their
understanding a sketch of the position of the various chiefs, as they
were at this time scattered over the island. The English pale,
originally comprising "the four shires," as they were called, of Dublin,
Kildare, Meath, and Uriel, or Louth, had been shorn down to half its old
dimensions. The line extended from Dundalk to Ardee; from Ardee by
Castletown to Kells; thence through Athboy and Trim to the Castle of
Maynooth; from Maynooth it crossed to Claine upon the Liffey, and then
followed up the line of the river to Ballimore Eustace, from which place
it skirted back at the rear of the Wicklow and Dublin mountains to the
forts at Dalkey, seven miles south of Dublin.[290] This narrow strip
alone, some fifty miles long and twenty broad, was in any sense English.
Beyond the borders the common law of England was of no authority; the
king's writ was but a strip of parchment; and the country was parcelled
among a multitude of independent chiefs, who acknowledged no sovereignty
but that of strength, who levied tribute on the inhabitants of the pale
as a reward for a nominal protection of their rights, and as a
compensation for abstaining from the plunder of their farms.[291] Their
swords were their sceptres; their codes of right, the Brehon
traditions,--a convenient system, which was called law, but which in
practice was a happy contrivance for the composition of felonies.[292]

[Sidenote: Ireland beyond the pale absolutely governed by the Irish
chiefs. Their distribution.]

These chiefs, with their dependent clans, were distributed over the four
provinces in the following order. The Geraldines, the most powerful of
the remaining Normans, were divided into two branches. The Geraldines of
the south, under the Earls of Desmond, held Limerick, Cork, and Kerry;
the Geraldines of Leinster lay along the frontiers of the English pale;
and the heads of the house, the Earls of Kildare, were the feudal
superiors of the greater portion of the English counties. To the
Butlers, Earls of Ormond and Ossory, belonged Kilkenny, Carlow, and
Tipperary. The De Burghs, or Bourkes, as they called themselves, were
scattered over Galway, Roscommon, and the south of Sligo, occupying the
broad plains which lie between the Shannon and the mountains of
Connemara and Mayo. This was the relative position into which these
clans had settled at the Conquest, and it had been maintained with
little variation.

[Sidenote: Recovery of the indigenous Ir