The first evidence of significant settlement at Fethard dates from 1201, when a Norman lord -- most likely William de Braose -- chose the low hill above the Clashawley River as a base. There may have been a pre-Norman church on the same hill, but William was the one who laid out the town and began the walls that would eventually surround it. Fethard's situation on the Clashawley, where three regional roads now meet, made it a defensible market town. Over the centuries the walls were extended, reinforced, and repaired, and remarkably substantial portions of them still stand, the surviving sections detailed in heritage studies of Irish town fortifications. Sixteen kilometres east of Cashel, with its famous rock and cathedral, Fethard is a less famous but more intact survivor of the Norman urban project in Ireland.

The Everard family, a local landed line, served the Butler clan and the Earl of Ormond. John Everard, a lawyer, performed well enough as a justice in the Earl's liberty of Tipperary that Elizabeth I appointed him Second Justice of the Court of King's Bench (Ireland) in 1602. The Everards' connection to Fethard ended in 1725, when the last Baronet, Sir Redmond Everard, who lived in France, sold his family's properties. The new owner was a Mr. Barton, a wine merchant from Bordeaux, who replaced the old Everard mansion with a new house. Early in the 19th century that house became a military barracks. The transition from medieval manor to wine-merchant residence to British army garrison compresses 500 years of Irish history into a single building's biography.

Today Fethard is best known in one industry: thoroughbred horse breeding. It is the home of Coolmore Stud, owned by John Magnier and probably the most influential thoroughbred breeding operation in the world, where stallions like Sadler's Wells and Galileo redefined what an Irish horse could be worth. The trainer Michael 'Mouse' Morris keeps his stables in town. McCarthy's Hotel was once the home of Dick McCarthy, a professional jockey of the early 20th century who rode Savernake in the 1930 Grand National. Fethard GAA Club plays at Fethard GAA Park, formerly the Barrack Field, and holds 21 senior county Gaelic football titles -- among the most of any club in Tipperary.

Each June the town hosts the Fethard Medieval Festival, a parade running through the main street and culminating in Valley Park beside the surviving walls. Workshops, archery, craft demonstrations, live music, and food stalls do their best to inhabit the medieval setting without slipping into kitsch. In 2011 the town doubled for 1950s Borrisokane in the film Stella Days, based on Michael Doorley's book about life in that era. Fethard has produced its share of notable sons -- among them John J. Cantwell, who attended the Patrician Brothers Monastery National School and became Archbishop of Los Angeles, and Thomas Francis Bourke, the Fethard-born Confederate soldier and later Fenian Brotherhood figure who fought for the South in the American Civil War and lived long enough to die in 1889. William Tirry, an Augustinian friar executed during the Cromwellian conquest, was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1992 as one of the Irish Catholic Martyrs.