Such were the laws of England, which Sir James Ware complains the Irish did not know.
In signing the treaty of Windsor, the English king had apparently recognized in the person of Roderic O'Connor, and in the Irish through him, the chief rights of sovereignty over the whole island, except Leinster and, perhaps, Meath. But, at the same time, a passage or two in the treaty concealed a meaning certainly unperceived by the Irish, but fraught with mischief and misfortune to their country.
First, Roderic O'Connor acknowledged himself and his successors as liegemen of the kings of England; in a second place, the privileges conceded to the Irish were to continue only so long as they remained faithful to their oath of allegiance. We see here the same confusion of ideas, which we remarked on the meaning given to the word homage by either party. The natives of the island understood to be liegemen and under oath in a sense conformable to their usual ideas of subordination; the English invested those words with the feudal meaning.
All the calamities of the four following centuries, and, consequently, all the horrors of the times subsequent to the Protestant Reformation, were to be the penalty of that misunderstanding.
Let us picture to ourselves two races of men so different as the
Milesian Celts on the one side, and the Scandinavian Norman
French on the other, having concluded such a treaty as that of
Windsor, each side resolved to push its own interpretation to
the bitter end.
The English are in possession of a territory clearly enough defined, but they are ever on the alert to seize any opportunity of a real or pretended violation of it, in order to extend their limits and subjugate the whole island. Yet they are bound to allow the Brehon Irish to live in their midst, governed by their own customs and laws. Moreover, they acknowledge that the former great Irish lords of the very country which they occupy are not mere Irish, but of noble blood; for, from the beginning, the English recognized five families of the country, known as the "five bloods," as pure and noble, in theory at least.
The Irish without the Pale are acknowledged as perfectly independent, completely beyond English control, with their own magistrates and laws, even that of war; subject only to tribute. But, at the same time, this independence is rendered absolutely insecure by the imposition of conditions, whose meaning is well known and perfectly understood in all the countries conquered by the Scandinavians, but utterly beyond the comprehension of the Irish.
The consequence is clear: war began with the conclusion of the treaty—a war which raged for four centuries, until a new and more powerful incentive to slaughter and desolation showed itself in the Reformation, ushered in by Henry VIII.
First came a general rebellion. This is the word used by Ware, when John, a boy of twelve years of age, was dispatched by his father Henry, with the title of Lord of Ireland, to receive the submission of various Irish lords at Waterford, where he landed. "The young English gentlemen," says Cambrensis, who was a witness of the scene, "used the Irish chieftains with scorn, because," as he says, "their demeanor was rude and barbarous." The Irish naturally resented this treatment from a lad, as they would have resented it from his father; and they retired in wrath to take up arms and raise the whole land to "rebellion."
This solemn protest was not without effect in Europe. At the beginning of the reign of Richard I., Clement III., on appointing, by the king's request, William de Longchamps, Bishop of Ely, as his legate in England, Wales, and Ireland, took good care to limit the authority of this prelate to those parts of Ireland which lay under the jurisdiction of the Earl of Moreton— that is, of John, brother to Richard. He had power to exercise his jurisdiction "in Anglia,, Wallia, et illis Hiberniae partibus in quibus Joannes Moretonii Comes potestatem habet et dominium."—(Matth. Paris.) It would seem, then, that Clement III. knew nothing of the bull of Adrian IV.