Above : Another Picture Of King Henry V

In Dublin a miniature Government, modelled on that of England, had its seat. There was a Viceroy, called the Lord Lieutenant or the Lord Deputy (the former title was held more honourable) and a council, consisting mainly of the chief officials and one or more of the Archbishops. The defence of the people, whether from civil injustice or from the hostility of armed foes, was little attended to. The administration of justice was feeble and corrupt; the Viceroy held that, when he had made reprisals on the Irish who raided the Pale by counter expeditions into their territories, and had perhaps recaptured a few cows, he had done all that could reasonably be expected of him. Round the Viceroy and his council was a crowd of officials and clerks, excessively numerous for the work that had to be done. There was a Treasurer, a Lord Chancellor, a Master of the Rolls, and Justices of the King’s Bench, as well as lesser judges.

The full rights of English law were for those of English blood alone. The mere Irish could not claim them, unless they had taken out ” papers of denization,” that is to say become what we should now call naturalised English subjects, or belonged to ” the five bloods “—five families held to be of the race of the ancient provincial Kings. At this period, however, a ” mere Irishman ” residing within the Pale could no longer be slain by an Englishman with impunity, as had been the case in the earlier colony days.

A little Parliament held Sessions in Dublin, or in some other part of the Pale, or in one of the southern cities. There was a Commons’ House, in which sat representatives of the counties and boroughs of the Pale, and occasionally some representative of places more remote. Also there were two clerical proctors from each diocese under the English influence. The House of Lords was poorly attended ; sometimes scarcely a dozen temporal peers were present at a session. All, of course, were nobles of English blood. The bishops and abbots, the “lords spiritual,” too, came from the dioceses within or near the Pale and from Anglo-Irish monasteries. Now and then a bishop of an Irish diocese or of a southern city appeared, but he seems always to have been either an Englishman or a foreigner from the Continent.

The similarity between chiefs and lords was not confined to the latter’s independence of the English Crown, and their adoption of Irish national life and customs. If the Normans had become Irish the clans had become feudal. The constant growth of the arbitrary power of the chiefs still continued, and the common rights and privileges of the free clan had sunk under the personal influence of the chief and his immediate military dependants.

There was little now to mark any difference between the relations of the military chief with his clan and those of the lord with his followers. The important element of the ownership of the land was the only thing that prevented the chief from being equivalent to a feudal lord.