AHC: Ireland a Tribal State

Another thing we have to consider is the Catholic Church.

This. Pope Adrian IV had given permission to England to bring Ireland and its Celtic Church under Rome's authority since 1155's Laudibiliter. Dermot McMurrough et al were just the spark that forced Henry II into action. How long can a tribal Ireland survive opposition by the Pope at this time?
 
yourworstnightmare

Why? England, after the expulsion of the Viking kings was a rich and powerful state, and then again after the 2nd Viking invasion under Canute. It had some internal divisions which tended to make external power projection a problem despite it's fairly high level of centralisation. However it never, as far as I'm aware attack Ireland nor anyone else except Scotland and Wales where there were continued border disputes. Ireland was actually a fairly friendly neighbour which often supplied trade and a place of exile for displaced English.

The immediate problem was the Norman system of sending younger sons out to make their own future, generally looking to conquer and rule new lands. This made them both expansionist and very destructive of the existing populations and power structures.

Steve

The one documented occasion when the Irish and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms fought was the attack upon the Kingdom of Brega by King Ecgfrith of Northumbria circa 682AD. However this occurred around the same time as hostilities broke out between the Northumbrians and the Pictish kingdoms, making it likely that the there was some element of collusion between the Irish and Picts for King Ecgfrith to strike westwards against Ireland instead of northwards what is now Scotland.

Why wouldn't an Anglo-Saxon England invade Ireland? Sure it may take longer than IOTL, but an England, which gets it's act together and/or has an expansionist ruler, could very well end up in seeing Ireland as a target for expansion.
And who's to say that second (or third etc.) sons in a surviving Anglo Saxon England wouldn't try to do the same?

With England not controlled by the Normans, you butterfly away their expansionist policies. It wasn't the English who initially fought overseas wars to reconquer the Holy land or retake Sicily, but the Normans. With the one exception I mentioned above, the Anglo-Saxons didn't actually fight a war against any people overseas until they were absorbed into King Canute's Danish kingdom, and even then this basically took the form of English levies being raised to fight in internal struggles within this kingdom over the succession of the Danish crown.

Without the fatal combination of Norman expansionism and Papal support, it would be fairly difficult to imagine the circumstances under which an English King would want to seize an island that lacks any usable resources and is at the time mostly bogland or forests with the exception of the southeastern coastline.
 
IMHO no Normans in England doesn't butterfly away the possibility that England could develop expansionist policies (a lot can happen between the middle ages and modern times).
Sure it might take longer, but I won't dismiss the possibility that they might.
 
I'd guess that the ideal situation to meet the terms of this challenge would be to have a fairly centralized and efficiently administered English kingdom that possesses a halfway decent fleet, and follows a foreign policy similar to that of the House of Wessex. By this I mean that Welsh kings and Irish chieftains either consent to or can be forced into becoming client kingdoms and accepting a notional English high kingship, as some did historically. This would help by ensuring that it is in the interest of successive English kings to maintain existing divisions so as to keep the peace between his sub-kings.
 
Why wouldn't an Anglo-Saxon England invade Ireland? Sure it may take longer than IOTL, but an England, which gets it's act together and/or has an expansionist ruler, could very well end up in seeing Ireland as a target for expansion.
And who's to say that second (or third etc.) sons in a surviving Anglo Saxon England wouldn't try to do the same?

Janprimus

Sooner or later it probably would if it stayed strong and Ireland weak and tribal, if only to keep such a dangerous base out of other hands. However in the period after the initial Anglo-Saxon invasions the various kingdoms and later the unified state seems to have been largely introvert. Also it had fairly friendly links with the Irish tribes. Furthermore it looked more south and east.

I'm not saying Saxon England was the perfect neighbour but it was a damned sight better than any Norman state. It's unlikely for a couple of centuries at least, unless possibly you have the papal involvement point that's been raised, that it would look aggressively towards Ireland.

Steve
 
Janprimus

Sooner or later it probably would if it stayed strong and Ireland weak and tribal, if only to keep such a dangerous base out of other hands. However in the period after the initial Anglo-Saxon invasions the various kingdoms and later the unified state seems to have been largely introvert. Also it had fairly friendly links with the Irish tribes. Furthermore it looked more south and east.

I'm not saying Saxon England was the perfect neighbour but it was a damned sight better than any Norman state. It's unlikely for a couple of centuries at least, unless possibly you have the papal involvement point that's been raised, that it would look aggressively towards Ireland.

Steve

Agreed

Its more likely that a fragmented Ireland divided into five of more kingdoms would, for the first several centuries at least, slowly become a cultural and political satellite of England. You will almost certainly see some conflict between England and Ireland at some point given that piracy continued to flourish within this time period, with the Irish sea and the eastern coastline of Ireland being the most likely battlegrounds.

As I said earlier, I think the best bet is to allow Ireland to become, to some degree, intertwined within English political affairs. This way it then becomes the duty of successive English kings to actively work against any effort at unification in Ireland through their obligations to their sub-kings; their notional loyalty in exchange for his protection of their lands. This kills two birds with one stone by keeping Ireland divided but giving the English a way of asserting authority over its kingdoms without having to resort to a war of conquest. Its unlikely that this state of affairs would last throughout the middle ages, but it would certainly limit mutual aggression between the two nation's for some time.
 
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