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Ireland and the Making
of Britain
and in whom an immemorial pride of family and birth
and an unbroken sense of freedom had made obeisance
to any conqueror inconceivable. 1 The newcomers speedily
succumbed to Irish civilization and, dropping their
French speech, dress and customs, sought matrimonial
alliances with Irish families of equal station and became,
in the old phrase, more Irish than the Irish themselves.
Very different had been the behavior of these Frenchmen
in England. The Anglo-Saxon had not taken to
civilization kindly. The vices, the brutalities, the indo-
lences and sensualities of an intractable barbarism
weighed him down, and despite six centuries of wander-
ing among the habitations of Roman civilization, and
despite almost five centuries of Christianity, the Englishman
still remained the semi-savage, using his intervals of
liberty from one oppression
or another to alternate ex-
cesses of swinish self-indulgence with suicidal orgies of
internecine strife. 2
To his French conqueror the medieval
Englishman was simply an evil-smelling boor and hind,
fit only for low and menial tasks; and to such tasks he
was henceforth condemned. 3
Thus the Anglo-Saxon,
trodden into resistless clay by the Dane, was trodden
1 Nothing more surprized these French and Flemish settlers from Britain,
accustomed as they were to the cringing servility of the English produced by
long slavery and what contemporary Norman French writers' call innate Saxon
dulness, than the natural boldness and readiness of the ordinary Irish in
speaking even in the presence of their princes and nobles. (Giraldus Cambrensis,
"Description of Wales," b. 1., C. 15; but the remarks apply to the Irish
in a greater degree.)
2 Green is more candid in his correspondence than in his history. Thus in
writing to Freeman about his projected history to the Norman conquest, he
remarks: "As I read it, the story isn't a pretty one, and the people are not
pretty people to write about." Stubbs had told him that people would not
read anything in English history before 1066. He refused to bow to this
doom and managed to throw over the facts and absence of facts a veil of
romance. (Letters of John Richard Green, 478.)
s "Who dare compare the English, the most degraded of all the races under
Heaven, with the Welsh?" writes Giraldus Cambrensis (1147-1222). "In their
own country they are serfs, the veriest slaves of the Normans. In ours (Wales)
whom else have we for our shepherds, herdsmen, cobblers, skinners, cleaners
of our dog-kennels, aye, even of our privies, but Englishmen?" (Opera, ed.
by J. S. Brewer, vol. III, p. 27.)
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