curious illustrations of the complete independence of the "Irishry" in those districts which they had maintained against invasion, or which, from time to time, they wrested back from the Saxon. Of these the system of quasitributary payment by which the hostility of the native chiefs, especially in the border districts, was purchased off, is, perhaps, the most curious. Thus, during the Viceroyalty of James le Botiller, third Earl of Ormond, in 1377, we find a royal warrant directing that Art Mac Murrough Kavanagh should be paid the fee of eighty marks, which he demanded as the price of peace. O'Connor of Offaly was subsidized at the same time; and almost immediately afterwards, while a Parliament, guarded by English soldiery, was actually sitting at Castle Dermot, Murrough O'Brien of Thomond, having advanced into Leinster, was only induced to return by a payment of a hundred marks. The strangest part of the transaction to modern eyes is the poverty of the Anglo-Irish exchequer at this crisis. Of the full sum of a hundred marks, the exchequer was unable to supply more than nine; and the remaining ninetyone were contributed by individuals, and that not in money, with the exception of the Prior of the Hospitallers, who paid down sixteen marks in cash, and Sir Robert and Sir Patrick De la Freyne, who contributed jointly seven marks and ten shillings in kind, or perhaps more correctly in the form of pledges. Thus, William Fitzwilliam gave a horse value twenty marks; John Fitzgerald a horse and cuirass, price twenty marks; Robert Lughteburgh a horse, price twenty marks; John More a bed, value thirty shillings! Of the same Earl of Ormond, nearly twenty years later, we find a royal writ, authorizing the repayment to him of £46. 13s. 4d. paid by him to the son of Murrough O'Brien, as the price of his withdrawing his troops from Leinster. At the time of the accession of Edward IV. these payments appear to be reduced to a settled and recognized system, probably graduated according to the necessities of the particular district of English territory, and to the strength or the menacing attitude of the native sept, whose neutrality it was desired to secure. Thus Meath and Kildare paid to O'Connor of Offaly, eighty pounds; Kilkenny and Tipperary, to O'Carrol, forty pounds; Limerick, to O'Brien, forty pounds; Cork, to Mac Carthy, forty pounds. Wexford contributed yearly forty pounds to Mac Murragh, who was also annually paid a salary of eighty marks at the English exchequer at Dublin. The settlers in the barony, of Lecale, on the Ulster coast, and those of Uriel, or Louth, paid an annual "black rent" of

sixty pounds to O'Neill; and with the object of propitiating the head of that clan, King Edward sent him, with other presents, a collar of gold, bearing the royal badge of the House of York.

This regular and established system of levying black mail was probably confined to the native Irish. But it frequently happened in special emergencies that it was only by subsidizing the more powerful Anglo-Irish lords, and even the English municipalities of the purely Anglo-Norman towns and cities of the coast, that the viceroy was enabled to command their assistance in the straits to which the hostility of the native septs reduced him. In a rising of the Irish of west Ulster in 1423, Sir William De Burgh refused to move to the rescue unless upon a payment of £40. His brother was paid half that sum on the same occasion, and a corresponding grant, the amount of which is not specified, was made to the mayor and burgesses of Dublin.

Even the Church was forced occasionally to pay its share of those or similar exactions. A curious instance is recorded, in which an archbishop of Armagh, John Mey, only obtained from the O'Neill permission to enter his diocese on payment of "six yards of good cloth" for the chief himself, and three yards of the same material for his wife's tunic! The much more common state of things was that the English ecclesiastics were forced to abandon their establishments on the frontiers, after having vainly attempted to maintain and fortify them against the hostile natives. When Ramon de Perellas, Señor de Seret, arrived with a safe-conduct of Richard II. to visit St. Patrick's Purgatory with a retinue of twenty men and thirty horses, the viceroy, who received him most honourably in Dublin, did his best to dissuade him from an enterprise which he declared to be most perilous in its nature. Ramon having, in despite of this caution, made his way to Armagh, the English archbishop, De Colton, repeated even more strongly the same warning; and, although Ramon accomplished his pilgrimage among the wild Irish, in all safety and honour, the incident is a curiously convincing illustration of the habitual state of feeling which prevailed between the races, and the complete isolation from each other of the territories which they severally occupied: and it enables us to understand the declaration of one of the viceroys, Sir William de Windsor, in the reign of Edward III., who, although he had been engaged in border warfare "for a longer period than any knight in the service of England, yet had never succeeded in penetrating beyond the borders sufficiently far to learn correctly the nature VOL. VI.-NO. XI. [New Series.]

E

of the interior of the country, or the condition of the native Irish."*

Among the sources of strength to the persistent opposition offered to the English power by the native Irish, not the least important was the want of union among the English themselves, and the preference which, in many instances, from the earliest times, many of the English settlers manifested for Irish customs, and for the freedom from English feudalism which these customs implied. It not unfrequently happens that we find the viceroy actively engaged in hostilities with one or more of the mutinous Anglo-Normans. A still more normal condition of the Anglo-Norman nobles was that of declared feud with one another; and how far even ecclesiastics shared in the spirit of party and its consequent feuds, is curiously exemplified in the contest about jurisdiction between the English Archbishop of Dublin (John Lech) and the English Archbishop of Armagh (Walter Joise), which Mr. Gilbert has detailed, and which, retaining its vitality through all the conflicts of race and of creed of the darker days which succeeded, was revived in a form almost identical in the midst of the peril and gloom of the seventeenth century in Ireland.

