From medieval march to military frontier: English border formation in south Dublin, 1460–1534

Abstract

The south Dublin frontier between English settlers and native Irish established after the twelfth-century conquest was the most prominent and longest lasting of medieval Ireland’s many marches. The frontier later underwent ongoing English contraction, but two separate late fifteenth-century developments sought to reverse this. The south Dublin marches were built up into an impressive military frontier, with a formidable belt of defences around its dikes and ditches. The frontier was also incorporated into the English Pale, a wider system of defences thrown up around the Dublin region, although elsewhere the defences of ‘the four obedient shires’ were less developed. The military frontier’s effectiveness in curtailing Irish raids remains unappreciated, however. Successive studies of the south Dublin frontier have argued instead for a truncated English Pale ending with the dikes and ditches of the statutory, march-maghery boundary as Irish raiding continued unabated. In practice, the military frontier extended English rule well into the Pale marches beyond, recovering erstwhile English ground lost during the marches’ earlier contraction.