A great many provisions are laid down by this Act, all bearing the same aim.  Marriage and fosterage between the English and Irish are forbidden, and declared to be high treason.  So, too, is the supply of all horses, weapons, or goods of any sort to the Irish; monks of Irish birth are not to be admitted into any English monastery, nor yet Irish priests into any English preferment.  The Irish dress and the Irish mode of riding are both punishable.  War with the natives is inculcated as a duty binding upon all good colonists.  None of the Irish, except a certain number of families known as the “Five Bloods” (Quinque sanquines), are to be allowed to plead at any English court, and the killing of an Irishman is not to be reckoned as a crime.  In addition to this, speaking the language of the country is made penal.  Any one mixing with the English, and known to be guilty of this offence, is to lose his lands (if he has any), and his body to be lodged in one of the strong places of the king until he learns to repent and amend.

The original words of this part of the Act are worth quoting.  They run as follows:  “Si nul Engleys ou Irroies entre eux memes encontre c’est ordinance et de cei soit atteint soint sez terrez e tenez s’il eit seizez en les maines son Seignours immediate, tanque q’il veigne a un des places nostre Seignour le Roy, et trove sufficient seurtee de prendre et user le lang Englais.”

One would like—­merely as a matter of curiosity—­to know what appliances for the study of that not easiest of languages were provided, and before what tribunal the student had to prove his proficiency in it.  When, too, we remember that English was still, to a great degree, tabooed in England itself; that the official and familiar language of the Normans was French, that French of which the Statutes of Kilkenny are themselves a specimen, the difficulty of keeping within the law at this point must, it will be owned, have been considerable.

“In all this it is manifest,” says Sir John Davis, “that such as had the government of Ireland did indeed intend to make a perpetual enmity between the English and the Irish, pretending that the English should in the end root out the Irish; which, the English not being able to do, caused a perpetual war between the two nations, which continued four hundred and odd years, and would have lasted unto the world’s end, if in Queen Elizabeth’s reign the Irish had not been broken and conquered by the sword.”

It is easy to see that the very ferocity—­as it seems to us the utter and inconceivable ferocity—­of these enactments is in the main a proof of the pitiable and deplorable weakness of those who passed them, and to this weakness we must look for their excuse, so far as they admitted of excuse at all.  Weakness, especially weakness in high places, is apt to fall back upon cruelty to supply false strength, and a government that found itself face to face with an entire country