Nor need it be matter of wonder that the separation of the English and Irish races in Ireland, and of the territories which they respectively occupied, should have been so complete, when it is considered that, in the eyes of the English law, the soil of Ireland was regarded as foreign, and that migration to Ireland was held to be an equivalent for the penalty, then in use, of legal banishment. The judges who, in the council at Nottingham, in 1388, declared the authority of the king superior to that of the laws, were condemned to exile for life in Ireland. Sir Robert Belknap, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, was sent to Drogheda; Sir Roger Fulthorpe and William Burgh, Justices of the King's Bench, were sent to Dublin; Sir John Casey, Chief Baron, and John Lockton, King's Serjeant, to Waterford; and Thomas Rushod, Bishop of Chichester, to Cork. And, on the other hand, curiously enough, yet with a certain consistency, the sentence of banishment from England was not held incompatible with the exercise of jurisdiction, even the very highest, within the realm of Ireland. When Piers de Gaviston, the favourite of Edward II., was actually under sentence of perpetual exile, the king nominated him his viceroy for Ireland with the most ample powers.

One of the most interesting portions of Mr. Gilbert's history is that in which he relates the well-known but im

* P. 241.

perfectly understood expedition of Bruce into Ireland. Mr. Gilbert traces out very clearly and naturally the course of events through which, out of the relations of the English crown with both sections of the population of Ireland-the native and the Anglo-Norman-there arose such a settled subject of conflict, and so abiding a spirit of disaffection, that both sections alike came gradually to rally round a standard which, without fully representing either, rested upon ground which was common to both. We had hoped for the same careful rendering of the history of the later episodes of Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck; but although the incidents of both these curious stories are pleasingly related, and although all the requirements of the dramatic interest of the narrative are fulfilled, yet the events are not so clearly traced back to the causes in which each originated, and we fail to discover the same careful dissection of the peculiarly Irish relations of the contest, and the same skilful delineation of its results to the general history of the country.

There is no part of Mr. Gilbert's subject to which we can refer with more pleasure than his treatment of the old and familiar, but yet unexhausted, subject of the "Statute of Kilkenny." He has been careful to interweave in the general narrative every shred of the earlier Anglo-Irish legislation which bears upon the same subject; and there are few readers who will not be surprised to find how little there is in that famous statute, the theme of so much bitter denunciation, which had not been anticipated by earlier but fragmentary enactments, and how completely the laws of Kilkenny, instead of forming a novel code then first arbitrarily imposed, reflect the existing tone of the Anglo-Irish mind, and embody the spirit of the existing social system in English Ireland. These minor indications, anticipative of what was to come, are of course diffused over too large a range of the history to be enumerated here, even in outline; but they will well repay the pains of a careful study, and are plainly the fruit of long and systematic original research. We must be content with presenting to the reader Mr. Gilbert's summary of the Kilkenny statute itself, which is much more complete and more intelligible than the meagre abstract which is to be found in the popular essays on the subject. It is hardly necessary to say that the parliament from which this enactment emanated was held in Kilkenny in Lent, 1367, during the Vice-royalty, in many respects a notable one, of Prince Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the son of Edward III.; but it is right to call special attention to the circumstance that the measure certainly was the result of the free deliberation of the Parliament itself, and not an

arbitrary enactment dictated by the Crown, or emanating in any way from alien influences.

On the grievous complaints of the Commons, and for the maintenance of the limited territories in Ireland remaining under the jurisdiction of the English Crown, a series of ordinances were enacted, at a Parliament of the chief ecclesiastical and lay colonists, presided over by Duke Lionel, at Kilkenny, in the first week of Lent, 1367. This statute, embodying much of the previous colonial legislation, commenced by setting forth that "many of the English of Ireland, discarding the English tongue, manners, style of riding, laws, and usages, lived and governed themselves according to the mode, fashion, and language of the Irish enemies; and also made divers marriages and alliances between themselves and the Irish enemies, whereby the said lands, and the liege people thereof, the English language, the allegiance due their lord, the King of England, and the English laws there, were put in subjection and decayed, and the Irish enemies exalted and raised up, contrary to reason.'

These Kilkenny enactments professed to deal solely with the English in Ireland, and the Irish who resided amongst them under the dominion of England. Over the clans, then occupying about three-fourths of the island, these legislators did not attempt to assume an authority which they would have been entirely unable to enforce; and throughout the document, the natives, whether hostile or at peace with the English, are referred to as the "Irish enemies." Of this "Statute of Kilkenny," which was long regarded as a masterpiece of legislation for the colony in Ireland, the following is a synopsis :

Alliances by marriage, gossipred, fostering of children, or other connections between English and Irish, or selling to the latter, in time of peace or war, horses, armour, or victuals, were declared treasonable. All Englishmen, or Irish living amongst them, were to use the English language, be called by English names, follow the English customs, and not ride otherwise than in saddles, in the English manner. If ecclesiastics dwelling amongst the English did not use the English language, the profits of their benefices were to be seized by their superiors; but, adds the statute which was written in French, the language of the upper classes of England-" they shall have respite to learn the English tongue, and to provide saddles, between this and the Feast of St. Michael next coming." That English should not be governed in the determination of their disputes by Brehon law, or the law used in the "marches" or borders. That no Irishman should be admitted into any cathedral, collegiate church, or benefice, by promotion, collation, or presentation; and that religious houses should not receive Irishmen into their profession. That the English should neither admit nor make gifts to Irish musicians, story-tellers, or rimers, who might act as spies or agents. That dwellers on the borders should not, without legal permission, hold parleys or make treaties with any hostile Irish or English. That differences should not be made between English born in England and English born in Ireland, by calling the former "English Hobbes," or clowns, and the latter "Irish dogs;" and that religious houses should receive Englishmen, without