’The appearance and outward behaviour of the Irish showeth them to be fruits of no good tree, for they exercise no virtue and refrain and forbear from no vice, but think it lawful to do every man what him listeth.  They neither love nor dread God, nor yet hate the devil.  They are worshippers of images and open idolaters.  Their common oath they swear is by books, bells, and other ornaments which they do use as holy religion.  Their chief and solemnest oath is by their lord or master’s hand, which whoso forsweareth is sure to pay a fine or sustain a worse turn.  The Sabbath-day they rest from all honest exercises, and the week days they are not idle, but worse occupied.  They do not honour their father and mother as much as they do reverence strangers.  For every murder that they commit they do not so soon repent, for whose blood they once shed, they lightly never cease killing all that name.  They do not so commonly commit adultery; not for that they profess or keep chastity, but for that they seldom or never marry, and therefore few of them are lawful heirs, by the law of the realm, to the lands they possess.  They steal but from the strong, and take by violence from the poor and weak.  They know not so well who is their neighbour as who they favour; with him they will witness in right and wrong.  They covet not their neighbours’ good, but command all that is their neighbours’ as their own.  Thus they live and die, and there is none to teach them better.  There are no ministers.  Ministers will not take pains where there is no living to be had, neither church nor parish, but all decayed.  People will not come to inhabit where there is no defence of law.’

After six years of discipline and improvement Sir Henry Sidney, in 1566, described the state of the four shires, the Irish inhabitants, and the English garrison, in the following terms:—­’The English Pale is overwhelmed with vagabonds—­stealth and spoil daily carried out of it—­the people miserable—­not two gentlemen in the whole of it able to lend 20 l.  They have neither horse nor armour, nor apparel, nor victual.  The soldiers be so beggerlike as it would abhor a general to look on them; yet so insolent as to be intolerable to the people, so rooted in idleness as there is no hope by correction to amend them, yet so allied with the Irish, I dare not trust them in a forte, or in any dangerous service.’

A sort of ‘special correspondent’ or ‘commissioner,’ as we should call him now, furnished to Cecil a detailed account of the social condition of the people, which of course he viewed with English eyes.  He found existing among them a general organisation wherever the Irish language was spoken—­the remnants of a civilisation very ancient, but now fast tending to ruin.  Next to the chiefs were the priesthood, and after them came a kind of intellectual hierarchy, consisting of four classes of spiritual leaders and teachers, which were thus described.  The first