Adopting Irish fosterage culturally assimilated the Anglo-Norman conquerors

Evidence

The institution survived, in modified forms, into the late medieval and early modern Irish period. Norman-Irish lords in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — the Anglo-Norman elite established after the 1169 invasion — adopted Irish fosterage practices, placing their own children with Gaelic Irish foster-families and taking Gaelic Irish children into their own households. This Hiberno-Norman fosterage practice was, in fact, one of the principal mechanisms by which the Anglo-Norman elite became culturally Irish over the following two centuries. The Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366 — a major late-medieval English-colonial legal code for the lordship of Ireland — specifically prohibited Anglo-Irish lords from fostering their children with Irish families, on the explicit ground that fosterage was making the colonizers indistinguishable from the colonized. The English colonial state recognized what was happening and tried, by law, to stop it. — , The Rod and the Child, 1333

Categorization

• XREF: Child-rearing practice as a mechanism of cultural assimilation parallels themes elsewhere about how daily domestic practice exceeds policy control.