The ‘Calculus of Faction’ and Richard II's Duchy of Ireland, c. 1382–9

Summary

During the penultimate decade of the fourteenth century, a long-standing factional struggle between the two most powerful comital houses in English Ireland became markedly more intense. The nobles in question were Gerald fitz Maurice (d. 1398), third earl of Desmond, head of the Munster branch of the famous Geraldine family; and James Butler, third earl of Ormond (d. 1405). On two occasions – in the autumn of 1384 and again in the spring of 1387 – the records of the Irish chancery laconically report the outbreak of ‘great discords’ between these earls. The royal administration in Ireland deemed it prudent to intervene. Among those it entrusted with the task of mediation were some of the most distinguished political figures in Ireland, including Maurice, fourth earl of Kildare (d. 1390) – whose career of over four decades may have marked him out as something of an elder-statesman – and two experienced bishops. The dispute was not easily composed. The negotiations in 1384 lasted well over a week. One of the mediators grandly claimed that his efforts had helped restore the king's lieges in Munster to tranquillity. If so, peace was ephemeral. Early in 1387, the earl of Kildare was again commissioned to intervene and treat between the two earls.

The antagonism between the Geraldine and Butler families was to become perhaps the most notorious, and certainly the most enduring, magnate rivalry in Irish history. It is sobering, then, to realise how little we know of its crucial early phases.