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science and literature. It was indeed an age of national scholarship which has never since been equalled. It was this century that produced in rapid succession Geoffrey Keating, the Four Masters, and Duald MacFirbis, men of whom any age or country might be proud, men who amid the war, the rapine, and conflagration that rolled through the country with the English soldiers, still strove to save from the general wreck those records of their country which to-day make the name of Ireland honourable for her antiquities, traditions, and history, in the eyes of the scholars of Europe.'

Not till the end of the seventeenth century were these schools finally crushed. The hedge-schools were their shadowy children. While the Irish language was the language of the mass of the people the history and traditions of the country were familiar to them. To the 18th century belong the majority of those manuscripts written in beautiful script, on coarse paper stained brown by turf-smoke, bound in untanned sheep-skin covers, which re-tell the Heroic Tales and folklore of Ireland. And so vivid and strong was oral tradition enshrined in the language that a poor blind wandering poet in the early years of the 19th century can relate in verse after verse the history of his country from the mythic invasions to the Tithewar of his own day.

At the end of the Elizabethan wars the conquest of Ireland appeared completed. The beginning of the 17th century saw the overthrow of the clan and communal system, the destruction of the great Gaelic Houses, and the establishment of centralisation by a despotic power. The centralisation, carried out rigorously, placed the government, patronage, power, and the ownership of the land in the hands of the English colonists. The standing fact, however, is that the conquest was not completed. It was surface deep, no more. On that surface the English Law ran, and her armed forces moved. But the soul of Ireland was unconquered. For two centuries after the conclusion of the Elizabethan wars the great bulwark of Irish nationality was the Irish language. England recognised this; she made every effort to destroy it. The memory of the Brehon Laws survived to the 19th century, and showed itself in the Land League and the people's claims. Ireland's body was in chains, but her soul and mind were free.

FOR THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD:

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Sir John Davies' Letters.

Mountjoy's Report to English Privy Council.

Rev. C. P. Meehan, M. R. I. A., Irish Franciscan Monasteries. O'Clery's Life of O'Donnell.

Edmund Spenser's View of the State of Ireland.

Don Philip O'Sullivan's History of the Catholic War in Ireland. Pacata Hibernia.

Fynes Morryson.

Sir William Stanley's Letters.

CHAPTER XLVI

SUPPRESSING THE RACE

THROUGH these many dread centuries England's energies were concentrated upon an effort, seemingly, to annihilate the Irish race.

Says Edmund Burke (Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe): "All the penal laws of that unparalleled code of oppression were manifestly the effects of national hatred and scorn towards a conquered people whom the victors delighted to trample upon and were not at all afraid to provoke. They were not the effect of their fears, but of their security whilst that temper prevailed, and it prevailed in all its force to a time within our memory, every measure was pleasing and popular just in proportion as it tended to harass and ruin a set of people who were looked upon as enemies to God and man; indeed, as a race of savages who were a disgrace to human nature itself."

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Yet with that sublime disregard of humour which is the privilege of an elect people, one old English historian and champion piously exclaims anent "how much Ireland is beholden to God for suffering them to be conquered, whereby many of their enmities were cured-and more might be, were themselves only pliable."

Differing from most other conquered peoples the Irish have been made to suffer through the centuries not only from the conqueror's dreadful sword but perhaps even more from the conqueror's far more dreadful "justice." The laws imposed upon Ireland from the Norman's first coming, down till to-day or yesterday, far surpassed in ferocity any of the repressive systems temporarily imposed upon any other of the sorest suffering conquered ones of the world.

For many cruel centuries British law in Ireland only took notice of the native as a subject on which to exercise its repressive or exterminating power. We have record of a trial in Waterford as early as 1310-when the British law was still new to the nation -in which Robert le Waleys, a Briton, was charged with the murder of John, the son of Ivor MacGillemory. The defence taken was that while admitting the prisoner had killed John, yet it was

no murder, since the slain one was only an Irishman! To meet this effective line of defence the public prosecutor contended that the man killed was not Irish but Ostman (Dane). In the same era we find Donal O'Neill, in his remonstrance addressed to Pope John XX, stating that the murder of an Irishman was not a felony, and "it is no more sin say even some of their religious to kill an Irishman than to kill a dog." "They were out of the protection of the law," says Sir John Davies, "so that every Englishman might oppresse, spoile, and kill them without controulement." 1

And Sir Richard Cox, himself one of the elect, records: "If an Englishman be damnified by an Irishman not amenable to law, he may reprise himself on the whole tribe or nation."

