In the eleventh century, Ireland had a unified language, religion, culture and law. The ruling class spoken Middle Irish, a Gaelic language that absorbed some of the "Old West Norse" words spoken by the Norse people from Norway; the church people spoken Latin, but most of them also preferred to use Middle Irish. Irish writers and poets began to write many poems, plays, legendary epics and folktales in the Irish language as early as the end of the sixth and early seventh centuries. The Irish were the first people north of the Alps to write a large amount of literature in their own language. This cultural superiority played a significant practical role after the Normans invaded Ireland.
In 1166, King Leinster, who had been isolated and helpless during the Irish Civil War, fled to Britain for help. When the Norman adventurers he brought from Wales landed on the island of Ireland, dozens, four hundred, thousands of people... "The Norman invasion" began. The Combined Irish Army, assembled by the Supreme King in response to the invasion, had a large force and the help of Nordic mercenaries, but was defeated by a surprise attack of 600 Norman cavalry. Not even the 1,000 Norman adventurers could beat them, let alone Against Henry II, who landed 4,000 troops in 1171?
▲ King Henry II of England
The Irish ruling class chose to submit temporarily, and most of the Kings of england in the centuries that followed, as the Irish expected before their submission, had little time to intervene in Irish affairs with great fanfare. The Norman colonists, who were far ahead of the Irish in both military technology and military tactics, frantically occupied land under the stimulation of the British king's "speculative fiefdom". The King of England either gave a piece of land belonging to the Irish princes and nobles to the colonists to induce them to conquer it, or after the colonists seized a certain piece of Irish land, they recognized it afterwards. The legalized colonial aggression put Ireland on a feudal orbit. The Irish nobles who persisted in the struggle, although temporarily forced into the remote wastelands of the west, were able to achieve some military victories from time to time.
More critically, the French-speaking Normans eventually fell to Ireland's cultural superiority. Music and literature captured the Norman hearts, and the constant intermarriage with the Celtic Norse diluted norman ancestry. With the change to Irish, wearing Irish costumes, following Irish customs, giving irish names to future generations... Another group of invaders were gradually assimilated and integrated, becoming part of the Irish.
▲ Ireland's cultural capital - Galway
Of course, the Norman colonizers also caused great suffering to the Irish. The long-term chaos on the island has brought widespread hunger and death. The British government was dissatisfied with the fact that it could only directly rule one county of Dublin, and with the gradual Irishization of the British colonists. He seized every opportunity to exert influence on the island of Ireland: in 1228, it was compulsory to replace Irish law with English law and practice; in 1297, an Irish parliament was established that was not available to half of the Irish; It encouraged The English colonists to enter Ireland; and decrees were constantly issued to discriminate against the Irish in order to avoid the Irishization of the colonists... So much so that "killing an Irishman is equivalent to killing a dog". However, these measures did not have much effect, and time seemed to be on the side of the Irish – unfortunately, it was only an illusion.
▲ Norman knight
In the sixteenth century, the Reformation of King Henry VIII brought new forms of colonization. Believers in the Church of England and the Scottish Presbyterian Church, as Protestants, and Catholics such as the Irish have irreconcilable religious contradictions, and it is difficult to be assimilated and integrated. Coupled with Britain's rapidly growing overall national strength, the differences between colonizers and colonized people will only become more and more serious. Successive British rulers after Henry VIII took advantage of the significant gap in national power to brutally suppress and increase their colonization. One of the "masters" was Oliver Cromwell, the Protector.
Henry VIII
In the conflict between King Charles I and the British Parliament, the Irish people tried to establish a Catholic Irish state by supporting Charles I. After the end of the Civil War in 1649 and the defeat of the Royalists, Cromwell, as a devout Puritan, immediately led an army to conquer Ireland. Under the iron heel of the British army, in just three years, the island of Ireland, with a population of about 1.5 million, was reduced by 410,000 due to massacres, famine, disease and immigration. In order to settle the army's arrears and the Land Claims of the British bourgeoisie, the British Parliament confiscated and auctioned 11 million acres of all 20 million acres of arable land in Ireland. The days that followed became more and more difficult: in 1648, the Irish Catholics owned 59% of all Of Ireland, and by 1751 they had only 5% of all Of Ireland in their hands. They cannot also hire more than two apprentices, cannot study abroad, apply for degrees and scholarships at university, hold public office, jurors, lawyers and teachers, cannot attend parliament, have no right to vote, are not allowed to purchase land, and are even limited in the value of personal property (e.g. cannot own horses worth more than £5).
Charles I
Ireland was forbidden to export goods overseas, and its industrial base (such as the once-developed wool spinning industry) was destroyed and completely reduced to an agrarian country. Worse still, this agrarian status is even subordinate. In order to ensure the supply of grain needed for industrial development, Britain completely controlled Ireland's grain exports, and most of the barley, wheat, oats, etc. had to be supplied to Britain, and Irish farmers could only rely on high-yielding and cheap potatoes to feed. This is almost the same as the situation during the First Industrial Revolution when the British government, landlords, factory owners, and parish priests joined forces to snatch bread from the workers' tables, and it was "similar" to forcing the laborers to change their eating habits and feed on potatoes so that they could survive after paying as little wages as possible. The "saved" food can be used to meet the growing (sufficient purchasing power) demand in the UK and maximize profits.
