From early modern Ireland to the great famine

Abstract

In the centuries that followed the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 the vast majority of the population of Ireland continued to speak Irish, mostly in the countryside, while English predominated in the towns and cities, as well as in the area around Dublin, known as the Pale. However, pressure on Irish as a vernacular mounted when the Tudor dynasty equated English-speaking with loyalty to the crown and Irish with disloyalty. This policy was given formal expression in ‘An Act for the English Order, Habit, and Language’, passed by the Dublin Parliament in 1537. In its introduction, the act drew a distinction between the King’s loyal, English-speaking population in the Pale and those dwelling in the rest of the country, of whom it was stated that there was ʼnothing which doth more contain and keep many of his subjects of this his said land, in a certain savage and wild kind and manner of living, than the diversity that is betwixt them in tongue, language, order, and habit’ (Crowley 2000: 21). It was therefore to be enacted ‘That every person or persons, the King’s true subjects, inhabiting this land of Ireland, of what estate, condition, or degree he or they be, or shall be, to the uttermost of their power, cunning, and knowledge, shall use and speak commonly the English tongue and language’ (Crowley 2000: 22). Although the ideological, institutional and administrative underpinning of this colonial policy was strongly developed during the sixteenth century, it was not until the following century that it began to bear tangible fruit in the wake of the Ulster (1609) and Cromwellian (1652) plantations and the further confiscation of land from the native Catholics following the enactment of the Penal Laws, from 1695 onwards.