The social and political system of Ireland was powerless either to expel or to absorb the foreign element thus introduced within its borders. Not only was such an union of the two peoples as had at last been effected in England simply impossible in Ireland; the Irish Danelaw was parted from its Celtic surroundings by barriers of race and speech, of law and custom and institutions, far more insuperable than those which parted the settlers in the “northman’s land” at the mouth of Seine from their West-Frankish neighbours. Even the Irish Church, which three hundred years before had won half England—one might add half Europe—to the Faith, had as yet failed to convert these pagans seated at her door. At the close of the tenth century the Ostmen were still for the most part heathens in fact if not in name, aliens from whatever culture or civilization might still remain in the nation around them. Meanwhile their relations with England had wholly altered in character. The final submission of the English Danelaw to Eadred carried with it the alliance of the Irish Danelaw; it seems that the Ostmen in their turn endeavoured to strengthen themselves against the attacks of the Irish princes by securing a good understanding with the English king, if not actually by putting themselves under his protection; for the fact that Eadgar coined money in Dublin[381] indicates that his authority must have been in some way or other acknowledged there. The years of the Ostmen’s struggle with Malachi and Brian Boroimhe were the years of England’s struggle with Swein and Cnut; but the two strifes seem to have been wholly unconnected; and throughout the long peace which lasted from Cnut’s final triumph until the coming of the Normans, new ties sprang up between the Ostmen and the sister-isle. Owing to their position on the sea-coast and to the spirit of merchant enterprise which was, quite as much as the spirit of military enterprise, a part of the wiking-heritage of their inhabitants, the towns of the Irish Danelaw rose fast into importance as seats of a flourishing trade with northern Europe, and above all with England through its chief seaports in the west, Bristol and Chester. The traffic was chiefly in slaves, bought or kidnapped in England to be sold to the merchants of Dublin or Waterford, and by these again to their Irish neighbours or to traders from yet more distant lands.[382] Horrible as this traffic was, however, even while filling the Irish coast-towns with English slaves it helped to foster a more frequent intercourse and a closer relation between Ostmen and Englishmen; and the shelter and aid given to Harold and Leofwine in 1151 by Dermot Mac-Maelnambo,[383] a prince of the royal house of Leinster who had acquired the sovereignty over both Leinstermen and Danes, shews that the political alliance established in Eadgar’s day had been carefully renewed by Godwine.

To these commercial and political relations was added soon afterwards an ecclesiastical tie. The conversion of the Ostmen to Christianity, completed in the early years of the eleventh century, was probably due to intercourse with their Christianized brethren in England rather than to the influence of the Irish clergy, whose very speech was strange to them; and their adoption of their neighbours’ creed, instead of drawing together the hostile races, soon introduced a fresh element into their strife. About the year 1040 the Ostmen of Dublin set up a bishopric of their own. Their first bishop, Donatus, was probably Irish by consecration if not by birth.[384] But when he died, in 1074,[385] the Ostmen turned instinctively towards the neighbouring island with which they had long been on peaceful terms, where the fruits of the warfare waged by generation after generation of wikings upon the shores of Britain were being reaped at last by Norman hands, where William of Normandy was entering upon the inheritance alike of Ælfred and of Cnut, and where Lanfranc was infusing a new spirit of discipline and activity into the Church of Odo and Dunstan. The last wiking-fleet that ever sailed from Dublin to attack the English coast—a fleet which Dermot Mac-Maelnambo, true to his alliance with their father, had furnished to the sons of Harold—had been beaten back six years before.[386] Since then Dermot himself was dead;[387] the Ostmen were once more free, subject to no ruler save one of their own choice and their own blood; with the consent of their king, Godred,[388] they chose a priest named Patrick to fill Donatus’s place, and sent him to be consecrated in England by the archbishop of Canterbury.[389] No scruples about infringing the rights of the Irish bishops were likely to make Lanfranc withhold his hand. At the very moment when the Ostmen’s request reached him, he had just been putting forth against the archbishop of York a claim to metropolitical jurisdiction over the whole of the British isles, founded on the words of S. Gregory committing “all the bishops of the Britains” to S. Augustine’s charge.[390] He therefore gladly welcomed an opportunity of securing for the authority of his see a footing in the neighbour-isle. He consecrated Patrick of Dublin and received his profession of obedience;[391] and for the next seventy-eight years the bishops of Dublin were suffragans not of Armagh but of Canterbury. When in 1096 the Ostmen of Waterford also chose for themselves a bishop, they too sought him beyond the sea; an Irishman, or more probably an Ostman by birth, a monk of Winchester by profession, Malchus by name, he was consecrated by S. Anselm and professed obedience to him as metropolitan.[392]

