With the aid of his Norman allies, to whom the Irishman with his naked valour was as the Mexican to the Spaniard, Dermot prevailed and glutted his revenge by plucking from the triumphal pyramid of hostile heads that of his chief enemy and tearing it with his teeth. But in this case, as in that of the alliance of Cortez with the Tlascalans, the ally had conquered for himself. Declining to be dislodged, he proceeded to establish himself and to organize a Norman principality.
Now the jealousy of the English king was aroused. He saw an independent Anglo-Norman kingdom on the point of being founded by Strongbow in Ireland. He published the papal bull, came over to Ireland in his power, and held his court at Dublin in a palace of wickerwork run up in native style for the occasion, where the Irish chiefs bowed their heads, but not their hearts, before him. He organized a feudal principality with himself as lord, but having the Pope as its suzerain, and tributary to the Papacy. He formally introduced the organization of a feudal kingdom. He held at Cashel a synod like that held by William the Conqueror at Winchester for the purpose of reforming, that is thoroughly Romanizing, the Church of Ireland. Irregularities respecting infant baptism and the matrimonial table of consanguinity were set right. The payment of tithes, that paramount duty of piety, was enjoined. Rome was installed in full authority, thus in Ireland, as in England, receiving from her Norman liegemen her share of their prize. With this pious offering to the Papacy in his hand, Henry departed to meet his responsibility for the slaying of Becket. He was presently succeeded for a short time in Ireland by his hopeful boy, John, whose personal behaviour was an earnest of the future tenour of his reign. Afterward, as king, John paid Ireland another flying visit in which, besides pouncing on an enemy, he seems to have made a fleeting attempt to regulate the government.
Henry, had he not been called away by the storm following the death of Becket, might have left things in better shape, but nothing could make up for the permanent absence of the king. Two antagonistic systems henceforth confronted each other. On one side was the feudal system, with its hierarchy of land-owners, from lord-paramount to tenant-paravail; its individual ownership of land; its hereditary succession and primogeniture; its feudal perquisites, relief, wardship, and marriage; its tribute of military service; the loyalty to the grantor of the fief which was its pervading and sustaining spirit; its knighthood and its chivalry; its Great Council of barons and baronial bishops; its feudal courts of justice and officers of state; all however highly rude and imperfect. On the other side was tribalism, with its tie of original kinship instead of territorial subordination; its tanistry; its Brehon law. But the feudal system in Ireland lacked the keystone of its arch. It was destitute of its regulating and controlling power, the king. A royal justiciar could not fill the part. From the outset the bane of the principality was delegated rule.
Ireland was a separate realm, though attached to the Crown of England. It had a Parliament of its own, which followed that of England in its development, being at first a unicameral council of magnates, lay and clerical; but after the legislation of Edward I. a bicameral assembly with a Lower House formed of representatives of counties and boroughs, whose consent would be formally necessary to taxation. Representatives of Ireland were at first called to Edward’s Parliament at Westminster, but the inconvenience seems to have been found too great. Weak, however, was the Parliament of the colony compared with that of the imperial country. If the Lords ever showed force, the making of a House of Commons was not there. The representation, as well as the proceedings and the records, appears to have been very irregular. Nothing worthy of the name of Parliamentary government seems ever to have prevailed. Among those who signed the Great Charter was the Archbishop of Dublin; but of chartered rights Ireland was not the scene. There is no appearance of a separate grant of subsidies by the clerical estate. The clergy, it seems, were represented by their proctors in the Lower House, as by the bishops and abbots in the Upper House. The Parliament appears to have been generally a tool in the hands of the deputy. The irregularity of its composition seems to have extended to its meetings.
From the first the relation between the feudal realm and that of the tribes was border war. They were alien to each other in race, language, and social habits, as well as in political institutions. The Norman could not subdue the Celt, the Celt could not oust the Norman. The conquest of England by William of Normandy had been complete, and had given birth to a national aristocracy, which in time blended with the conquered race and united with it in extorting the Great Charter. The Norman colony in Ireland was left to its feeble resources, and to a divided command, while the monarchy was far away over sea, was squandering its forces in French fields, and could not even project a complete conquest. Besides, there were the difficulties which the country, with its broad rivers, its bogs, its mountains and forests, opposed to the heavy cavalry of the Anglo-Norman. There was the mobility of a pastoral people, presenting no cities or centres of any kind for attack, driving its cattle to the woods on the approach of the invader, and eluding his pursuit like birds of the air. Thus the Anglo-Norman colony failed to become a dominion and presently dwindled to a pale. Between the Pale and the Celt incessant war was waged with the usual atrocity of struggles between the half-civilized and the savage. Fusion there could be none. There was not the bond of human brotherhood or that of a common tongue. On neither side was the murder of the other race a crime. Never was there a more inauspicious baptism of a nation.
Anglo-Norman and Celt, feudalist and tribesman, alike were Catholics. A common religion might have been a bond, a common clergy might have been a mediating power. But race and language prevailed over religion. The Churches, though outwardly of the same faith, remained inwardly separate, and not only separate but hostile to each other, the clergy on both sides sharing the spirit and the atrocities of race enmity and frontier war. The Church of the tribes was still very rough and irregular. The Norman on his part was devout. He was a founder of monasteries, thereby discharging his conscience of a load not seldom heavy. Whatever of religious life and activity there was in the Pale seems to have been monastic. Our glimpses of the secular clergy show that they were secular indeed. Among them not neglect of duty only but criminality appears to have been rife.
In the little commercial towns of Danish foundation on the coast which had been taken over by the Norman, life was probably rather more civilized; but they were too diminutive to exert any influence beyond their gates. Galway in time became the port of an active trade with Spain which is supposed to have left a Spanish trace on its architecture and a Spanish strain in the blood of its people.