They were rebellions by the Earl of Desmond, the head of the FitzGerald dynasty in Munster, and his followers, the Geraldines and their allies, against the threat of the extension of the English government over the province.

The rebellions were motivated primarily by the desire to maintain the independence of feudal lords from their monarch but also had an element of religious antagonism between Catholic Geraldines and the Protestant English state.

In addition to the scorched earth policy, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Warham St Leger, Perrot and later Nicholas Malby and Lord Grey and William Pelham, deliberately targeted civilians, including women and children, the elderly or infirm or even those of diminished mental capacity regardless of whether they supported the Desmonds or not.

The south of Ireland (the provinces of Munster and southern Leinster) was dominated, as it had been for over two centuries, by the Old English Butlers of Ormonde and the Fitzmaurices and FitzGeralds of Desmond.

FitzMaurice was thus the support of important Munster clans, notably MacCarthy Mór, O'Sullivan Beare and O'Keefe, and two prominent Butlers, brothers of the Earl.

To discourage Sidney from going ahead with the Lord Presidency for Munster and to re-establish Desmond primacy over the Butlers, FitzMaurice planned rebellion against the English presence in the south and against the Earl of Ormonde.

Together, Ormonde, Sidney, and Humphrey Gilbert, appointed as governor of Munster, devastated the lands of FitzMaurice's allies in a scorched earth policy.

Gilbert, a half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, was the most notorious for terror tactics, killing civilians at random and setting up corridors of severed heads at the entrance to his camps.

Perhaps the biggest winner of the first Desmond Rebellion was the Earl of Ormonde, who established himself as the most powerful lord in the south of Ireland because he had sided with the English crown.

This and the Desmond Rebellion caused Pope Pius V to issue Regnans in Excelsis, a bull excommunicating Elizabeth and depriving her of the allegiance of her Catholic subjects.

During his exile in Europe, he had declared himself as a soldier of the Counter-Reformation by arguing that since the Pope's excommunication of Elizabeth I, Irish Catholics did not owe loyalty to a heretic monarch.

In the summer of 1580, English troops under William Pelham and locally-raised Irish forces under the Earl of Ormonde retook the south coast, destroyed the lands of the Desmonds and their allies and killed their tenants.

They captured Carrigafoyle, the principal Desmond castle at the mouth of the Shannon at Easter 1580, cutting off the Geraldine forces from the rest of the country and prevented a landing of foreign troops into the main Munster ports.

In July 1580, the rising spread to Leinster under the leadership of Fiach MacHugh O'Byrne and his client the Pale lord James Eustace, 3rd Viscount Baltinglass.

Through the relentless scorched-earth tactics of the English, who killed animals and razed crops and homes to deprive the Irish of any food or shelter, the rebellion was crushed by mid-1581.

In April 1582, the provost marshal of Munster, Sir Warham St Leger, estimated that 30,000 people had died of hunger in the previous six months.

The first is from the Gaelic Annals of the Four Masters: ... the whole tract of country from Waterford to Lothra, and from Cnamhchoill (a wood close to Tipperary) to the county of Kilkenny, was suffered to remain one surface of weeds and waste… At this period it was commonly said that the lowing of a cow or the whistle of the ploughboy could scarcely be heard from Dun-Caoin to Cashel in Munster.The second is from the View of the Present State of Ireland, written by English poet Edmund Spenser, who fought in the campaign, approved the scorched earth method, and suggested it as a useful method of enforcing English ways: In those late wars in Munster; for notwithstanding that the same was a most rich and plentiful country, full of corn and cattle, that you would have thought they could have been able to stand long, yet ere one year and a half they were brought to such wretchedness, as that any stony heart would have rued the same.

Out of every corner of the wood and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked Anatomies [of] death, they spoke like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat of the carrions, happy where they could find them, yea, and one another soon after, in so much as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewithal; that in a short space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man or beast.

After a survey begun in 1584 by Sir Valentine Browne, Surveyor General of Ireland, the thousands of English soldiers and administrators who had been imported to suppress the rebellion were given land in the Munster Plantation of Desmond's confiscated estates.