Analysis: there are parallels to be drawn between the 1921 partition and the one which occured in Medieval Ireland in 1247
By John Marshall, TCD
This year marks the centenary of the introduction of the Government of Ireland Act on May 3rd 1921, which partitioned six Ulster counties from the other 26 and created the constitutional framework for Northern Ireland. It wasn't the first partition on the island on a May day: on the very same day 674 years earlier, the great Marshal lordship of Leinster was partitioned amongst the heirs of the earl of Pembroke and lord of Leinster William Marshal (d.1219), after his five sons had died without any legitimate heirs.
Naturally, both partitions vastly differ in their complexities and aftermaths. The Leinster Partition of 1247 and the Government of Ireland Act 1921 are not on a par merely because they were introduced on the same day. However, there are parallels to be observed in the process regardless of the century of occurrence.
Partitions are primarily implemented to solve problems. For British politicians, the Government of Ireland Act sought to finally untangle the 'Irish question', the British response to Irish nationalism and calls for Irish independence. Likewise, the kings of medieval Ireland had utilised partition as a political and military tactic, dividing a rival kingdom and installing a relative or acquiescent ruler to neutralise a possible threat.
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The deaths of Marshal's five sons—William the younger (d.1231), Richard (d.1234), Gilbert (d.1241), Walter (d.1245), and Anselm (d.1245)—left Henry III, the king of England and lord of Ireland, with a lack of coherence in Leinster, the very heart of English power in Ireland. This was compounded by the eager heirs, who happened to be some of the most powerful men in England, circling like vultures around their prospective rich inheritance.
What often precedes partition is an ideology of separatism, a feeling of unique identity that a physical border can then cement. While much of the rest of the island was heavily colonised from England, most of Ulaidh (Ulster) had maintained its Gaelic way of life and staved off conquest until the Plantation of Ulster in the 17th century. The Plantation resulted in the seizure of property and removal of people on the basis of religion, making the province, as Professor Diarmaid Ferriter has aptly described it, 'a bastion of Protestant settlement and British influence', and cognitively separating large swathes of Ulster from the rest of Ireland.
The shiring of Ulster and the creation of the counties that survive today came later than the rest of Ireland, only being accomplished in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. These county lines were arbitrary in many respects, but were adhered to for the 1921 Partition regardless of what towns, farms, or houses they crossed, as six of the nine counties became part of Northern Ireland.
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Unlike Gaelic Ulster, the rest of Ireland had been shired far earlier, beginning at the end of the 12th century with Dublin. While this shiring system was implemented in the areas under direct royal control, such as Dublin and Waterford, it also inspired Marshal, to replicate the system and increase the administrative efficiency of his lordship. He and his sons divided Leinster into Carlow, Wexford, Kildare, and Kilkenny, which was the caput (capital) of the lordship.
Similar to Ulster in 1921, these four counties provided the basis for the Marshal Partition in 1247. Leinster was partitioned among Marshal's five daughters (Matilda, Isabel, Sibyl, Eva and Joan). Four of them obtained a county each, with a fifth daughter, Eva, receiving the large stone fortress on the Rock of Dunamase, Co. Laois, and an assortment of different manors (landed estates) throughout her co-heiresses’ holdings. Even though the fifth heiress inherited an equal share of land to her sisters (£343 5s. 6.5d. each), her holdings still belonged judicially within the county of Kildare.
Although the counties in both partitions were accustomed to being separate, their overall administration was still centralised. This meant that on both sides of the Partition lines, new administration systems had to be created. In 1921, civil servant Ernest Clark found himself ‘setting out to form a new 'administration' armed only with a table, a chair and an act of Parliament’.
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The Marshal lordship of Leinster had been centralised around Kilkenny which housed its exchequer. There was one seneschal (principal administrator) for all of Leinster, and he heard the pleas in each of the four county courts twice a year. Under the seneschal, there was also a sheriff for each of the counties. Leinster was part of the Marshal transnational lordship which included vast lands in Pembroke (Wales), and manors spread across England, all of which utilised one chancery under the Marshals, which produced the lordship’s official documents.
All of this changed after the 1247 partition. Each of the four counties had to develop their own chancery, exchequer and seneschalry. Partition resulted in the construction of new administrative systems, but these tended to fall into the category of replication rather than innovation by observing and adopting existing systems.
While the magnitude and complexity of both partitions are of a vastly different scale, the process itself has many parallels. Although partitions are primarily geographical, administrative, and fiscal in nature, their cause lies in political issues concerned with the solving or preventing of problems.
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Often partitions are preceded by the concept of separate identities, and the creation of a boundary perpetuates this division. Similarly, partitions tend not to construct new lines but to capitalise on an existing system of land division, as seen here in the utilisation of the county system in both 1247 and 1921. Partitions lead to the creation of new administrative systems, which often replicate already existing organisational structures.
While each individual partition involves unique causes and repercussions arising from the temperature of the socio-political backdrop, we may conclude that the partition process is remarkably similar. This is but one of the many parallels between medieval and modern history in Ireland.
John Marshall is a PhD student in the Department of History at TCD
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