Says the English historian Leland: "Every inconsiderable party, who, under pretence of loyalty, received the king's commission to repel the adversary in some particular district, became pestilent enemies to the inhabitants. Their properties, their lives, the chastity of their families, were all exposed to barbarians, who sought only to glut their brutal passions, and by their horrible excesses, saith the annalist, purchased the curse of God and man."

The solemn and well considered statutes of the realm were likewise well designed to make smooth the lot of English exiles among the wild Irishrie. "It shall be lawful," says one of these statutes (5 Ed. IV) "to all manner of men that find any thieves robbing by day or by night, or going or coming to rob or steal, having no faithful man of good name in their company, in English apparel, upon any of the liege people of the king, to take and kill them, and to cut off their heads, without any impeachment of our sovereign lord the king, his heirs, officers, or ministers, or of any others." In plain language this empowered any of the British in Ireland to kill at sight any Irishman whom he wished to kill.

In the reign of the third Edward was passed the famous Statute of Kilkenny for reclaiming or preserving the English in Ireland from Irish witchery. Although the beneficent laws had branded Irishmen outlaws in their own country, and the rulers had proclaimed them savages, barbarians, it was noticed that their manners, their customs, their dress, their ways, their language, had

1 Davies, in his "Discoverie," said that the plagues of Egypt were short, but the plagues of Ireland lasted four hundred years. It was three hundred years ago that Davies wrote this when the said plagues were only beginning to get the stride which carried them through centuries after with ever-increasing impetus. Davies, then, had just aided in imposing on the stricken country one of the worst of the plagues the British Undertaker on whom was bestowed the lands of which his master, James the First, robbed the Ulstermen.

uncanny attraction for the Anglo-Norman settlers who quickly became Irish in all these things; so the Statute of Kilkenny was in 1367 considered necessary. This Statute made it high treason to adopt the Irish dress, speak the Irish language, practise the Irish customs, avail of the Irish laws (which were "wicked and damnable"), follow Irish fosterage or gossipred, or intermarry with the Irish. Yet, despite this Statute, and many others to the same purport passed again and again in later generations, the ways and the women-of the outlawed "barbarian" still bewitched and won the hearts of the Anglo-Normans, till at length they became in the historic phrase used in the English complaint "ipsis Hibernicis Hiberniores"-more Irish than the Irish themselves. They had become savage of the savage, adopting all the "savage" manners, customs, dress, language.

Languages it should be said, for the Irish "savages" spoke Irish and Latin indifferently. Sir Richard Cox complained that "every cowboy in Ireland" tried his tongue at Latin. Sir John Perrott (1585) reported of one of "the degenerate English"the term applied to those who had voluntarily resigned their English heritage, and assimilated with the Irish-"I found MacWilliam verie sensible, and though wanting the English tongue yet understanding the Latin."

When the De Burghos renounced England to become Irish in all things (under the name of MacWilliam) they came before the English Castle at Athenry, and in sight of the garrison there, threw off their English dress, and donned the Irish costume.

In 1569 one of the Galway English, Dominick Linche, makes complaint to the English Privy Council that "the brothers of the erle of clan-Rickerde, yea, and one of his uncles, and he a byeshop (bishop) can neither speak nor understand anything of the English language." Their languages, like that of the Irish of their class, were Irish and Latin. In 1535 a Welsh officer marching in the South with Lord Butler, wrote in surprise of the type of "degenerate English" which he met. One of them, a brother-inlaw of Lord Butler, whose name, had he not fallen away, would have been FitzGerald, but who now wore the Irish name of MacShean, could speak never a word of English, "but he made the troops good cheer in the gentlest fashion that could be." Refinement and gentility, in a man who scorned the English language, were amazing to find!

And in 1589, after Munster had been successively devastated by first ruthless war, then famine, and then planted with English

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