Old English (Ireland)

Old English (Ireland)

The Old English (Irish: Seanghaill, meaning "old foreigners") were the descendants of the settlers who came to Ireland from Wales, Normandy, and England after the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169–71. The term is generally used by scholars for residents of The Pale and Irish towns after the mid-16th century, who became increasingly opposed to the Protestant New English who arrived in Ireland after the Tudor conquest of Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries. Many of the Old English were dispossessed in the political and religious conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries, largely due to their continued adherence to the Roman Catholic religion. As a result the distinction between Old English and Native Irish largely disappeared by 1700, as they were both equally barred from positions of wealth and power by the so-called New English settlers, who became known as the Protestant Ascendancy.

The earliest known reference to the term 'Old English' is in the 1580s The community of Norman descent prior to then used numerous epithets to describe themselves (such as "Englishmen born in Ireland" or "English-Irish"), but it was only as a result of the political cess crisis of the 1580s that a group identifying itself as the Old English community actually emerged.