Ardnaree on the Moy1586 CE

Dateline

The most sharply dated Irish event of 1586 occurred on 23 September beside the River Moy at Ardnaree, near modern Ballina. There Sir Richard Bingham, the crown’s governor of Connacht, surprised and defeated a force of Scottish mercenaries and Irish allies. The engagement was one episode in the Tudor crown’s long attempt to turn claims of sovereignty over Ireland into regular authority: authority expressed through sheriffs, courts, rents, surveys and, when those failed, armed force. Its consequence was not merely a military reverse for Bingham’s opponents. Ardnaree exposed how closely local Connacht rivalries, Gaelic lordship, Scottish migration and the English state’s expanding institutions had become entangled.

A Campaign in Connacht

Bingham had been appointed president, or governor, of Connacht in 1584. He was energetic, capable and feared. The previous year’s Composition of Connacht had sought to make government more predictable. Leading lords and landholders were to pay a fixed composition rent in place of older and more variable burdens, particularly military exactions and the billeting of troops. In return, the Dublin administration hoped to bind provincial elites to English law, reduce the expense of garrison government and make Connacht’s revenue support its own presidency.

In practice, the arrangement unsettled as much as it settled. It limited the customary claims of powerful lords over their dependants, while many inhabitants still encountered soldiers demanding food, lodging and labour. Bingham’s administration also pressed claims to land, punished resistance severely and made wide use of local officers allied to his family. The agreement therefore became, in 1586, not a quiet constitutional settlement but part of the immediate argument over who commanded men, land and money in the west.

The principal resistance came from branches of the Burke family in Mayo, including the Mac William Íochtar, and from the MacPhilbins. Their opponents were not simply divided into neatly “English” and “Irish” camps. The Burkes were descendants of Anglo-Norman settlers but were deeply embedded in Gaelic political life; Bingham’s own army included Irish allies as well as English officers and troops. The rebels called on kindred and connected Scottish fighting men from the MacDonnell world of the Hebrides and Antrim. Such mercenary forces, commonly including heavily armed gallowglasses, had long moved through the sea lanes and coastal lordships linking western Scotland and Ireland.

Ardnaree, 23 September

The invading Scots travelled south through Sligo towards Mayo, having been opposed along the way by crown forces. At Ardnaree they and their Irish associates found themselves close to the Moy, a formidable obstacle once an enemy held the approaches. Bingham attacked on 23 September. The MacDonnell brothers Donnell Gorm of Carey and Alexander Carrach of Glenarm, commanders of the Scottish contingent, were killed. Crown reports presented the victory as overwhelming, and one contemporary account estimated that about a thousand or more of the opposing force were killed or drowned as they were pressed against the river.

That figure must be treated with caution. It comes from victorious soldiers writing to government officials, and early modern battle numbers were frequently inflated. Yet there is no doubt about the scale of the disaster for the expedition. Later Irish and Scottish memory preserved Ardnaree as a destruction, while official correspondence celebrated it as a decisive blow against the rebels and their overseas support. Accounts also indicate that non-combatants attached to the camp suffered in the rout. This was not a restrained encounter between professional armies but a violent assault within a war in which soldiers and civilians alike were exposed.

The battle mattered because it cut across the expectation that Scottish manpower could alter the balance in Mayo. It also demonstrated the advantages enjoyed by a provincial administration able to combine local intelligence, garrisons, mounted troops and control of strategic routes. Bingham pursued the campaign with further coercion against the Burkes and their associates. His authority remained contested, but Ardnaree made open resistance in north Connacht far more dangerous.

Rent, Law and the Map

Military victory and civil administration advanced together. A “state of the new composition” was compiled in December 1586, documenting the operation of the Connacht settlement. The paperwork behind it was consequential. A fixed rent required officials to decide who held each territory, how much land was chargeable and which person could be made responsible for payment. Such decisions could turn fluid lordship, shared customary rights and local tenures into liabilities legible to the crown.

Surveying was another instrument of this change. Records associated with Bingham’s administration include a 1586 division of Connacht into counties and baronies, with notes on castles. To map a castle, a route or a territory was not to gain unquestioned possession of it; much of the province was still beyond everyday crown control. But the work translated landscapes of lordship into an administrative vocabulary of counties, forts and jurisdictions. It enabled the government to plan movement, taxation and military supply with a precision unavailable to earlier officials.

