Download or read book The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland written by John McGurk and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the impact of the Nine Years' War on central and local government and society in the English and Welsh shires in the 1590s. It contains fascinating new insights into the centrality of Ireland to England's problems in the crucial last decade of Elizabeth I's reign. However, this is in no sense a conventional military history, but rather a history of the social impact of the war and the strains it put upon the Elizabethan government. Based on painstaking primary research, it also covers the recruitment of levies for Ireland, their shipping, their service in Ireland and the limited extent of aftercare given to the sick and the wounded. The book therefore helps towards an understanding of why the Elizabethan conquest took so long to complete and why it proved to be more severe than at first intended.