In 1367, the last year of the administration of the Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III, a parliament held at Kilkenny passed the famous act that inter-marriage with the Irish should be punished as high treason, and that any man of English race using the Irish language should forfeit all his land and tenements to the Crown, and forbidding also the entertainment of bards, ministrels, and rhymers.
These first attacks upon the language cannot possibly have produced much effect, for we find the English power within a hundred years after their passing, reduced to the lowest point, and there was scarcely an English or Norman noble in Ireland who had not adopted an Irish name, Irish speech, and Irish manners. The De Bourgo had became Mac William, and minor branches of the same stem had become Mac Philpins, Mac Gibbons, and Mac Raymonds; the Birminghams had became Mac Feóiris, the Stauntons Mac Aveeleys, the Nangles Mac Costellos, the Prendergasts Mac Maurices, the De Courcys Mac Patricks, the Bissetts of Antrim Mac Keons, etc.
A hundred years after the Statute of Kilkenny, the English, driven back into the Pale, which then consisted of less than four counties, passed a law in 1465, enjoining all men of Irish names within the Pale to take an English name, "of one towne as Sutton, Chester, Trym, Skryne, Corke, Kinsale; or colour as White, Black, Brown; or art or science as Cooke, Butler," and he and his issue were ordered to use these names or forfeit all their goods. This, however, the parliament was unable to carry through, none of the great Irish names within or alongside the Pale, Mac Murroughs, O'Tooles, O'Byrnes, O'Mores, O'Ryans, O'Conor Falys, O'Kellys, etc., seem to have been in the least influenced by it.
Next an attempt was made to maintain English in at least the seaports and borough towns, for we find an enactment of the year 1492-93 amongst the Archives of the Urbs Intacta, commanding that in Waterford, "no manner of man, freeman or foreign, of the city or suburb's dwellers, shall emplead nor defend in Irish tongue against any man in the court, but all they that any matters shall have in court to be administered, shall have a man that can speak English to declare his matter, except one party be of the country [i.e., of Irish race] then every such dweller shall be at liberty to speak Irish."[3] Galway followed suit in 1520, and enacted that "no Irish judge or lawyer shall plead in no man's cause nor matter within this our court, for it agreeth not with the king's laws."[4]
How far these petty attempts were successful may be judged from the fact that Captain Ap Harry, a Welsh officer, describing in October, 1535, Lord Butler's march for the recovery of Dungarvan Castle, says, "We were met by his lordship's brother-in-law, Gerald Mac Shane, (Fitzgerald) Lord of the Decies, who, though a very strong man in his country, could speak never a word of English, but made the troops good cheer after the gentilest fashion that could be. All this journey from Dungarvan forth there is none alive that can remember that English man of war was ever in these parts." Still more striking is the statement that in the Dublin parliament of 1541, all the peers except Mac Gillapatric were of Norman or English descent, and yet not one except the Earl of Ormond could understand English.[5] A letter to the English Privy Council, written in 1569, by Dominicke Linche, of Galway, confirms this. "Even they of the best houses," he writes, "the brothers of the Erle of Clanrickarde, yea and one of his uncles, and he a bysshop, can neither speak nor understand in manner any thinge of their Prince's language, which language by the old Statutes of Galway, every man ought to learn and must speak before he can be admitted to any office within the Corporation."[6]
Nor had the extirpating policy succeeded even in the Pale, for we read in the State Papers that in the county of Kildare in 1534, "there is not one husbandman in effect that speaketh English nor useth any English sort nor manner, and their gentlemen be after the same sort."[7]
The great Earl of Kildare had nearly as many volumes of Irish as he had of English in his library. A catalogue of his books was drawn up in 1518. Amongst the Irish manuscripts were St. Berachán's book,[8] the Speech of Oyncheaghis (?) Cuchuland's Acts, the History of Clone Lyre, etc. Murchadh O'Brien, king of Thomond, promised Henry VIII. as early as 1547, when in London, that he and his heirs should use the English habit and manner, and to their knowledge the English language, and to their power bring up their children in the same.[9] And indeed that family seems to have been always the greatest prop of the English power in the South of Ireland. Thomas Moore, settling in Ireland in 1575, got his lands in King's County on the condition that his sons and servants "should use for the most the English tongue, habit, and government," and make no appeals to the Brehon law. Three years after this, in 1578, we find Lord Chancellor Gerard affirming that all the English, and the most part with delight, even in Dublin speak Irish, and greatly are spotted in manners, habit, and conditions with Irish stains.[10]
In the Vatican Library my friend Father Hogan found a MS. of about the year 1580 with a memorandum concerning certain Franciscan friars, three of whom spoke Irish only, including the Provincial who preached all over Ireland, five more knew Irish better than English, while five are entered as knowing English better than Irish, none are entered as knowing English only.
In 1585 the Irish chieftains of Hy Many, the O'Kellys country, agreed that "Teige mac William O'Kelly and Conor Oge O'Kelly shall henceforth behave themselves like good subjects and shall bring up their children after the English fashions and in the use of the English tongue."[11] Of course such enforced promises had no effect. We find in the State Papers that at St. Douay in 1600 were sixty young gentlemen, eldest sons of the principal gentlemen of the Pale, and that they all spoke Irish.[12]
In 1608 it was found that the superior of the Irish Jesuits, apparently a Pales-man, Father Christopher Holywood of Artane, near Dublin, could speak no Irish, and a document was sent at once to the General of the Jesuits, pointing out how this destroyed his usefulness in the Irish mission. Care was taken that the same mistake should not be made in appointing his successor, Robert Nugent.[13]