New World, Lost Worlds

The land of Ireland was not easily delineated between highland and lowland, for the broken rings of
mountains arose in unexpected places, and even the lowland heart of Ireland, still undrained, was
interspersed with lakes and bogs. Scrubby woodland covered half the island. To English observers
the wildness of the terrain and the wildness of the people were all one. Where the country was
'nothing but woods, rocks, great bogs and barren ground', all untilled, the inhabitants were bound to
live 'like wild and savage persons', by robbery and rustling. True, in many parts of the island neither
the terrain nor political conditions encouraged patient tillage, but the English view of the Irish as
semi-nomadic herdsmen and barbarians were a travesty. Corn was cultivated where the land suited.
Yet those crops were often laid waste and burnt in the raids between Irish lords; incendiary methods
which were indigenous but would be adopted by the English in time.
Every observer noted the transient nature of Irish society: the scattered settlements, houses which
were easily erected and as easily abandoned, fields with temporary fences, the mobility of the great
cattle herds which were the movable wealth of the lords and their dependants, and which could be
driven to places of safety, or raided by enemies. Such transcience was conducive to growth of
neither wealth nor population. The economy of Gaelic Ireland was primarily one of subsistence, and
while coinage was known and used it was not central to its system of exchange.
Taxation was exacted in the form of food and billeting of troops. There were probably less than a 
half a million people in later medieval Ireland, and the population, unlike that of England, was not
set to recover in the course of the sixteenth century. Much of the island was impenetrable and inaccessible; not only because of the difficulties of the terrain, the lack of roads and bridges and
maps, but because of the dangers of ambush and attack unless travellers had the protection of
the lord through whose territory they ventured. The lords themselves rode with armed bands.
To the English governors, Gaelic Ireland was 'the land of war' and the Irish were 'Irish enemies'.
This was not because there was a state of open war, but because of the radical estrangement between
the Gaelic Irish, beyond the Pale, and the English of Ireland, the Englishry, who lived in 'the land
of peace', where English laws, civility and customs were preserved. The English lordship in Ireland had, by Henry VII's accession, contracted to the coastal plain between Dublin and Dundalk - the
four loyal (or half-loyal) counties of Dublin, Kildare, Louth and Meath - plus the towns of Drogheda,
Wexford, Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Galway and the royal fortress of Carrickfergus in the north-east. In the late fifteenth century a Pale was established, as in Calais, ringed around with a system of dykes and castles. In Dublin the institutions of English central and local government, and
the concepts of authority which underlay them, were replicated: there was a Parliament, there was
the king's Irish Council, there were the four courts of King's Bench, Chancery, Exchequer and Common Pleas. The law here was the common law; the language English, albeit of an archaic kind.
The Gaelic Irish were effectively banished from English Ireland, save as peasant labourers, disabled
at law from holding land or office, beyond appeal to English law. On the edge of the English colony
was a border world, which was hardly defensible. Even Dublin itself suffered predatory raids from
the circling Irish; from the O'Byrnes of the Wicklow Mountains, the O'Mores of Leix and the O'Connors of Offlay. At the northern boundary of the Pale the Benedictine abbey of Fore was aggressively fortified in the mid fifteenth century against Gaelic incursions. In County Louth the families who paid both 'black rent' (protection money) to the Ulster chieftains to ransom their safety
and taxes to the government of the Pale were recognizing the bewildering reality of lordship in Ireland.