Brotherhood of Saint George

The Brotherhood of Saint George was a short-lived military guild, which was founded in Dublin in 1474 for the defence of the English-held territory of the Pale.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, the only region of Ireland under secure English control was a part of Counties Dublin, Kildare, Meath and Louth.

In 1474 the Irish Parliament, apparently at the instigation of Thomas, 7th Earl of Kildare, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, chose thirteen men "of the most noble and worthy in the four shires" as the members, or companions of the Brotherhood.

After the downfall of the House of York in 1485, the Anglo-Irish nobility, whose leaders made up the knights of the Brotherhood, remained strongly Yorkist in sympathy.

Apart from Nicholas, 4th Baron Howth, son and heir of one of the original Companions, who had a connection by marriage to the new Tudor dynasty, almost all of the noblemen who were associated with the Brotherhood supported the claims of the Yorkist pretender Lambert Simnel to the English Crown, and some of them followed him to his crushing defeat by Henry VII at the Battle of Stoke in 1487.