The truth could not be expressed in more explicit terms. Yet all has not been said. The same persevering character, making headway against apparently insurmountable obstacles, shows itself conspicuously in the Irish, in the preservation of their land, which, after all, was the great object of contention between the two races.
The first Anglo-Norman invaders, including Henry II himself, had no other object in view than gradually to occupy the whole territory, subject it to the feudal laws, give to Englishmen the position of feudal lords, and reduce the Irish to that of villeins, if they could not succeed in rooting them out.
A few years later, by the Treaty of Windsor, the king seemed to confine his pretensions to Leinster, and perhaps Meath, and expressly allowed the natives to keep their lands in the other districts of the island. Yet none of his former grants, by which "he had cantonned the whole island between ten Englishmen," were recalled; the continued as part of and means to shape the policy of the invaders, and subsequent Parliaments always supposed the validity of those former grants made to Strongbow and his followers.
It is true that those posterior Acts of Parliament did not merely rely for their strength on the first documents, but on the pretence that the Irish chieftains and people outside of Leinster and Meath had justly forfeited their estates by not fulfilling the conditions virtually contained in the Windsor Treaty, in which they had professed homage and submission to the English king. It is clear that, lawfully or unlawfully, the Anglo-Normans were determined to gain possession, sooner or later, of the whole island.
To secure their end, they declared that the natives would not be subject to the English laws, but retain their Brehon laws, which in their eyes were no laws at all, and which the Parliament of Kilkenny had declared to be "lewd customs." Henceforth, then, the natives were out of the pale of the law, could not claim its protection, but became subject to the crown of England, without political, civil, or even human rights.
They were soon, by reason of the constant border wars all around the Pale, declared "alien and enemies." And these expressions became, in the eyes of the English lawyers, identical with the Irish race and the Irish nature; so that at all times, peace or war, even when the Irish fought in the English ranks, aiding the Plantagenets in their furious contests with the Scotch or the French, they were still "Irish enemies;" "aliens" unworthy human rights, villeins in whose veins no noble blood could flow, with the exception of five families.
All the rest were not only ignoble, but not even men; nothing but mere Irish, whom any one might kill, even though serving under the English crown, at a risk of being fined five marks, to be paid to the treasury of the King of England, for having deprived his majesty of a serviceable tool.
This (to modern eyes) astounding social state demands a closer examination in order to see if, at least, it had the merit of finally procuring for the English the possession of the land they coveted.
We find first that Henry II., John, and Henry III., would seem on several occasions to have extended the laws of England all over the island. But all English legists will tell us that those laws were only for the inhabitants of English blood. The mere Irish were always reputed aliens, or, rather, enemies to the crown, so that it was, " by actual fact, often adjudged no felony to kill a mere Irish in time of peace," as Sir John Davies expressly points out.
Five families alone were excepted from the general category and acknowledged to be of noble blood—the O'Neills of Ulster, the O'Melachlins of Meath, the O'Connors of Connaught, the O'Briens of Munster, and the McMurroughs of Leinster.