able to wrench from the Irish "the English Pale", which
fluctuated in extent with their fortunes; and, when compelled to pay
tribute to Irish chiefs, calling it "black rent", to indicate how
they regarded it. Their greatest difficulty was to counteract the
tendency of the earlier colonists to become Hibernicized--a most
unwilling tribute to the superiority of the Irish race. They, and
still more those in England who supported them, knew nothing of the
Irish language, laws, and institutions but that they should all be
impartially hated, uprooted, and supplanted by English people and
everything English as soon as means enabled this to be done. This was
the amiable purpose of the pompously-named "Statute of Kilkenny",
passed by about a score of these colonists in 1367. Presuming to
speak in the name of Ireland, the statute prohibited the English
colonists from becoming Irish in the numerous ways they were
accustomed to do, and excluded all Irish priests from preferment in
the Church, partly because their superior virtue would by contrast
amount to a censure. The purpose was not completely successful even
within the Pale. Outside that precinct, the mass of the Irish were
wholly unconscious of the existence of the "Statute of Kilkenny." But
expressing, as the statute did correctly, the views of fresh
adventurers, it became, in arrogance and in the pretension to speak
for the whole of Ireland, a model for their future legislation and
policy.

Under King Henry VI. of England, Richard, Duke of York, being Lord
Deputy, the Parliament of the Pale, assembled in Dublin, repudiated
the authority of the English Parliament in Ireland, established a
mint, and assumed an attitude of almost complete independence. On the
other hand, in 1494, under Henry VII., the Parliament of the Pale,
assembled at Drogheda, passed Poyning's Act, extending all English
laws to Ireland and subjecting all laws passed in Ireland to revision
by the English Council. This, extended to the whole of Ireland as
English power extended, remained in force until 1782. Henry VIII. was
the first English sovereign to take practical measures for the
pacific and diplomatic conquest of the whole of Ireland and the
substitution of English for Irish institutions and methods. His
daughter, Queen Elizabeth, continued and completed the conquest; but
it was by drenching the country in blood, by more than decimating the
Irish people, and by reducing the remnant to something like