Joan of Penthièvre, supported by great interests, had her opportunity for triumph. But the soul of the woman was too great to betray her country. She refused to take her revenge, but supported young John IV. of Montfort in his resistance, leaving an example which almost renews one's faith in human nature.

The Statutes of Kilkenny.-After Bretigny some attempt was made by Edward III. to regulate by deputy the affairs of the English colony in Ireland. His son Lionel Duke of Clarence, who had married the heiress of the Earl of Ulster, was sent to Ireland with a large force as viceroy. But it was an attempt to regulate only the relations between the powers of the deputy who represented the shadowy authority of the king, and the Anglo-Irish, resident in the country, as apart from the "meer" Irish. These Anglo-Irish were in each generation more nearly approaching the Irish in manners and habits and user of customary law, every day the more revolting from feudal dependence upon an absentee king, a king faced with the dangerous discontent of the same class in England, a king whose viceroys never had sufficient force to control the owners of the independent palatinates supported as they were by the "meer" Irish among whom they lived.

If any one of the greater Anglo-Irish barons had been able to attain sufficient pre-eminence over his fellows, an independent feudal kingdom such as the Bruce had established in Scotland might have sprung up in Ireland. But the strength of the Irish social system, irreconcilable with the decaying feudalism of England, worked both ways. It was sufficiently strong to check the creation of a new kingdom of the feudal baronage, while the chieftains of the Irish septs were always ready to assist the heads of the palatinates or other Anglo-Irish who had married and fostered among them against the always unpopular king's viceroy.

The English government made no effort to control the native Irish; they were treated as outside enemies to be destroyed and extirpated. All that was attempted was to remedy by enactment from without, which the English government was not prepared to enforce, a tendency among the

old Anglo-Irish resting on social conditions within, an attempt to insist by legislation that a centrifugal motion of society should become centripetal.

The weak point of the Irish national movement of to-day is that, from the political standpoint, Ireland never has, in the course of her history, become the political unit which is called a nation, the whole tendency of her institutions being towards the independence of the local authority and separation of each district from the others by its subjection to its own local laws. That she is a nation in the sense of possessing a great national literature would appear from her revolutionary movements being headed by men of great learning in Celtic literature, by poets and historians. But in the conflict of brute forces in the world such things do not count.

The attempt of the English king to control the independence of the Anglo-Irish lords was so great a failure, that until some way into the sixteenth century his authority in Ireland steadily decreased, the feudal courts being nonexistent over nearly the whole of Ireland.

This call of the king's English in the pale to lure back to the fist the hawk who had flown to the Irish beyond was embodied in a series of statutes enacted at a Parliament held in Kilkenny in 1367, a Parliament which is wholly ignored by the Irish annalists.

The provisions of these statutes show us some of the vital points of conflict between the two social systems, and, as it seems to me, the hopelessness of the one then overcoming the other without the steady and prolonged application of physical force and the keeping of good faith which it has never been Ireland's lot to experience from the Anglo-Scot.

The main purpose of these statutes was to separate the English-speaking people, subject to and accustomed to English feudal law, as a peculiar people from the man of the communal society, who, strong in the customs declared by his Brehon, seduced the Anglo-Irish resident by marriage and fosterage from his position of feudal tenant paying dues to the king.

So in the first place the Acts solemnly forbid what they

cannot possibly prevent, that no Anglo-Irish-whether those in the pale, or those who, scattered throughout Ireland and unsupported by the royal power, had become accustomed to what at first might have been a bitter necessity, the adoption of the communal customs and laws which had hardly ceased to be custom in their original country-shall enter into marriage, concubinage, gossipred or fosterage with the Irish, shall sell them arms or provisions, or use the Irish language.5 The penalty for breach was the seizure of the offender's lands, a very easy way of obtaining forfeiture for the benefit of newcomers. Under the same penalty he was not to ride without a saddle.6 Hurling and coiting were forbidden as games under penalty of fine and imprisonment.?

The

Other provisions were directed against the acknowledgment of the tribe or sept as the unit instead of the feudal king, and against the common use of unenclosed land. chiefs were to give up their retainers and kinsmen who commit crimes to the king's officials; in a case of debt by an Irishman to another, whether English or Irish, he personally and not the sept was to be responsible; and provision was made against the conveyance of lands to avoid the feudal forfeitures, and there were gruesome penalties for treason and felony.

