was strong enough to hold its assailants partially at bay.  The country was broken into two halves whose conflict has never ceased.  So far from either giving elements of civilization or good government to the other, conqueror and conquered reaped only degradation from the ceaseless conflict.  The native tribes lost whatever tendency to union or social progress had survived the invasion of the Danes.  Their barbarism was intensified by their hatred of the more civilized intruders.  But these intruders themselves, penned within the narrow limits of the Pale, brutalized by a merciless conflict, cut off from contact with the refining influences of a larger world, sank rapidly to the level of the barbarism about them:  and the lawlessness, the ferocity, the narrowness of feudalism broke out unchecked in this horde of adventurers who held the land by their sword.

[Sidenote:  English and Irish]

From the first the story of the English Pale was a story of degradation and anarchy.  It needed the stern vengeance of John, whose army stormed its strongholds and drove its leading barons into exile, to preserve even their fealty to the English Crown.  John divided the Pale into counties and ordered the observance of the English law; but the departure of his army was the signal for a return of the disorder he had trampled under foot.  Between Englishmen and Irishmen went on a ceaseless and pitiless war.  Every Irishman without the Pale was counted by the English settlers an enemy and a robber whose murder found no cognizance or punishment at the hands of the law.  Half the subsistence of the English barons was drawn from forays across the border, and these forays were avenged by incursions of native marauders which carried havoc at times to the very walls of Dublin.  Within the Pale itself the misery was hardly less.  The English settlers were harried and oppressed by their own baronage as much as by the Irish marauders, while the feuds of the English lords wasted their strength and prevented any effective combination either for common conquest or common defence.  So utter seemed their weakness that Robert Bruce saw in it an opportunity for a counter-blow at his English assailants, and his victory at Bannockburn was followed up by the despatch of a Scotch force to Ireland with his brother Edward at its head.  A general rising of the Irish welcomed this deliverer; but the danger drove the barons of the Pale to a momentary union, and in 1316 their valour was proved on the bloody field of Athenree by the slaughter of eleven thousand of their foes and the almost complete annihilation of the sept of the O’Connors.  But with victory returned the old anarchy and degradation.  The barons of the Pale sank more and more into Irish chieftains.  The Fitz-Maurices, who became Earls of Desmond and whose vast territory in Minister was erected into a County Palatine, adopted the dress and manners of the natives around them.  The rapid growth of this evil was seen in the ruthless provisions