The Anglo Norman Conquest

Feuds in Ireland led to Dermot MacMurrough, the King of Leinster, asking Henry II of England to send an army to aid him.  In 1169 this brought Richard de Clare, better known as Strongbow.  Within a year he had taken control of Dublin and had married MacMurrough’s daughter.  At his instigation the construction of  Christ Church Cathedral was started.

When MacMurrough died in 1171, Strongbow was in line to succeed him.  Henry II sent an army to Ireland to check his ambitions.  Henry then spent four months in Dublin in order to establish control.  Under Anglo-Norman control the structure and size of the city grew.  Fortified walls and watchtowers were built, and in 1205 construction on Dublin castle was started.  St Patrick’s was made a cathedral in 1220 and underwent massive expansion, while the Liberties, the cities earliest suburbs were growing in strength.  The city became greatly overcrowded and in 1348 it was struck by the great plague known as ‘The Black Death’.

Tudor and Stuart Rule

Like the Vikings before them, the Anglo-Normans had entwined themselves in Irish society through marriage and religion.  Some of them, such as the Fitzgeralds, the Butlers and the Burkes effectively controlled dynasties.  In 1534 ‘Silken’ Thomas Fitzgerald, son of the 9th Earl of Kildare, staged a revolt against London.  This was easily defeated by King Henry VIII who then, in 1541, passed the Act of Supremacy that made him King of Ireland and the Head of the Church which, under the English Reformation, broke from Rome.  All land was declared the property of the English Crown and by dissolving the monasteries and sentincing to death all adult males of the Fitzgerald family, he indicated the start of a strongarm rule over Ireland and the introduction of Protestantism to the island.

The reign of Elizabeth I witnessed the development of the island into a British colony, with plantations set up throughout Ireland.  She made her mark in Dublin with the creation of Trinity College in 1592 as a seat of Protestant learning, a status it retained well into the 20th century.  The college was built on the site of a dissolved monastery.  London’s grip over Ireland intensified when the Catholic ex King of England, James II was defeated by the Dutch Protestant William Prince of Orange (William III) at the Battle of the Boyne, north of Dublin in 1690.