The Recruitment of the New Irish Army

Gerard Hayes-McCoy was dubbed the founding father of Irish military history.  In his seminal book Irish Battles (published in 1967) he observed that the creation of what I have called the New Irish Army in this series was a great achievement.  It was five decades later in 2017 that James O'Neill, having taken up the baton, published his definitive work 'The Nine Years War'.  In it he urged readers to look again at the society that produced the same army.   In this post I have attempted to do so.

In the normal run of things once a year every free Irish man had to negotiate a contract with a new lord or renegotiate his existing contract with his current lord.  This was a time of great psychological strain for both parties.  Each party wanted to get the best deal possible.  

If the lord held the economic upper hand, he had to be careful that other lords did not poach his clients with better terms.  The Irish lord while being a land owner was primarily a man lord for it was the number of his clients that gave him his superior status.  No clients meant no lordship.

The contract usually involved the lord in providing additional livestock to the client or access to more land.  The livestock had to be paid back within 7 years while the land access terminated with the contract.  The lord also championed his client’s interests in disputes and court cases. Established farmers tended to need less from the their lord and so got better terms.

 

In return the client obligated himself to provide certain services to the lord.  These might involve providing food renders, providing a set amount of labour and invariably providing hospitality for the lord and a set number of companions during the season of guesting and feasting. The latter is when all negotiation great and small took place. The client’s kin group stood surety for his contracts and would have to make good if he defaulted or was fined for poor performance. It was the kin group that enforced the contract on the client.  

As a consequence Irish law eschewed physical punishment for offences. Rather, for the committed recidivist a life as a helot beckoned. Beyond that, to flee rather than pay due fines or a failure to defend the polity in time of war warranted the death penalty.

Traditionally the contract had also required military service should the lord be engaged fighting.

The law permitted a client to contract himself to more than one lord should he wish it. As an example a client might contract with one lord for extra cattle and another for extra grazing land.

It is these last two points that I wish to consider in terms of recruitment to the new Irish Army.

Both clients and lords were used to regular negotiations where assets tangible and political changed hands in return for labour, food and services.  

When the Irish lords agreed to create the New Irish Army they already had this widely used and understood mechanism at their disposal.  It enabled them to recruit and contract soldiers from beyond the traditional military classes.

They let it be known parish by parish that they wanted to contract client soldiers and set out what they were offering.

The lords offered weapons and training, gunpowder and shot and wages. I believe the wages were at a set level and not subject to the usual bargaining.  Set or not they represented a new income stream to the farmers and farmers sons who comprised the bulk of male Irish society.  I think it is safe to assume if a soldier did not renew his contract then his weapons were returned to the Lord who had provided them. Likewise if he perished. Should he perish and the weapon be beyond recovery the debt died with him.

This must have been an attractive offer especially to the young men who had yet to achieve full manhood and therefore the right to establish their own home and contracts.  The latter is what enabled a man to become a householder able to feed himself and his family on his own resources.

In return the client became a soldier for the duration of the contract.  He might of course be returned home to help with the harvest.  During his service he did in military terms whatever was required of him. Normally a man injured or killed in his lord’s service would get compensation to himself or his kin group. I suspect this did not apply to the soldiers of the New Irish Army.  Likely it was offset by the receipt of regular wages-a novel concept in Gaelic Ireland outside the traditional military classes.

The wages were raised by intense cereal cultivation in the lordships and by financial contributions from the Old English of Ireland.  The latter were sometimes voluntary and sometimes not. The Old English feared the land hunger of the New English.

The normal contract with a lord enabled a man to become a free farmer and therefore a fully franchised clansman.  The military contract with a Lord enabled a man to become a soldier.  The military calling was valued in Ireland and clearly the soldiers of the New Irish Army enjoyed their status.

I think it entirely possible for Irish men of military age to choose to contract with a Lord with a good military reputation who was not his non- military Lord.  It is compatible with the law texts as we currently understand them.  It was Irish Law that enabled the creation of a modern Irish army from a dispersed agrarian and pastoral society.

From this vantage point we can look back at the Tudor policy of surrender and re-grant and see it's application for denying the Irish lords the ability to raise substantial armies.  Surrender and re-grant required Irish lords to surrender the territories they ruled to the English Crown. In turn the Crown re- granted the territory to the original lord.  Consequently the lord acquired title to the land of his free holding farmers.  Should the lord prove difficult  the Crown could remove him and confiscate all of the land in the re-grant.

One of the key triggers for the Nine Years War was the determination of the Irish at all levels of society to maintain their own legal and social system.  As was noted at the time "They fought for their O's and Mac's".

It is useful here to briefly look at how Irish society appeared to outsiders. The English scholar William Camden wrote:

“It is a system among the Irish for their nobles to have lawgivers, physicians, antiquaries, poets, and musicians, and for endowments to be bestowed on them, and also their persons, lands, and property to enjoy immunity. These princes have their own lawgivers, whom they call 'brehons', their historians for writing their actions, their physicians, their poets, whom they name 'bards', and their singing men, and land appointed to each one of these, and each of them dwelling on his own land, and, moreover, every one of them of a certain family apart; that is to say, the judges of one special tribe and surname, the antiquaries or historians of another tribe and surname, and so to each one from that out, they bring up their children and their kinsfolk, each one of them in his own art, and there are always successors of themselves in these arts.”

This was the outward appearance of the upper echelons of the Irish agnatic clan ruling a lordship.  It was effectively a corporation.  The Rí (Lord to the English) was Chief Executive with all the perks of office and patronage of appointments.  This structure rested on the mass of free holding clansmen who attracted little notice from contemporary writers Irish or English.

Yet it was this class of society that produced the formidable infantry of the New Irish Army and it benefits us to discover what we can.

An English cleric by the name of Good taught school in Limerick.  Writing before the Nine Years War in 1566 he gave us his impression of the Irish he lived with:

“A nation this, which is strong of body, and active, which has a high vigorous mind, an acute intellect, which is warlike, lavish of its substance, which is gifted with endurance of labour, cold, and hunger, which has an amorous turn, which is most kind towards guests, steadfast in love, implacable in enmity, which is credulous, greedy of obtaining renown, impatient of enduring insult or injustice.”

The Irish scholar Seathrún Céitinn (Geoffrey Keating of Old English stock) was born before the Nine Years War and continued to write after it.  He judiciously observed:

“whereas, when the territory became divided among the associated brethren, the kinsman who had the least share of it would be as ready in its defence, to the best of his ability, as the lord who was over them would be.”

 
The "associated brethren" above were the free holding clansmen of Ireland who we have been discussing.  As we have seen in previous posts they did indeed prove to be ready in its defence.