When Charles I was executed, hundreds of new model troops "watched" around
The Irish were not without resistance. When the king was found unreliable, the national liberation movement in Ireland began to develop to a higher level. In particular, after the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, it provoked the climax of the Irish national liberation movement, and the concept of "independence, republicanism" was formed. Although all uprisings have failed due to various factors, the spirit is indeed passed down little by little, and the strength is indeed accumulated little by little. The British government also saw this and rushed to take measures to try to solve the problem. The result was simply a clearer understanding of the reality: after the anglo-Irish merger of 1801, the British government had no intention of promoting Ireland's integration with England as Scotland and Wales did. Ireland's colonial status has not changed in the slightest, and the colonial authorities continue to brutally exploit the Irish as colonizers.
▲ French Revolution of 1789
In 1817 the respective Treasuries of Britain and Ireland were merged. As a result of the British government's compulsion of Ireland, all costs incurred by the Irish in revolt, as well as military expenses "supposedly" provided by Ireland during the French Revolutionary War and the Napoleonic Wars, were borne as unilateral debts. Ireland's debt soared from £2.25 million to £113 million. The long-promised Emancipation Act did not pass the British Parliament until 1829. Not only was this an incomplete emancipation bill, it also raised voters' income requirements from the original 40 shillings to £10, reducing the number of Catholic voters in Ireland from 230,000 to 14,000. "The British can never count on it." The Great Irish Famine of 1845-1849 further educated the Irish people with endless blood and tears.
A group of Irish Protestant volunteer cavalry (Yeomanry) is preparing to hang an Irish rebel. Such lynchings were common in the British suppression of the United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798 from 24 May to 24 September 1798
Beginning in 1843, Potato Late Bright spread across North America and Europe, causing famine. When the famine ended, nearly 10,000 people died in the worst-case Netherlands, while the worst-case Irish had a death toll of 1 million. Together with the 1 million immigrants who fled Ireland during this period, Ireland, with a population of about 8.5 million, lost a total of 2 million people between 1845 and 1849. This is by no means the result of the normal development of famine, and Britain cannot be blamed. When famine broke out, the British media saw the catastrophe as God's warning to the Irish for a "luxurious" and "carefree" life, and denounced the potato as "the most unreliable crop and the worst food". It was as if the Irish people deserved to be punished for not eating bread and eating potatoes voluntarily.
In November 1845, the British government took three measures to deal with the famine: First, a large quantity of corn was ordered from the United States to Ireland, and sold at a low price by the government - not to mention that the American corn could not arrive until the spring of 1847. More importantly, the vast majority of Irish farmers grow wheat and other grains to pay rent, they usually rely entirely on potatoes to survive, and after the harvest is not free, how can they have any purchasing power? No matter how low the price of corn is, they can't afford it. Second, the exemption of protective tariffs on all grain imported into Britain and Ireland in order to reduce the price of bread – bread cannot be eaten in good years, and now that the price of bread is lower, Irish farmers can afford it? Third, the construction of public works across Ireland for work for relief – the only effective measure, but with few jobs, low wages, and at most less than 3 million people (including labourers and their families) can be fed. Moreover, the funds are simply not enough to sustain for a long time, the work is intermittent, and the farewell to famine is far away.
By July 1847, the government could only replace work-for-work rations with (relatively economical) direct relief rations. Government funding is rather limited, and donations from the British population are not much compared to those of Irish-Americans. Many British people believe that the Irish are ungrateful and unenterprising, and that it is a waste of tax to relieve the Irish. Despite the fact that the British government continued to collect taxes in Ireland during the famine, the poverty tax levied from Ireland and the principal and interest on loans recovered from Ireland alone exceeded 8.5 million pounds, while the total assistance provided by the British government was only 8.1 million pounds (more than half of which was actually used as a loan to be repaid). The British government also did not intervene in the wave of mass evictions that began in 1847.
Since the concentration of arable land in Ireland into the hands of the British colonists, a large group of "non-landlords (i.e., the concept of landlords in the land)" has been formed. These British landowners lived in big cities such as London, and some never even visited Ireland in their lifetime. They often rent the land in its entirety to local farmers, or remotely direct agents to manage the land, sit on the rent, and almost in no case agree to the rent reduction. After the famine broke out, some small and medium-sized farmers were overwhelmed by the rent that landlords refused to reduce and the tax imposed by the government, so they decided to evict the tenant farmers who could not pay their rents. However, many families of farmers were expelled by landlords immediately after the expulsion of tenant families. However, unlike sharecroppers, they have nothing, and they have often saved up a sum of money to settle down in North America.
Evictions were carried out by local officials with the help of the police and the army, and sharecropper families were evicted from their homes, houses were torn down, and neighbours who dared to take them in were often evicted together when they were discovered. Under the burden of debt, mortgage, or greed, only a small number of landlords do not carry out expulsion in the spirit of humanitarianism, some landlords are willing to exchange a little cash for the obedience of the evicted families, and most landlords are indifferent.
An Irish sharecropper whose house has been torn down after being evicted
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