CHAPTER XIV
Prince Lionel Viceroy for Edward III—The Statute of Kilkenny
EDWARD III, that valiant, vigorous, and ambitious “English” king—he was almost a pure-blooded Frenchman and about the last Norman monarch who occupied the throne of England that did not speak with fluency the language of the people he governed—was so occupied with his unjust wars against France that he gave but small heed to Irish affairs and never visited the island at all. But he sent over his third son, Prince Lionel, ancestor of the royal house of York and Clarence, as viceroy. Lionel had with him a well-equipped army of native-born English, but he treated his Anglo-Irish allies so contemptuously that many fell away from him and joined the ranks of the Old Irish. His English army, unaccustomed to the Irish climate and mode of warfare, made but a poor figure in the field, and was everywhere beaten by the dauntless Irish clansmen. At last he was compelled to lower his imperious tone to the Anglo-Irish and these foolishly helped him out of his scrape. It is said that a more than doubtful campaign in the present county of Clare procured for him, from his flatterers, the title of Duke of Clarence—a title, by the way, which brought more or less misfortune to every English prince who has borne it, except William IV, from his day to our own.
Lionel was particularly jealous of the friendship which seemed to exist between old Anglo-Irish and the old Celtic-Irish, and his small mind conceived a method of putting an end to it. He summoned a parliament to meet at Kilkenny, and there it was enacted, among other things, “that all intermarriages, fosterings, gossipred, and buying or selling with the (Irish) enemy shall be accounted treason; that English names, fashions, and manners (most of these having disappeared) shall be resumed under penalty of confiscation of the delinquent’s lands; that March laws (Norman) and Brehon laws (Irish) are illegal, and that there shall be no laws but English laws; that the Irish shall not pasture their cattle on English lands; that the English shall not entertain Irish rhymers, minstrels, or newsmen, and, moreover, that no ‘mere Irishman’ shall be admitted to any ecclesiastical benefice or religious house (England was then all Catholic) situated within the English district.”
Other provisions of the Statute of Kilkenny, as this precious “law” is called in Irish history, forbade the wearing of long hair, mustaches, and cloaks, after the manner of the Irish, and the use of the Gaelic speech was also forbidden, under heavy penalties. With their usual subserviency to English demands, the Anglo-Irish barons of the Pale—the portion of Ireland held by the English settlers, as already explained—passed this barbarous enactment without opposition, although they themselves were the chief “offenders” against it, in the eyes of the tyrannical viceroy.
To the honor of the Anglo-Normans and Celtic-Irish be it remembered, the base statute became almost immediately inoperative, and the Norman lords and Irish ladies, and the Irish princes and the Norman ladies, intermarried more numerously than before—an example generally followed by their dependants. The gallant house of Fitzgerald, or Geraldine, as usual, set the example of disregard.
“These Geraldines! These Geraldines! Not long her air they breathed—
Not long they fed on venison in Irish water seethed—
Not often had their children been by Irish mothers nursed,