CHAPTER XIV.

MISRULE AND OPPRESSION.

BEFORE the Reformation both Church and people were in an evil case. The reports of the visitations, preserved in Theiner's monumental work, of the various Sees in Ireland, as they became vacant from time to time, are not pleasant reading. The famous church of Clonmacnoise, where S. Columkille was received with great honour by the pupils of S. Kiaran more than 900 years before, is described in 1515 as "almost ruined, unroofed, with one altar and only covered with straw. Here Mass is seldom celebrated." The town itself is described as consisting of "scarcely twelve cabins built of wicker work and mud, close to which flows a river styled in the language of the inhabitants, Sinin." In the church itself was "the body of an Irish saint, of whose name the writer is ignorant.' So perished the glory of the Divinity School of the Church of Ireland in the west, and the name of its illustrious founder, S. Kiaran Macantsoir, or MacEntire, the son of the carpenter, generally known as S. Kiaran the younger. The see is said to be worth "thirty ducats, at which sum it is assessed in the Books of the Camera. The proceeds are derived from barley and oats." This would be about £15, if the ducats were gold. In the Inquisitio, 38, Henry VIII. (1547), the prebend of Wicklow is described as worth "communibus annis xlvil, xiiis, ivd." This was quite a large income, as the archdeaconry of Glendalough had been valued at 10 marks (7) in the Pope's

valuation of 1306, but at 100 marks (£70) in the king's visitation of 1615. But the ordinary income was “nil,” the usual entries being "nil propt. guerr.," "nil quia vasta." The report of the town (civitas) of Ardagh, to which see Henry VIII., appointed Roger O'Moleyn in 1517 presents a similar picture of decay. The civitas is described as "in spiritualities subject to the Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of all Ireland, in temporalities subject to the king of England." It is in the island of Hibernia, "called by the barbarians Irlandia. The part of it nearer to England is more civilised, but the rest is wild. A large number of the inhabitants even live with the cattle in the fields and in caves. Few wear shoes and almost all subsist on plunder. The land itself produces nothing but oats and horses, both excellent and victorious, being more swift than the English ones, the lighter in colour, having the easier motion."

The report of this visitation of Ardagh, which is found in Theiner's Vetera Monnmenta, p. 521, states that the cathedral church had but one altar and that exposed to the air, and that it was served by only one priest who seldom officiated at Mass; that it was without sacristy, bell-tower and bell, and sustained scarcely the necessary equipment for one Mass. The town contained but four cabins and very few inhabitants on account of their constant feuds with their neighbours, who would not allow a certain Bishop William to exercise any temporal authority over them and destroyed the town. Even St. Patrick's cathedral was no exception. We read that in 1474 that "the divine service of God is daily withdrawn," and that no vespers were said on St. Patrick's eve.

Indeed, all the documents, public and private, that have come down to us from those days, reveal a condition of society deplorable in the extreme. Lawlessness, rapine, murder and perpetual warfare made our unhappy island a den of furies. The Scotch mer

cenaries who passed over into the north, to settle and to offer their services to the various chiefs who happened to be at war, added fresh fuel to the flames that were extinguishing whatever hopes of peace and prosperity were fostered in Irish hearts. Of these a detachment was cut to pieces by Shane O'Neill to please Queen Elizabeth—the rashest act he ever perpetrated. For at Clandeboy the Scots under Alexander Oge (or Young) and MacGilly Asspuke took a terrible revenge (1567). Few of the English justices cared for these things. One of them, Lord Justice Arnold, grimly informed Lord Cecil, who was much shocked, that he acted "with the Irish as with bears and bandogs, so that he saw them fight earnestly, and hug each other well, he cared not who had the worst." At times even the Government seemed to encourage these feuds, not that any great encouragement was required. For we find the Archbishop of Dublin instructed in 1520 to establish concord between the Earl of Desmond and Sir Piers Butler, also to enfeeble and weaken the strength of the native Irish "as well by getting their captains from them as by putting division among them, so they join not together."

But the unhappiest of all the inhabitants of Erin, if we except the English subjects of the Pale whose condition beggars description, were the tenants on the estates of the great Norman barons, who had become more or less Irish in the course of time. These noblemen, for all their Irish pretensions, treated their

tenants with the hauteur of the Norman and the cruelty of the Celt. Subject to all the impositions the feudal lords exacted from their tenants, and to the support the Celtic chieftain demanded of his tribesmen, these unhappy people, who were principally Celts, were ground down to the earth, and their wrongs had no redress in a court presided over by their tyrant, who cared neither for British nor Brehon law. And in the King's Courts which sat in Dublin there was even less chance of fair play for these unfortunates. For these courts, presided over by English officials, were notoriously corrupt and practised extortion on all who placed themselves in their power, surpassing in corruption even the infamous Chancery Court of last century, and compelling the tenants to sell their land and freeholds rather than “be under the said extortion." And before they could enter these "cities of refuge," the tenants had to run the gauntlet of their own masters, who had, as Archbishop Allen wrote to Cromwell, made laws among themselves, "that whosoever under any of their rules pursue any action at the king's law shall forfeit five marks." The Royal Commission held in 1537, like other Commissions, did nothing save bringing to light many of these unjust impositions. But the condition of the Pale was the worst of all. The forms of exaction and extortion to which its inhabitants were subjected were legion. These are detailed at length in the document sent from the council in 1533 to the Master of the Rolls, which led to the arrest of the Earl of Kildare in the following year. The document mentions, in addition

1 State Papers, Henry VIII. Vol. II., pt. 3, p. 9.

to coyne and livery, "cuddies, gartie, taking of caanes for felonies, murders and all other offences, alterages, biengis, saulties and slaughteaghes."

Another document, twenty years earlier, mentions "carting, carriages, journies, and other impositions for hosting and journies and woful war." Moreover black rents and tributes were wrung from the unhappy people for the payment of the Irish enemies. And yet when their property, taken by these enemies, was recovered by the king's forces, maintained on cesses levied on the Pale, the Deputies kept it for their own use, in vulgar parlance, purloined it. Campion tells us that it was James, Earl of Desmond, and his son, Thomas, Deputy in 1463, who put upon the "king's subjects within the counties of Waterford, Corke, Kerry, and Limericke the Irish impositions of coyne and liverie, carting, carriages, loadings, cosherings, bonnaght and such like." He describes these customs as the very nurse and teat of all Irish enormities," and denounces the everlasting cess wrung from the poor tenants by the Deputy and his gallowglasses, who "eat out the farmers, beggar the country, and foster a sort of idle vagabonds ready to rebell if their lord command them, ever nusseled in stealth and robberyes."

This was a precedent, evil but rapidly learnt, and in consequence the king's subjects in the south and in the Pale lived in extreme poverty and debt. Patrick Finglas, Baron of the Exchequer, 1515, says—“There is not eight of the lords, knights, esquires, and gentlemen of the four shires but be in debt and their land be made waste, and without brief remedy be had, they must sell their lands and go to some other land," while a letter from a Mr. Deythyke, of Dublin, dated 3rd