Then the Acts dealt with what was no doubt one of the chief difficulties in the settlement of border squabbles. Everyone (it seems a pious wish only) was to attack any raider on the waste land from either side; but no Irishman was to pasture or occupy (pasture ou mayneaurye) lands belonging to the English on the marches. If he did so, the cattle might be driven off and distrained.

on his own side of the pale.

He was to keep

Provisions admirable if they could have been enforced all round, but, as it was, only telling against the helpless English of the pale, were enacted against keeping mercenary soldiers, against maintenance of bad characters by the great men, for the regulation of sergeants, against the use of the palatinates as sanctuaries for robbers, for the regulation of the fees of officials, to encourage the use of the king's courts instead of the Brehon's, for an inquiry by justices of con

spiracies, maintenance, etc., as in England, against "idlemen,' i.e. the freemen or small gentry attached to the chief, who, as his dependants, take coshering among their fosterers and friends. It is suggested that they shall support the royal purse by hiring waste land from the king. The Statute of Labourers is forestalled, and the price of merchandise regulated.

Lastly, there are provisions, important in the light of after events, that no Irishman is to have ecclesiatical preferment or to be received into any religious house in the pale. As if it were not a sufficient evil for the unhappy country to suffer the conflict of the opposed social systems, the evil of theological hatred was to be added.

If in later times the Ulster Scot suffered in his conscience or his pocket from the predominance of papal authority in Ireland, it was traceable to the use of the Roman power by the English invaders as a means to hammer the Irishman. Colonies of friars had followed the steps of the invaders; a lavish abuse of excommunication was a means of support of the sword; and even if not strictly true, the story told by Campion that St Patrick striving with St Peter to let an Irish gallowglass into Heaven had his head broken with the keys is ben trovato.

The Effect on the English Colony.-But so far from having the desired effect, all these well-meant and in some respects useful provisions resulted in a combination against the king's authority by the Anglo-Irish lords throughout the country and by the native Irish, in the defeat of the king's viceroy, and in the gradual narrowing of the pale and an increasing decay of the English powers until nearly the middle of the sixteenth century.

But for the treason of Henry Bolingbroke and the murder of Richard II., that king, who seems to have had a better capacity than most of the kings of our French dynasties for understanding Ireland, might have conciliated and united the different races and factions. But in the dreary waste of years which followed Richard's murder, Ireland became the plotting chamber for the two factions of the Yorkist and Lancastrian barons. The Pretenders, whether real or false, for the quavering throne of England, Lambert

Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, invaded England from Ireland, and carried on their intrigues from thence.

As the foreigners continued in each reign to pour from the Western continent into the increasingly wealthy England, the English continued to invade what was fast ceasing to be wealthy Ireland. Even when the men of the pale could only hold their own at all by paying blackmail to the Irish septs around them, and when the great barons, who should have been consolidating the English authority in Ireland, were being drained away from it for French and Scottish wars, the men of the two baronial parties were rending Ireland for their different factions.

The course of change is well summed up in a letter written in 1536 by the Lord Deputy and Council of Ireland to Henry VIII. "Your Highness," they say, "must understand that the English blood of the English conquest is in manner worn out in this land, and at all seasons in manner without any restauration is diminished and enfeebled, some by attainders, others by persecution and murdering of Irishmen, and some by departure from hence into your realm of England. And contrary wise the Irish blood ever more and more without such decays increaseth.”

The communal system free from the destroying influence of feudal attainder, the community resident in their own country among their own kin, displaced in each generation the absentee landlord and converted to Irish ways the tenant who ought to have paid feudal dues.

But a worse matter for Ireland than the decay of the English race was the destruction of her pastoral and agricultural wealth, and its exhaustion by export for England's foreign wars, since the English invasions had been followed by Plantagenet rule.

66

1 NOTES.-They all married. Matilda, the eldest, married Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk; Eva, the youngest, married William de Braose; her daughter married Roger Mortimer, from whom many of the royal houses of Europe descend. 2 We have not got the text of the treaty; we only know it imperfectly through some mots des chroniqueurs.' 3 See the account of the Free Companies given in Froissart, ch. 47. * In England the result was the enactment of 34 Edw. III., c. 1, which to the disgrace of English law is still used by fiction for police purposes in magisterial courts. See my Tort, Crime, and Police, p. 256 et seq.