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into trouble with King John, who resumed his grant and gave it to Hugh de Lacy, the youngest son of the Lord of Meath. The whole of this vast territory afterwards passed to the De Burgh family, through Hugh's daughter Maud, who married Fitzaldelm's son Richard, the Lord of Connaught. But the lordship of Ulster was never much more than a nominal possession. The greater portion of that province was never subdued, and remained in the hands of the untamable peoples of the north; the great O'Neil and O'Donnel tribes, into which the sovereign clan had become divided, and the lesser septs, the Maguires of Fermanagh, the O'Rourkes of Brefny, the O'Reillys of Cavan, the McGennisses of Southern Dalradia, and the O'Kanes of Coleraine. The only portions which owned obedience to the De Burghs were the fringes of Down and Antrim, the southern border of Monaghan, and a few lodgments of Norman settlers on the coast of Donegal. After the murder of William, the third Earl of Ulster, his only daughter and heiress married Lionel, Duke of Clarence; and the earldom of Ulster and the lordship of Connaught passed in this way through females to Edmond and Roger Mortimer, and finally to Richard, Earl of Cambridge, the grandfather of Edward IV.; and so became vested in the Crown.

Among the smaller grants were the seigniory of Bray, given to De Riddlesford; of Dangen and Tadhoyle to Robert de St. Michael; of Howth to Almarie St. Lawrence, the ancestor of the barons and earls of Howth; and "the honour of Limerick" to Braosa.

The subinfeudations created by these great tenants

in capite gave rise to a number of barons holding large estates hardly less powerful than their immediate overlords. Large tracts of the province of Meath in this way estated the Nugents, barons of Delvin, the Flemings of Slane, the Petits of Dunboyne, the Tuites of Killallon, the Prestons of Gormanston, and others; while in Cork the Roches became barons of Fermoy, and the Barrys lords of Barrymore.

The great territorial barons had consolidated their power. The castles which they built with towering keep and inner and outer wards, guarded with frequent bastion towers and curtain walls, frowned over the surrounding country, and bade defiance to the ill-armed, ill-accoutred kerns, whom the native chieftains led to battle. The Norman baron lived a life of rough self-reliance. He was a law unto himself, and dealt out rough justice to his tenants in the court baron, according to a curious mixture of the Brehon law and the common law of England. He was a border chieftain, ever watchful to protect the herds of himself and his retainers, to sally forth and chastise the cattle-lifters, or revenge an affront from a neighbour. When years began to tell upon him, and he thought with some remorse over the wild, lawless acts of which he had been guilty, his superstitious piety prompted him to bring over Norman builders and craftsmen, and to erect an abbey or a priory, which he endowed with a slice of his broad acres, to satisfy the clamourings of his conscience, and perhaps to afford a spiritual retreat for himself in his declining years.

CHAPTER IV.

THE ASSIMILATION OF THE SETTLERS. A.D. 1272-1335.

THE English system of government was confined to the English settlements. The Irish districts were outside the law. The law did not in fact recognize them: no Irishman could plead in the English courts, unless he was a member of the families of O'Neil, O'Brien, O'Connor, O'Melaghlin, or McMurrough, "the five bloods," as they were called, who enjoyed by royal grant the privilege of being the king's freemen. To kill an Irishman was not murder; they existed in fact as a separate nation, and were governed by their ancient Brehon law. On the accession of Edward I., the Irish who lived on English ground petitioned the Crown for an equal recognition with the English by the English law, and offered to pay eight thousand marks for the privilege. But though the king was favourable to the concession, the English settlers would not consent, and so the claim slumbered.

The Irish chieftains, whose territories had been granted to the English, effected a sort of tacit compromise with the new grantees, retiring within the re

duced limits of the more worthless land, and permitting the settlers to occupy the richer portions. Their lands lay interspersed amongst and dovetailed between the lands of the settlers in accordance with the configuration of the ground, their narrowed borders lying more in the heart of the country and in the less accessible districts. What was won from them by the sword was in effect surrendered; and though the natives were ever ready to lift the cattle of their Norman neighbours, and to reoccupy territories where the owners might have been left minors, and so less able to protect themselves, or where estates had devolved on females, who had married husbands living away in England; though a deep racehatred lay beneath the surface, which on occasions could burst forth, still time and convenience gradually drew the English and the Irish lords into mutual toleration, and at times combined them in a common resistance to the English Crown.

The social condition of the settlers in course of time underwent a curious change. They lived isolated in their strongholds; they intermarried with the daughters of the native chiefs, and the native chiefs intermarried with their daughters; they fell into the singular Irish practice of fosterage, under which the children of the lord were drafted out to nurse with the family of his retainer. They employed the natives both for domestic and military service; they made alliances with the native tribes in their quarrels with their Norman neighbours. The consequence was that they became gradually weaned away from English ideas, habits, customs, and manners.

They let their hair grow long and cultivated the moustache; they adopted the Irish dress, the Irish mode of riding bareback, even the Irish language and the Irish law; they aspired to be independent princes, like the Irish chieftains, whose will was law and whose law was licence. "They became more Irish than the Irish themselves."

To check the growing degeneracy of the settlers, a Parliament was held in A.D. 1295, and a statute* passed embodying an ordinance given by the king at Westminister, to compel the lords marchers, who had abandoned their tenants on their border estates to the tender mercies of the Irish, to return and protect them on pain of forfeiture; to compel absentees in England [for this curse of the country is as old as the thirteenth century] to assign a portion of their Irish revenues to the support of a military force for the common security; to restrain the number of mercenaries, or kerns, kept by the great lords; to enforce the making and repairing of roads and bridges; and to prohibit the use, by the English, of the native garb, moustache, and "culan."

The Norman supremacy in Ireland was at its zenith at the end of the thirteenth century; but a subtle decay was extending through the whole system. The king's Welsh and Scottish wars prevented him from bestowing much care on his Irish dominions; the revenue he derived from them barely paid the expenses of the government. They were a good recruiting ground for the armies of the Welsh marches and the Scottish 23 Edw. I., Irish Statutes.

*