The Pale

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article refers to a Pale in Ireland. It is not to be confused with the Pale of Settlement. For other uses of "pale" or "Pale" as a noun, see Pale.

The Pale (grey) in 1450

The Pale (

Earldom of Kildare, towards Trim and north towards Kells. In this district, many townlands
have English or French names, the latter associated with Norman influence in England.

Etymology

The word pale, meaning a fence, is derived from the Latin word

Imperial Russia where Jews were permitted to reside.[4]

History

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

Hiberno-Norman occupation in Ireland at first faltered, then waned.[citation needed] Across most of Ireland, the Normans increasingly assimilated into Irish culture after 1300.[citation needed] They made alliances with neighbouring autonomous Gaelic lords. In the long periods when there was no large royal army in Ireland, the Norman lords, like their Gaelic neighbours in the provinces, acted essentially as independent rulers in their own areas.[citation needed
]

The

Tudors took a greater interest in Irish affairs from 1485 and moved it back to Dublin.[citation needed] The Pale generally consisted of fertile lowlands which were easier for the garrison to defend from ambush than hilly or wooded ground. For reasons of trade and administration, a version of English became the official language. Its closest modern derivative is said to be the accent used by natives of Fingal.[citation needed
]

The Pale – According to Statute of 1488

In 1366, so that the English Crown could assert its authority over the settlers, a parliament was assembled in

feudal nature of the Lordship.[citation needed] The Act was never implemented successfully, even in the Pale itself.[citation needed
] This inability to enforce the statute indicated that Ireland was withdrawing from English cultural norms.

By the Tudor period, the Irish culture and language had reestablished itself in regions conquered by the Anglo-Normans: "even in the Pale, all the common folk ... for the most part are of Irish birth, Irish habit and of Irish language".[5] At a higher social level, there was extensive intermarriage between the Gaelic Irish aristocracy and Anglo-Norman lords, beginning not long after the invasion.[citation needed]

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.[

"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 English Pale (1596) expressed contemporary usage.[6]

The Pale was composed of

Old English merchants who were loyal to the crown.[7]

Fortification: The Pale Ditch

Modern plaque near Ballymore Eustace marks the end of the Pale.

The Pale boundary essentially consisted of a fortified ditch and rampart built around parts of the medieval counties of Louth, Meath, Dublin and Kildare, leaving out half of Meath, most of Kildare, and southwest County Dublin. Border or garrison towns of the pale included Ardee, Siddan, Kells, Athboy, Trim, Kilcock, Clane, Naas, Harristown, Ballymore Eustace, Rathmore, Kilteel, Saggart, Tallaght and Dalkey. The northern frontier of the Pale was marked by the De Verdon fortress of Castle Roche, while the southern border lay slightly south of the present day M50 motorway in Dublin, which crosses the site of what was Carrickmines Castle. The following description is from The Parish of Taney: A History of Dundrum, near Dublin, and Its Neighbourhood (1895):[8]

In the period immediately after the Norman Settlement was constructed the barrier, known as the "Pale," separating the lands occupied by the settlers from those remaining in the hands of the Irish. This barrier consisted of a ditch, raised some ten or twelve feet from the ground, with a hedge of thorn on the outer side. It was constructed, not so much to keep out the Irish, as to form an obstacle in their way in their raids on the cattle of the settlers, and thus give time for a rescue. The Pale began at Dalkey, and followed a southwesterly direction towards Kilternan; then turning northwards passed Kilgobbin, where a castle still stands, and crossed the Parish of Taney to the south of that part of the lands of Balally now called Moreen, and thence in a westerly direction to Tallaght, and on to Naas in the County of Kildare. In the wall bounding Moreen is still to be seen a small watch-tower and the remains of a guard-house adjoining it. From this point a beacon-fire would raise the alarm as far as Tallaght, where an important castle stood. A portion of the Pale is still to be seen in Kildare between Clane and Clongowes Wood College at Sallins.

Within the confines of the Pale, the leading gentry and merchants lived lives not too different from those of their counterparts in England, save for the constant fear of attack from the Gaelic Irish.

The Pale Ditch in South Dublin

Portions of the Pale Ditch can still be seen in the Sandyford/Kilgobbin/Ballyogan areas of South Dublin. The most well-preserved section can be visited and lies just south of the Ballyogan Road within the Ballyogan Recycling Park. It consists of pair of ditches on either side of a high flat-topped bank. The bank is 2 to 3 meters wide on the top and is approximately 2 meters above the bottom of the ditches. The entire length of this section is roughly 500 meters and the top of the bank is planted with hedgerow shrubs, indicating that the Pale Ditch subsequently served as a field boundary. Another section of the Pale Ditch lies in the Clay Farm Ecopark, near the Ballyogan Road. This section is very different from the previous section, in that it does not consist of a double ditch and bank. Rather, the builders made use of an existing shallow escarpment, steepening the slope to create a 2 meter high barrier to movement from north to south. The purpose of this was probably to make it hard for Irish raiders to herd stolen cattle from the Pale to the Wicklow mountains to the south. That this feature was part of the Pale Ditch was originally proposed by Rob Goodbody in the 1990s,[9] and recently confirmed by archaeology during the building of the Clay Farm housing development.[10] Both the sections described above are part of a single linear earthwork, designed to connect Kilgobbin and Carrickmines castles, fortifications built by the Walsh Family during the medieval period to defend the southern marches of the Pale. Another, slightly less well-preserved section of the Pale Ditch can be seen at Kilcross Crescent within the Kilcross housing estate near Sandyford village. This section consists of a bank approximately 200 meters long, although the associated ditches are no longer clearly visible.

End

The idea of the Pale was inseparable from the notion of a separate Anglo-Irish polity and culture. After the 17th century and especially after the

Elizabeth I
.

Modern usage

The term continues to be used in contemporary Irish speech to refer to County Dublin and nearby counties, generally critically—for example, a government department may be criticised for concentrating its resources on the Pale.[citation needed]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Northern Ireland – A Short History". BBC. Archived from the original on 10 November 2012.
  2. ^ "palus." Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary. MICRA, Inc. 22 December 2009.
  3. OED
    , "Pale": "The theory that the origin of the phrase relates to any of several specific regions, such as the area of Ireland formerly called the Pale (see sense 4b) or the Pale of Settlement in Russia (see sense 4c), is not supported by the early historical evidence and is likely to be a later rationalization."
  4. ^ See 'pale', English: Etymology 2.6. on Wiktionary.
  5. ^ "Culture & Religion in Tudor Ireland, 1494–1558". University College Cork. Archived from the original on 16 April 2008.
  6. ^
    ISBN 1-144-76601-X
    .
  7. S2CID 157626208
    .
  8. Hodges, Figgis – via Internet Archive
    .
  9. ^ Goodbody, Rob (1993). On the borders of the pale. Dublin: Pale Publishing.
  10. ^ "Pale Boundary". excavations.ie. 2018. Archived from the original on 5 March 2023. Retrieved 10 May 2023.
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Further reading

External links
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