Into the eastern parts of Ireland, however, a fresh stream of English adventurers continued to flow, as aggressive and covetous as their means and prudence permitted; calling so much of the country as they were able to wrench from the Irish “the English Pale”, which fluctuated in extent with their fortunes; and, when compelled to pay tribute to Irish chiefs, calling it “black rent”, to indicate how they regarded it.  Their greatest difficulty was to counteract the tendency of the earlier colonists to become Hibernicized—­a most unwilling tribute to the superiority of the Irish race.  They, and still more those in England who supported them, knew nothing of the Irish language, laws, and institutions but that they should all be impartially hated, uprooted, and supplanted by English people and everything English as soon as means enabled this to be done.  This was the amiable purpose of the pompously-named “Statute of Kilkenny”, passed by about a score of these colonists in 1367.  Presuming to speak in the name of Ireland, the statute prohibited the English colonists from becoming Irish in the numerous ways they were accustomed to do, and excluded all Irish priests from preferment in the Church, partly because their superior virtue would by contrast amount to a censure.  The purpose was not completely successful even within the Pale.  Outside that precinct, the mass of the Irish were wholly unconscious of the existence of the “Statute of Kilkenny.”  But expressing, as the statute did correctly, the views of fresh adventurers, it became, in arrogance and in the pretension to speak for the whole of Ireland, a model for their future legislation and policy.

Under King Henry VI. of England, Richard, Duke of York, being Lord Deputy, the Parliament of the Pale, assembled in Dublin, repudiated the authority of the English Parliament in Ireland, established a mint, and assumed an attitude of almost complete independence.  On the other hand, in 1494, under Henry VII., the Parliament of the Pale, assembled at Drogheda, passed Poyning’s Act, extending all English laws to Ireland and subjecting all laws passed in Ireland to revision by the English Council.  This, extended to the whole of Ireland as English power extended, remained in force until 1782.  Henry VIII. was the first English sovereign to take practical measures for the pacific and diplomatic conquest of the whole of Ireland and the substitution of English for Irish institutions and methods.  His daughter, Queen Elizabeth, continued and completed the conquest; but it was by drenching the country in blood, by more than decimating the Irish people, and by reducing the remnant to something like the condition of the ancient fuidre.  Her policy prepared the ground for her successor, James I., to exterminate the Irish from large tracts, in which he planted Englishmen and Scotchmen, and to extend all English laws to Ireland and abolish all other laws.  James’s English attorney-general in Ireland, Sir John Davies, in his work, A Discoverie of the True Causes, etc., says: