Search -
The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century
The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century Author:James Anthony Froude Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SECTION IIT. There are many ways in which a conquered but still reluctant people may be dealt with, when the interest of the conquerors is rather in the count... more »ry itself than in the inhabitants who occupy it. They may be exterminated, either wholly, as the Red races are being exterminated in North America, or in part, as the Gauls were by Csesar, and the Mexicans by Cortes and his successors ; or they may be held continuously down by the sword, as the North of Italy was held by Austria ; or again armed colonists may be settled on the soil who, in exchange for land on easy terms undertake the maintenance of order, as was done in Ulster under James the First, and in Leinster and Munster by Cromwell. The Norman occupation of Ireland in the twelfth century differed materially from all and any of these methods. The Normans were not properly colonists ; they were a military aristocracy whose peculiar mission was to govern men. When a tract of land was allotted to a Norman baron, it was not at first an estate out of which to extract rents to spend upon his own pleasures, so much as a fief, over which he was a ruler responsible to the crown. The Irish, when the Normans took charge of them, were, with the exception of the clergy, scarcely better than a mob of armed savages. They had no settled industry and no settled habitations, and scarcely a conception ofproperty. The poor-spirited and the weak were told off for such wretched tillage as could not be dispensed with. The only occupation considered honorable was fighting and plunder; and each tribe roamed within its own limits, supported either by the pillage of its neighbors or the wild cattle which wandered through the forests. They had some human traits. They were fond of music and ballad singing. They were devout after a fashion of...« less