The Pale was a strip of land that stretched north from Dalkey in Dublin to Dundalk in Louth; it became the base of English rule in Ireland. The
Norman invasion of Ireland, beginning in 1169, created the
Lordship of Ireland and brought Ireland under the theoretical control of the
Plantagenet Kings of England. From the 13th century onwards, English rule in Ireland at first faltered, then waned. Across most of Ireland, the
Anglo-Normans increasingly
assimilated into Irish culture after 1300. They made alliances with neighbouring autonomous Gaelic lords. In the long periods when there was no large royal army in Ireland, the Anglo-Norman lords, like their Gaelic neighbours in the provinces, acted essentially as independent rulers in their own areas. English power in Ireland was greatly weakened by the
Bruce campaign (1315–1318), the
Black Death, the
Hundred Years War (1337–1453), and the
Wars of the Roses (1455–85). In 1366, so that the English Crown could assert its authority over the settlers, a parliament was assembled in
Kilkenny and the
Statute of Kilkenny was enacted. The statute decreed that
intermarriage between English settlers and Irish natives was forbidden. It also forbade the settlers from using the
Irish language and adopting Irish modes of dress or other customs, as such practices were already common. The adoption of Gaelic
Brehon property law, in particular, undermined the
feudal nature of the Lordship. The Act was never implemented successfully. This inability to enforce the statute indicated that Ireland was withdrawing from English cultural norms. By the mid-15th century, direct English rule was largely restricted to a region on the east coast, the "four obedient shires" comprising most of counties
Dublin,
Kildare,
Meath and
Louth. This was the region in which English culture and English law were observed. In 1454, commissioners were appointed to recruit workmen "to make trenches and fortresses upon the borders and marches" of these four counties, to prevent further raids by the Gaelic Irish and Gaelicized Normans. In 1494, the Lord Deputy,
Edward Poynings, summoned the
parliament. It passed a statute ordering "ditches to be made aboute the Inglishe pale". This is the first recorded use of the name. Poynings had been governor of the
Pale of Calais before being made the English governor of Ireland. Thereafter, the territory it enclosed was known as "the English Pale". The Pale was composed of
Dublin and its surrounding area, the population of which was mainly made of
Old English merchants who were loyal to the crown. By the late 15th century, the Pale became the only part of Ireland that remained subject to the English king, with most of the island paying only token recognition of the overlordship of the English crown. The tax base shrank to a fraction of what it had been in 1300. A proverb quoted by
Sir John Davies said that "whoso lives by west of the
Barrow, lives west of the law." At a higher social level, there was extensive intermarriage between the Gaelic Irish aristocracy and Anglo-Norman lords, beginning not long after the invasion.The
earls of Kildare ruled as lords deputy from 1470 (with more or less success), aided by alliances with the Gaelic lords. This lasted until the 1520s, when the earls passed out of royal favour, but the
9th earl was reinstated in the 1530s. The brief revolt by his son
"Silken Thomas" in 1534–35 served in the following decades to hasten the
Tudor conquest of Ireland, in which Dublin and the surviving Pale were used as the crown's main military base. A book
A Perambulation of Leinster, Meath, and Louth, of which consist the Pale (1596) expressed contemporary usage. ==Fortification==