Ireland’s natural resources – particularly uncultivated land – attracted English attention in the 16th and 17th centuries and in part motivated the early modern conquest. However, many English proponents of the conquest also revealed anxieties about Irish culture, repeatedly asserting that the wild Irish customs that they observed were contagious. This concern over spreading incivility was nowhere more evident than in commentators’ assertions about the “Old English”, the descendants of the 12th century Norman conquerors of Ireland. Although descended from the race of William the Conqueror, the Old English who settled in Ireland had, Fynes Moryson claimed “by little and little been infected with the Irish filthiness”.[1] To Spenser, the Old English degeneracy was doubly lamentable as they had abandoned their hard-won civility and in many cases had grown “much more lawless and licentious than the very wild Irish”.[2] This degeneracy could manifest itself in various different ways, with Tudor-Stuart commentators remarking on bilingualism, the taking of Gaelic surnames, and the adoption of Irish foodways and clothing styles as symptoms.
The specific mechanisms by which this degeneracy occurred were subject to interpretation. Most English writers agreed that intermarriage between English and Irish resulted in the gradual decline of the former. This was often worsened by the Irish custom of fostering children – that is, sending children away to be raised in the households of allied families – and the widespread use of wet nurses among the Irish and Old English elite. Moryson suggested that nurses inevitably “corrupt the children they foster, nourishing and heartening the boys in all villainy, the girls in obscenity”.[3] Edmund Spenser came down even harder against nursing, asserting that “the child that sucketh the milk of the nurse must of necessity learn his first speech of her” and that infants “draw into themselves together with their suck, even the nature and dispositions of their nurses”.[4] To Spenser, then, incivility was something that could be literally eaten, its symptoms dispersed through the body through the processes of digestion
In contrast to many of his contemporaries, who contented themselves with documenting Irish incivility and the lamenting the historical failure of English civilizing schemes, Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland proposed a plan. The wild Irish must be cut from the body politic like a diseased limb. The English must proceed, Spenser wrote, “by the sword, for all those evils must first be cut away with a strong hand, before any good can be planted, like as the corrupt branches and the unwholesome boughs are first to be pruned, and the foul moss cleansed or scraped away, before the tree can bring forth any good fruit”[5]
Only by proceeding with violence against the uncivilized Irish would their savage customs be eliminated once and for all. Spenser did propose a period of amnesty during which time peaceable Irish could surrender themselves to English authority.[6] For those who refused to both surrender and Anglicize, however, dire penalties awaited. In a haunting passage, Spenser advocated a scorched earth policy in Ireland, proposing that an English army should clear the landscape and make a mass slaughter of the Irish cattle. In the aftermath, the quick demise of the Irish people would ensue. Recalling the famine which had accompanied English scorched earth tactics during the second Desmond Rebellion, Spenser envisioned hordes of starving Irishmen coming
out of every corner of the woods and glens… creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them. They looked anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts coming out of their graves, they did eat of the dead carrions, happy were they could find them, yea and one another soon after in so much as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves… [7]
Spenser’s endgame promised “a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man or beast. Yet sure in all that was there perished not many by the sword, but all by the extremity of famine, which they themselves had wrought.”[8]
[1] Spenser proposed that, accompanied by a flood of English soldiers, the crown could “wish a proclamation were made generally…that what persons soever would within twenty days absolutely submit themselves…should find grace”. Ibid., 102. Such Irish as did surrender under the terms of the proclamation would, however, be expected to take up English customs, would be relocated by force to “the inner parts of the realm, and dispersed in such sort as they shall not come together, nor easily return”, and would be subjected to martial law under English troops for the foreseeable future. All those who refused to submit would be revealed as “stout and obstinate rebels, such as will never be made dutiful and obedient, nor brought to labor or civil conversation”. Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W.L. Renwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 103.
[2] Spenser, View of the Present State of Ireland, 104.
[4] Spenser, View of the Present State of Ireland, 63.
[5] Graham Kew (ed.), The Irish Sections of Fynes Moryson’s Unpublished Itinerary (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1998), 109
[6] Spenser, View of the Present State of Ireland, 67-68.