that if the chief governor should die in office, his functions should be exercised by one (afterwards two, and three *) of the principal officers of state, to be chosen. by the chancellor, the treasurer, and the rest of the king's council of state, until the king should make a fresh appointment.

His next step was to place the most reliable of his followers in responsible posts, for the due security of his new dominions, to reward them for their services, and to strengthen his hold on the sea-ports.

Meath had always been an appanage of the sovereign, he accordingly granted the whole of it to his new constable, Hugh de Lacy, and his heirs. He granted to John De Courcy the province of Ulster, provided he could succeed in subduing it. He confirmed the grants in Wexford to Maurice Fitzgerald, to Hervey Mountmorres, and to Robert Fitzstephen. He stationed William Fitzaldelm, Philip de Braosa, and Philip of Hastings, in Wexford. He granted the city of Dublin by royal charter to the citizens of Bristol, giving them the right of free trade with the rest of his dominions; and confirmed the city of Waterford to the Danes.

He next proceeded to win over the Church to his side. The clergy, on the first invasion of the English, had held a council at Armagh, whereat they had decided that the imminent enslavement of their country was a just judgment from heaven upon the traffic with Bristol in English slaves, and had promptly ordered the manumission of every English bondsman in the island. They

* 33 Hen. VIII., c. 2.

seem to have been greatly impressed with Adrian's bull; and made their peace with Henry, and accepted him as their temporal head without reserve. Henry held a synod at Cashel, at which the Bishop of Lismore presided as Pope's legate, and promulgated some decrees, which purported to reform certain alleged irregularities of Church discipline. He declared that the Church lands should thenceforth be freed from all exactions of the laity; relieved the ecclesiastics from the payment of erics in respect of crimes committed by their relations; and confirmed the claim of the clergy to the payment by the laity of tithes.

The work of organization was suddenly arrested. Henry was summoned by the papal legates in Normandy to appear before them and render an account in respect of Becket's murder; and in April, 1172, he sailed from Wexford for St. David's.

CHAPTER II.

THE COLONISTS. A.D. 1172-1189.

IN the introduction of the feudal system into Ireland we recognize the germ of the "Land Question," which has proved the stumbling block to its tranquillity for seven hundred years. The theory of the feudal system was that all the soil belonged to the king, who had accordingly the right to make grants of tracts of land in his discretion to his followers, to be held by them upon the condition of their rendering him the services of themselves and their retainers in the field whenever he should require them. The grant, though not so at first, soon became hereditary, and the land passed to the heirs of the grantee by descent, without reference to the consent of the tenants whom he had permitted to occupy and cultivate subdivisions of his domain. The land, too, was inalienable, and reverted to the king if the heirs of the grantee failed, or he became attainted for treason; but though inalienable, the tenant in chief from the crown could make sub-grants of portions of his land to smaller men, who were bound to him in the same way as he was bound to the king; and these again could repeat the

process with still smaller men. The process being known as subinfeudation. This system could not be applied to Ireland, where the tribal system prevailed, without revolutionizing the whole structure of society; and its application was in the eyes of the Irish nothing but a high-handed invasion of the rights of property, and an act of shameful injustice.

We find the thin end of the wedge introduced by Dermot surrendering to Henry and his heirs a kingdom of which he was only the elected monarch; to which no ruler, according to the law of the land, could have any rightful claim but through the free suffrages of the tribal chiefs. We find him again making grants of territory to Strongbow, Fitzstephen, and others, over which he had not the shadow of a right: lands which belonged to various native septs, whose chosen overlord he was, but over whose lands he had no right of control. The lands thus illegally granted were occupied by the Norman adventurers, who held them by force, the tribes who dwelt thereon either being expropriated or reduced to the position of tenants. Again, Henry based his title to be lord paramount over the island on the papal bull, which was obviously no title at all; and he affected to treat those who opposed him as rebels, and claimed to escheat their lands by branding them with treason, and to re-enjoy that which he never possessed, and to which he could have no claim.

The Normans had as yet made but slight lodgments on the coasts; but the time was coming when this fiction of feudal tenure was to be forced gradually upon the

whole island, and to be converted into an engine for the transfer of the soil from the native Celt to the colonizing Norman. Every effort of the people to assert its independence was to be punished as treasonable offence, entailing the resulting penalty of a forfeiture of the land. When the owners were dispossessed, they might be permitted to occupy as tenants at will, to support themselves by tilling the ground, and to pay for the privilege in rent to the new landowner. What was begun in 1170 was continued in after generations, until the whole island. came into the possession either of English immigrants, or those natives who accepted the new order of things, and received again their lands as grants from the English

crown.

It should also be remembered that the invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century was not an invasion by England, but by the Normans of the continent. Henry was Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, and he also happened to be King of England. His ancestors had reduced England to a dependency of the Norman duchy, and in like manner the Normans of his day proceeded to spread through England over to Ireland. England had been occupied by the penniless riffraff of Normandy; after a hundred years' occupation of England, the Norman adventurers of that day swarmed upon the coasts of Ireland, in order to win a kingdom after the manner of their forefathers. It was a fresh invasion of Northmen by a circuitous route through Normandy and Britain.

Henry had accomplished his primary object, that of securing his authority over the colonists. He left it to