Preface

Summary

This book has been an awfully long time in the making. I had first thought of writing it over 30 years ago, but that would have been a mistake. Our knowledge of the English Pale’s development then was much more limited, the sources less accessible: anything more than a brief, inevitably inaccurate, study would scarcely have been possible. The book that I wrote then about English government in early Tudor Ireland included brief comments about an expanding English Pale and the three statutes which delineated the bounds of march and maghery; but my knowledge was still very vague as to what an English military frontier might have looked like, especially its standing defences. So instead I explored the theme of military frontiers with a brief comparative survey of the Pale and the English far north. There was also the English Pale at Calais, after which Ireland’s English Pale had reputedly been named; but was this an extended frontier, or a military outpost?

In other circumstances, I might have attempted a more detailed study of Ireland’s English Pale, its genesis and development, but some of the evidence seemed ambiguous, even conflicting. It was unclear when the Pale had originated, as also what its relationship was with ‘the four obedient shires’, the term used to describe the region during the fifteenth century. An obstacle of a different sort was the political atmosphere in the Ireland of the 1980s, with a military campaign being waged across the border and Northern Ireland torn apart by violence. The resultant polarized atmosphere seemingly also influenced historians, sparking reaction against what was labelled ‘revisionism’ in Irish history. In this atmos¬phere, erecting a frontier to defend ‘the four obedient shires’ and separate native from settler, English from Irish, smacked far too much of Partition and a hotly-contested hard border. Actually, I thought the ‘revisionist debate’ was good for Irish history, raising historiographical issues which attracted attention from historians in other countries; but it would have been a brave thing to do to write about the Pale’s expansion in early Tudor Ireland without being sure of evidence that was certain to be contested evidence. So, I steered towards a less contentious line of research, drawing conceptually on the new framework of frontier and border studies in early modern Europe, and writing comparative studies of Tudor frontiers, focusing initially on marcher lordship, later on county communities.