Through the medium of these Irish suffragans the archbishops of Canterbury endeavoured to gain a hold upon the Irish Church by cultivating the friendship of the different Irish princes who from time to time succeeded in winning from the Ostmen an acknowledgement of their overlordship. In the struggles of the provincial kings for the supreme monarchy of Ireland it was always the Ostmen who turned the scale; their submission was the real test of sovereignty. The power which had been wielded by Dermot Mac-Maelnambo passed after his death first to Terence or Turlogh O’Brien, king of Munster,[393] a grandson of Brian Boroimhe, and then to Terence’s son Murtogh.[394] Both were in correspondence with the successive English primates, Lanfranc and Anselm,[395] and both were recognized as protectors and patrons, in ecclesiastical matters at least, by the Ostmen,[396] whose adherence during these years enabled the O’Briens to hold their ground against the advancing power of Donnell O’Lochlainn, king of Aileach or western Ulster,[397] a representative of the old royal house of the O’Neills which had fallen with Malachi II. On Murtogh’s death in 1119[398] a new aspirant to the monarchy appeared in the person of the young king of Connaught, Terence or Turlogh O’Conor. A year before, Terence had won the submission of the Ostmen of Dublin;[399] in 1120 he celebrated the fair of Telltown,[400] a special prerogative of the Irish monarchs; and from the death of Donnell O’Lochlainn next year[401] Terence was undisputed monarch till 1127, when a joint rising of Ostmen and Leinstermen enabled both to throw off his yoke.[402] Meanwhile Murtogh O’Lochlainn, a grandson of Donnell, was again building up a formidable power in Ulster; at last, in 1150, all the provincial kings, including Terence, gave him hostages for peace;[403] and Terence’s throne seems to have been only saved by a sudden change in the policy of the Ostmen, whose independent action enabled them for a moment to hold the balance and act as arbitrators between northern and southern Ireland.[404] Four years later, however, they accepted Murtogh as their king,[405] and two years later still he was left sole monarch by the death of Terence O’Conor.[406]

The anarchy of the Irish state was reflected in that of the Church. If Lanfranc, when he consecrated Patrick of Dublin, knew anything at all of the ecclesiastical condition of Ireland, he may well have thought that it stood in far greater need of his reforming care than England itself. The Irish Church had never felt the organizing hand of a Theodore; its diocesan and parochial system was quite undeveloped; it had in fact scarcely advanced beyond the primitive missionary stage. Six centuries after S. Patrick’s death, the Irish clergy were still nothing but a band of mission-priests scattered over the country or gathered together in vast monastic establishments like Bangor or Durrow or Clonmacnoise; the bishops were for the most part merely heads of ever-shifting mission-stations, to whose number there was no limit; destitute of political rank, they were almost equally destitute of ecclesiastical authority, and differed from the ordinary priesthood by little else than their power of ordination. At the head of the whole hierarchy stood, as successor and representative of S. Patrick, the archbishop of Armagh. But since the death of Archbishop Maelbrigid in 927 the see of Armagh had been in the hands of a family of local chieftains who occupied its estate, usurped its revenues, handed on its title from father to son, and were bishops only in name.[407] The inferior members of the ecclesiastical body could not escape the evil which paralyzed their head. The bishops and priests of the Irish Church furnished a long roll of names to the catalogue of saints; but they contributed little or nothing to the political developement of the nation, and scarcely more to its social developement. The growth of a class of lay-impropriators ousted them from the management and the revenues of their church-lands, reduced them to subsist almost wholly upon the fees which they received for the performance of their spiritual functions, stripped them of all political influence, and left them dependent solely upon their spiritual powers and their personal holiness for whatever share of social influence they might still contrive to retain.[408] The Irish Church, in fact, while stedfastly adhering in doctrinal matters to the rest of the Latin Church, had fallen far behind it in discipline; to the monastic reforms of the tenth century, to the struggle for clerical celibacy and for freedom of investiture in the eleventh, she had remained an utter stranger. The long-continued stress of the northern invasions had cut off the lonely island in the west from all intercourse with the world at large, so completely that even the tie which bound her to Rome had sunk into a mere vague tradition of spiritual loyalty, and Rome herself knew nothing of the actual condition of a Church which had once been her most illustrious daughter.

But it was the northmen, too, who were now to become the means of knitting up again the ties which had been severed by their fathers’ swords. The state of things in Ireland, as reported to Canterbury from Dublin and Waterford, might well seem to reforming churchmen like Lanfranc and Anselm too grievous to be endured. Lanfranc had urged upon Terence O’Brien the removal of two of its worst scandals, the neglect of canonical restraints upon marriage and the existence of a crowd of titular bishops without fixed sees;[409] Anselm used all his influence with Murtogh O’Brien for the same end;[410] at last, finding his efforts unavailing, he seems to have laid his complaints before the Pope. The result was that, for the first time, a papal legate was appointed for Ireland. The person chosen was Gilbert, who some two or three years before Anselm’s death became the first bishop of the Ostmen of Limerick. Gilbert seems, like the first Donatus of Dublin, to have been himself an Irish prelate; he lost no time, however, in putting himself in communication with Canterbury,[411] and displayed an almost exaggerated zeal for the Roman discipline and ritual.[412] In 1118 he presided over a synod held at Rathbreasil, where an attempt was made to map out the dioceses of Ireland on a definite plan.[413] Little, however, could be done till the metropolitan see was delivered from the usurpers who had so long held it in bondage; and it was not until 1134 that the evil tradition was broken by the election of S. Malachi.