This eagerly awaited book is an outstanding and right up-to-date summary of every excavation and investigation undertaken in Ireland into the earthworks, castles, ecclesiastical buildings and towns of the period from the arrival of the Anglo-Normans to the mid-sixteenth century...a most welcome synthesis and will be valued by the layperson, student and professional archaeologist, historical geographer and historian alike.' Archaeology Ireland

These essays explore aspects of the English colony in medieval Ireland and its relations with the Gaelic host society. They deal both with the foundation and expansion of the English lordship in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and with the problems sand adjustments that accompaneid its contraction in the later middle ages. Attention is paid both to the government and society of the colony itself, and to the interactions between settler and native.