The Pale
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The Pale (An Pháil in Irish) or the English Pale (An Pháil Sasanach) comprised a region on Ireland's east coast stretching from Dalkey, south of Dublin, to the garrison town of Dundalk[1] north of Drogheda. The inland boundary went to Leixlip around the Earldom of Kildare, towards Trim and north towards Kells. In this district, many townlands have English, and even French names.
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[edit] History
From the thirteenth century onwards, the Hiberno-Norman invasion in the rest of Ireland at first faltered then waned. Across most of Ireland, the Norman knights, and their servants who were mostly from Wales and Cornwall assimilated to Ireland. A series of alliances with their neighbouring autonomous Gaelic chieftains developed. The Norman lords in the provinces behaved as kings in their own right in their own areas, as the Gaelic chieftains had previously.
This left a section of territory that did not have any independent ruler overlord, which came directly under control of the English crown. The power of the crown itself was greatly weakened by the Hundred Years War, and Wars of the Roses. A parliament was created, which mostly sat in Drogheda, until the Tudors took direct interest in Irish affairs and moved it back to Dublin. The Pale generally consisted of fertile lowlands, which were easier for the garrison to defend from ambush, than hilly or wooded ground. For reasons of trade and administration, a version of English became the official and common language, whose closest modern derivative would be the accent used by natives of Fingal.
In 1366, in order for the English Crown to assert its authority over the settlers, a parliament was assembled in Kilkenny and the Statute of Kilkenny was established. The statute decreed that inter-marriage between English settlers and Irish natives were forbidden. It also forbade the settlers using the Irish language and adopting Irish modes of dress or other customs. This however was never implemented successfully, even in the Pale itself, as the first expansion of Dublin was to an area known as Irishtown.
In the 15th century the Pale became the only real piece of Ireland that took any notice of the English king, with most of the island paying only token recognition of the overlordship of the English crown. Until the Tudor conquest of the Earldom of Kildare, the Pale itself was tenuous foothold for the English on the island of Ireland.
[edit] Origin of the name
The word pale derives ultimately from the Latin word palus, meaning stake. (Palisade is derived from the same root.) From this came the figurative meaning of "boundary", and eventually the phrase "beyond the pale". Also derived from the "boundary" concept was the idea of a pale as an area within which local laws were valid. As well as the Pale in Ireland, the term was applied to various other English colonial settlements, and the Pale of Settlement, the area in the west of Imperial Russia where Jews were permitted to reside.
[edit] Fortification
The Pale boundary essentially consisted of a fortified ditch and rampart built around parts of the medieval counties of Louth, Meath, Dublin and Kildare, actually leaving half of Meath, most of Kildare, and south west Dublin on the other side. The pale border line cut off an area south of the modern day M50 in Dublin.
The following description is from The parish of Taney: a history of Dundrum, near Dublin, and its neighbourhood (1895):[2]
In the period immediately after the Norman Settlement was constructed the barrier, known as the "Pale," separating the lands occupied by the settlers from those remaining in the hands of the Irish. This barrier consisted of a ditch, raised some ten or twelve feet from the ground, with a hedge of thorn on the outer side. It was constructed, not so much to keep out the Irish, as to form an obstacle in their way in their raids on the cattle of the settlers, and thus give time for a rescue. The Pale began at Dalkey, and followed a southwesterly direction towards Kilternan ; then turning northwards passed Kilgobbin, where a castle still stands, and crossed the Parish of Taney to the south of that part of the lands of Balally now called Moreen, and thence in a westerly direction to Tallaght, and on to Naas in the County of Kildare. In the wall bounding Moreen is still to be seen a small watch-tower and the remains of a guard-house adjoining it. From this point a beacon-fire would raise the alarm as far as Tallaght, where an important castle stood. A portion of the Pale is still to be seen in Kildare between Clane and Clongowes Wood College at Sallins.
Within the confines of the Pale the leading gentry and merchants lived lives not too different from that of their counterparts in England, except that they lived under the constant fear of attack from the Gaelic Irish.
[edit] End of The Pale
Eventually, after the 16th and 17th centuries, and especially after the Anglican Reformation and the Plantation of Ulster, the English settlers were gradually assimilated into the Irish nation, in large part due to their relative reluctance to give up Roman Catholicism (those who became Protestants were rewarded with a higher status). They kept their version of the English language, which had Cornish influences, for the most part. They were in fact joined by other English Catholics fleeing persecution under Queen Elizabeth I and subsequent monarchs. (Even in the 19th century, Leinster had few Irish-speakers.) This large body of middle- and lower-class English speakers, combined with their rejection by the ascendant Protestant upper class, provided much of the impetus for the displacement of the Irish language from Ireland's population.[citation needed] This is also why the English spoken in the Dublin area sounds more like early Modern English[citation needed] and is quite different from the Hiberno-English in the formerly-Gaelic-speaking parts of Ireland, such as County Cork (which has the stereotypical sing-song accent which replaces /θ/ with /th/).
[edit] See also
- Greater Dublin Area
- Pale of Settlement in Imperial Russia
