<Articles>Reformation of "The Wild" : Edmund Spenser's Theory for the Colonization of Ireland

The English monarchs had been the overlords of the whole of Ireland since the middle of the 12th century, but in the early 16th century they only controlled Dublin and its immediate suburbs, known as "the Pale". Outside "the Pale" there were many independent or semi-independent regional rulers, both Gaelic Irish chieftains and Anglo-Irish feudal lords. So int he early 1540s the Tudor government began trying to establish effective rule over all of Ireland. At first it tried to subordinate the regional rulers through negotiations and persuasion, but approach this did not bring any immediate results, so the Tudor government began to apply coercion in the middle of the 1550s. However, this change in the government's attitude only made their residence stronger. So the government adopted a new measure to bring peace and order to Ireland. That was the "plantation "policy, under which the estates of rebels were confiscated and distributed to "undertakers", who were to settle Enflish people on their new estates. This policy was executed on the most extensive scale in Munster after the Desmond rebellion of 1579-83. The old nationalist Irish historians usually regarded this policy and the whole process of the Tudor reconquest of Ireland purely negatively, as one of many English crimes against Ireland. But in the 1940s a new point of view emerged which saw these as a part of the overseas, particularly western, movement of the English after the middle of the 16th century. According to this view, Ireland in the late 16th century occupied a position similar to that of the New World of North America for the contemporary English. D. B. Quinn was the pioneer of this point of view, and in recent years N. Canny has been energetically pursuing research from this perspective. But there was still another side to Ireland as a colony, namely, Ireland as a relic of the "Angevin Empire" of the Middle Ages. So the English settlers in Ireland in the late 16th century must have encountered a socially and politically more complicated environment than the one the settlers in North America faced. Then how did they view and adapt themselves to this environment? To approach this problem, the author has analyzed the contents of Edmund Spenser's A View b f the Present State of Ireland (1596). Spenser was not only a great Elizabethan poet but also one of the "undertakers" of the "Munster Plantation" in the 1580s and a provincial official in Munster. The English settlers--of whom Spenser was one--acuired their estates at the expense of the natives. Naturally the former became the object of the resentment of the latter. So Spenser wrote A View to defend and justfy the position of the settlers. He said that Irish society was extremely "wild", and that the English had to "reform" it utterly, even through cruel methods. This suggests that early modern Ireland occupied a position similar to that of contemporary North America or later British colonies in general. But why did Spenser feel compelled to produce an explicit justification of the English settlers ? Because in Ireland there were "Old English", descendants of the Anglo-English settlers of the Middle Ages, who were alienated from the Dublin government and critical of the plantation policy. They still had some connection with the English royal court and could deliver their complaints to the queen, Their exiatence was proof that Ireland was in some sense a relic of the "Angevin Empire". For the "New English", i. e. the new settlers, they were a more formidable opponent than the Gaelic Irish. A View was written to refute their complaints.