Law likewise reached beyond Dublin, though unevenly. Parliament, first convened by Sir John Perrot in May 1585, met for its concluding session in 1586 and ended on 13 May. Its measures included an Act of Attainder against the late earl of Desmond and others. Gerald FitzGerald had been killed in 1583, but the 1586 statute gave legislative force to the confiscation of rebel interests and underpinned the crown’s treatment of vast estates in Munster. Another statute addressed wilful perjury, prescribing heavy fines or, for those unable to pay, imprisonment and public exposure in the pillory. Its language reveals official concern that land, debts and inheritance depended upon contested testimony in courts whose authority was being extended across the realm.

Munster’s Uncertain Settlement

In June a plan was prepared for settling the lands said to have escheated through the Desmond rebellion. This was a formative stage of the Munster plantation, rather than a completed colonisation. Government agents sought prospective English undertakers—men who would receive large estates on condition that they brought in tenants, built defensible residences and helped establish a loyal, English-speaking society. Recruitment was actively pursued during 1586, but grants, title disputes, surveys and negotiations meant that settlement proceeded slowly and unevenly.

For people in Munster, the issue was immediate even where no new settler had yet arrived. The 1586 attainder and associated planning placed former ownership, leases and inheritance under acute pressure. The crown’s programme promised revenue, security and agricultural recovery after the devastating Desmond wars. To displaced or uncertain proprietors, it threatened the permanent conversion of wartime ruin into a new order of landholding. The experience would shape the province for generations.

New Counties, Fragile Reach

Elsewhere, the crown’s geographical ambitions continued. County Longford is conventionally dated to 1586, when the territory of Annaly was separated from Westmeath and shired. The act of drawing a county boundary was important, creating a framework for sheriffs, assizes, taxation and land records. It did not, however, instantly dissolve the power of the O’Farrells or make the new county securely governed from Dublin. Like Bingham’s Connacht surveys, it marked an intended extension of royal administration whose reality on the ground remained partial.

Appointments also show the state being equipped for this wider reach. Robert Gardiner became lord chief justice of Ireland in 1586, while Sir Edward Waterhouse was appointed chancellor of the exchequer in October. These offices concerned the working machinery of rule: judicial authority, crown income, accounts, grants and fees. Their importance is easily overlooked beside battles, but Tudor expansion depended on clerks, lawyers and financial officials as surely as on captains.

Ulster and a Confessional Absence

Ulster remained politically unsettled. Hugh O’Neill had secured recognition as earl of Tyrone in the parliament of 1585, yet his position within Tyrone was still challenged by Turlough Luineach O’Neill and by the surviving sons of Shane O’Neill. Perrot’s government continued to negotiate with northern lords and with Sorley Boy MacDonnell’s kindred in Antrim. The Anglo-Scottish Treaty of Berwick, signed on 6 July 1586, formed part of a wider effort to stabilise relations between Elizabeth I and James VI; the movement of Highland and Island fighting men into Ireland ensured that such diplomacy had direct Irish consequences. Ardnaree, fought only months later, showed how porous the North Channel remained.

Religion, too, was inseparable from these politics, although the evidence for one supposed event of 1586 requires care. Richard Creagh, the Catholic archbishop of Armagh, remained a prisoner in the Tower of London into late 1586. A later Vatican reference indicates that he died in prison during that year, but the Tower chapel’s burial register records the burial of “Bishop Richard Crue, Irish” on 28 January 1588 in modern dating. The precise date of his death is therefore uncertain. What can responsibly be said of 1586 is that the imprisonment of a leading Catholic churchman continued, a potent sign of the crown’s distrust of an episcopate whose religious and political loyalties it could not command.

Thus 1586 did not bring a single transformation of Ireland. It brought a brutal victory at Ardnaree, legislative confirmation of confiscation in Munster, the tightening of fiscal and county structures, and continuing negotiation in Ulster. Together they show a kingdom being remade through an unstable mixture of agreement, documentation, dispossession and force.