ABSTRACT
Ireland had already for a century been threatened by the powerful monarchy of Norman England, and still more immediately by the aggressive Norman baronial race. The fall of Celtic Wales heralded the fall of Celtic Ireland. The earldoms of Chester, Shrewsbury, and Gloucester, and the Honour of Glamorgan had by 1100 brought most of Wales under the feudal yoke. When in 1090 Rhys ap Tewdwr, king of Dyved, was killed by the Normans the independence of southern Wales perished. Pembroke became a Norman lordship under Arnulf of Montgomery, who in 1097 made castellan of his castle at Pembroke Gerald of Windsor, ancestor of the Geraldines of Ireland. Arnulf was banished by Henry I in 1103 along with his brother Robert, Earl of Shrewsbury, but the Norman advance was not checked, and in 1109 Henry I granted to Gilbert de Clare ‘all the land of Cardigan, if he could win it from the Welsh’. This was the sort of ‘speculative grant’ which was to be common in Ireland.
