Ireland. A History. A Nation Once Again? Part I. Иностранный язык. Фомина И.В - 10 стр.

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II. Answer the questions.
    1. What next great shock did Ireland experience?
    2. Was there any organized national resistance to the invasion?
    3. How did the Vikings become part of Ireland?
    4. Where did Norman invaders come from?
    5. Why did Irish kings invite Normans?

III. Retell the text.

                                          Unit Six.

   I.      Read and translate the text.

    It was then that the king of England, Henry II, intervened. He came not principally
to subdue the Irish but to subdue Strongbow who was clearly having ideas above his
station as one of the king’s feudal subjects. And that was the beginning of London’s
claim to concern itself with Ireland. The problem of eventually subduing the Irish as
well was taken on almost without realizing it.
    The immediate impact on the Gaelic world of the Norman adventurers who
stormed into Ireland in the wake of Strongbow was devastating. Entering into
alliances with some Irish chieftains they seized land and cattle from others, building
great castles as bastions to protect their gains as they penetrated, with their superior
military technology, into all parts of Ireland except western and central Ulster.
    Although these Normans owed nominal allegiance to their overlord, the English
king, on the other side of the Irish Sea, they were only in pursuit of their own
interests; and they spread their castles across the country in that pursuit. They were
after land and wealth, which, to the strong – and they were strong – was there for the
taking.
    Numerous attempts were made by kings of England to stop this process of
assimilation. One of the early Irish parliaments, held as Kilkenny in 1366, tried to
legislate against the wearing of Irish clothes and Irish hair-styles, and the use of the
Irish language and Irish laws, by what were referred to as ‘the English born in
Ireland’. All to no permanent avail. They became known as the ‘degenerate English’.
Even those great Norman-Irish barons who were entrusted by the English king, their
nominal overlord, with the role of deputy for his interests in Ireland tended to become
an independent power. Royal government shrank increasingly to a beleaguered,
ineffectual thing, enclosed within a self-isolating defensive frontier of a few hundred
square miles round Dublin known as ‘the Pale’.
    Part of the Pale as it was at the end of the fifteenth century can still be seen at
Clongowes, some twenty miles west of Dublin. It makes a pleasant woodland walk
along a raised rampart standing now about four feet high between and above the
double ditch that marked the boundary. The Gaelic Irish and the Gaelicized English
were original models. The Crown of England’s writ simply did not apply west of the
Irish Pale. Less than fifty years later the boundary had shrunk still closer to Dublin
and the former Pale at Clongowes was itself ‘west of the law’. But by that time there