O'Connors, chiefs of Offaly, and twenty-four other followers, were massacred by Peter de Bermingham, who had invited them to a banquet.

Titles were assumed by, or conferred on, the powerful nobles: Hugh de Lacy became Earl of Ulster; Richard de Burgo, Earl of Connaught; the Fitz-Geralds were Earls of Desmond; and the Butlers, who derived their name from an ancestor who accompanied Henry I. to Ireland as chief butler, were Earls of Ormond. Strong castles were erected at Dublin, Athlone, Roscommon, and Randoun, for the purpose of keeping down the natives, who were taxed to support the garrisons.

The Irish princes looked to the Bruces of Scotland as their allies and perhaps their deliverers from the oppressions of the English. In 1315, after the Scotch, under Robert Bruce, had achieved such a victory at Bannockburn, Edward Bruce landed in Ireland with a force of six thousand men, and was at once joined by a strong Irish contingent. For a time it seemed that the enterprise would be successful, and Robert Bruce was proclaimed King of Ireland. Desirous to obtain the papal sanction for their proceedings, Donnell O'Neill, King of Ulster, and other princes wrote to the Pope on the part of the nation, explaining why they were anxious to transfer the kingdom to Bruce. They told the Pope he had been deceived by false representations; spoke of "the sad remains of a kingdom which has groaned so long beneath the tyranny of English kings, of their ministers and barons, some of the latter, although born on the island, exercising the same extortions, rapine, and cruelties as their ancestors inflicted. The people had been obliged to take refuge, like beasts, in the mountains, and even there were not safe. There was only law for the English, none for the Irish; and any Englishman could, as often happened, kill an Irishman of any rank, and seize his property. The Church had been despoiled of its lands and possessions by sacrilegious Englishmen. A few years later Pope John wrote to Edward III. to the effect that the object of Pope Adrian's bull had been entirely neglected, and that the "most unheard-of miseries and persecutions had been inflicted on the Irish."

When Bruce appeared to be gaining ground, the De Lacys actually

took side with him, so little of national feeling did they possess, and so ready were they to secure their own interests by attaching themselves to the winning party. Some of the Irish quarrelled among themselves, in the old fashion, and when one chief marched with his followers to join Bruce, another Irish chief made a raid on his territories. Dublin, in which a large number of Bristol folk had settled, held out so stoutly that Bruce relinquished the attempt to take it; and then came the great battle near Dundalk, in which Edward Bruce was slain. Bermingham, the English commander, obtained the earldom of Louth, and the manor of Ardee, in return for Bruce's head, which was salted and sent to the King, Edward II. John de Lacy, and Sir Robert de Coulragh, who had sided with Bruce, were taken prisoners, and punished by being starved to death in prison. The English barons themselves perpetrated frightful cruelties in their quarrels between themselves and with the Irish. A new Viceroy, Sir Anthony de Lacy, was sent from England, and he hanged Sir William Bermingham and his son in the keep of Dublin Castle; the Earl of Ulster starved to death Walter de Burgo at Innishowen, for which he was stabbed by Sir Richard Mandeville, De Burgo's brother-in-law. The Earl's death was avenged by the slaughter of three hundred of the followers of his murderer. A band of English and Irish attacked MacNamara, a minister, and burnt a church in which were two priests and a hundred and eighty persons, not one of whom escaped. Fitz-Nicholas, an Englishman, killed the heir of the MacCarthy More as he sat on the bench beside the judge at the assize court, Tralee, and no notice was taken of the crime.

We could easily fill pages with records of these enormities, but these instances suffice to show the disorganized condition of the country. In 1360, the third son of Edward III., Lionel, afterwards Duke of Clarence, was appointed Viceroy, and in 1367 he summoned a Parliament at Kilkenny, by which the famous statutes of Kilkenny were enacted, the object being to make the line of demarcation between England and Ireland more distinct, and to prevent the assimilation in manners and customs which, except in the remote mountain districts,

was, as we have shown, so prevalent. The statute made it high treason for an English colonist to intermarry with the Irish, to stand godfather to an Irish child, or to entrust an infant to a native nurse. Any man of English race taking an Irish name, or using the Irish language, apparel, or customs, should forfeit all his lands. The English were not to make war upon the natives without the permission of the Government. The Irish were not to be permitted to pasture on land belonging to the English, nor to be admitted to ecclesiastical benefices or religious houses, nor entertained as minstrels. The clause about making war remained a dead letter, for when the English were disposed to make war there was no authority strong enough to prevent them. At any rate, there was plenty of fighting, as the annals show, between the Irish, as the settlers had begun to call themselves, and "the wild Irish," as they styled the natives. It was necessary also to avoid pressing the clause about the use of the Irish language, for a large number of the colonists could speak no other.

In 1494, the Viceroy, Sir Edward Poyning, a man of considerable ability, who had been sent over by Henry VII., summoned Parliament at Drogheda, at which the famous statute, known in history as Poyning's Law, was enacted. It provided that henceforth no Parliament should be held in Ireland until the chief governor and council had first certified to the King, under the great seal, the reason for its being summoned, and obtained permission to hold it. The general object of the Act was nominally to reduce the people to "whole and perfect obedience," and to abolish "the many damnable customs and uses" practised by the English lords and gentlemen.

The part of Ireland occupied by descendants of the English settlers and the new arrivals was known as the Pale, the word being taken from one of the enactments of Poyning's Parliament, which required all the colonists to "pale in," or enclose, the portion of the country possessed by the English. At this time, the English Pale, which at one time had comprised the "four shires," Dublin, Kildare, Meath, and Louth, had been greatly diminished, and formed a narrow strip about fifty miles long and twenty broad, and that was the only part in

any sense English; for beyond it the common law of England had on authority, the King's writ was not respected, and the country was divided among independent chiefs, who levied tribute on the inhabitants of the Pale as payment for a nominal protection of their rights, and as a compensation for abstaining from the plunder of their farms. Their law was "strength and the Brehon traditions" (the old native law). As for the great ennobled families, they were not in the Pale, and were a law to themselves.

CHAPTER II.'

FROM THE TUDORS TO THE UNION.

THEN Henry VIII. came to the throne, in 1509, he appears to

WHE

have been honestly desirous to ameliorate the condition of Ireland. When a boy he had been appointed Viceroy of Ireland, with the Earl of Kildare for his deputy-the same audacious nobleman who had been summoned to England by Henry VII. to answer a charge of high treason, having encouraged the pretender, Perkin Warbeck, but so ingratiated himself with the King that he was married to a rich wife and sent back practically to rule Ireland—and in 1515 an elaborate report on the state of Ireland was prepared by royal command. The document has been recently published in the "State Papers." The author of the paper says, "There be sixty regions in Ireland, inhabited with the King's Irish enemies, some regions as big as a shire, some more, some less, where reigneth more than sixty chief captains, whereof some calleth themselves kings, some king's peers, in their language, some princes, some dukes, that liveth only by the sword, and obeyeth to no other temporal person, save only to him that is strong. And every one of the said captains maketh war and peace for himself, and holdeth by the sword, and hath imperial jurisdiction, and obeyeth no other person, English or Irish, except only such persons as may subdue him by the sword. Also in every of the said regions there be divers petty captains, and every of them maketh war and peace for himself, without licence of the chief captain. And there be more than thirty of the English noble folk that follow the same Irish order and keepeth the same rule."

The condition of the poor native Irish, ruled by so many masters,