Anglo-Irish

The Anglo-Irish are the English-descended settler community of Ireland, whose roots lie in the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169–1171 and the Lordship of Ireland created for Henry II’s son John in 1177. Many settler families Gaelicised so thoroughly that medieval commentators called them more Irish than the Irish themselves.

Edward Bruce’s Scottish invasion of 1315–1318, famine and the Black Death of the 1340s shrank the colony, and the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366 vainly forbade settlers from using the Irish language and Irish customs. By the fifteenth century English rule scarcely reached beyond the Pale around Dublin.

The Tudor plantations and the Cromwellian conquest of the seventeenth century remade the community into a largely Anglican landowning class, the Protestant Ascendancy, whose position was anchored by the Act of Union of 1801.