charters relating to land and marriage, church records detailing Louth's holdings, as well as the surviving revenue records and parliamentary proceedings of the colony. In turn, he blends this mix with Irish annalistic sources, depicting the settlers at war with the Irish.

Economic history · Genealogy · Irish · Classics · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philippine History and Culture