all he wanted. The light-armed Irish troop did great things at
Crecy, but they were never used at home. That Half-hold, which was the
ruin of Ireland, and which was to go on being its ruin for many and many
a century, was never more conspicuous than during the nominal rule of
the strongest and ablest of all the Angevin kings.

Something, however, for very shame he did do. In 1361 all absentee
landowners, already amounting to no less than sixty-three, including the
heads of several of the great abbeys, were summoned to Westminster and
ordered to provide an army to accompany Lionel, Duke of Clarence, whom
he had decided upon sending over to Ireland as viceroy.

Clarence was the king's third son, and had married the only daughter and
heiress of William de Burgh (mentioned a little way back as a baby
heiress), and through his wife had become Earl of Ulster and the nominal
lord of an enormous tract of the country stretching from the Bay of
Galway nearly up to the coast of Donegal. Most of this had, however,
already, as we have seen, been lost. The two rebel Burkes had got
possession of the Galway portion, the O'Neills, O'Connors, and other
chiefs had repossessed themselves of the North. So completely indeed was
the latter lost that Ulster--nominally the patrimony of the Duchess of
Clarence--is not even alluded to by her husband as part of the country
over which his government could attempt to lay claim.

The chief event of this visit was the summoning of a Parliament at
Kilkenny, a Parliament made memorable ever after by the passing of what
is still known as the Statute of Kilkenny[5]. This Statute, although it
produced little effect at the time, is an extremely important one to
understand, as it enables us to realize the state to which the country
had then got, and explains, moreover, a good deal that would otherwise
be obscure or confusing in the after history of Ireland.

[5] 40 Edward III., Irish Statutes.

Two distinct and separate set of rules are here drawn up for two
distinct and separate Irelands. One is for the English Ireland, which
then included about the area of ten counties, though it afterwards
shrank to four and a few towns; the other is for the Ireland of the
Irish and rebellious English, which included the rest of the island; the
object being, not as might be supposed at first sight, to unite these
two closer together, but to keep them as far apart as possible; to
prevent them, in fact, if possible, fr