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of this chapter. In Britain, as we have seen, there had emerged a
monoglossic form of the English language, which was strictly constructed
and patrolled in terms of both gender and class. In Ireland, on the other
hand, the situation can be thought of as polyglossic. Though in fact even
this is a simplification, since there was, within both of the main languages,
a great deal of regional and class-based difference. The principal feature of
the linguistic situation which all commentators note, however, was the
competition between the English and Irish languages, a conflict which had
arisen out of a long history of colonial struggle. From the Anglo-Norman
invasion of 1169 onwards, the Gaelic language of the indigenous
inhabitants of Ireland was at odds with the language of the invaders. It
had been an enduring, violent and bitter struggle between differing forms
of social organisation, cultures, economies and of course languages. For if
England in this period had achieved the status of becoming the first
nation-state, then Ireland s fate was to be its first colony. And as the
English language gradually became a major vernacular language in its
Forging the nation 101
own right, in which there was constructed an important literary tradition,
the Irish language and its speakers were subject to restriction, punishment
and proscription. The language had to suffer not only external attacks
launched by the invading culture but the even worse fate of coming to be
resented by its native speakers. In order to examine the complexities of the
polyglot situation of the nineteenth century then, along with their cultural
and political consequences, we need first to give a brief sketch of the
fortunes of the language after the first Anglo-Norman invasion.
With the expansion of the conquest throughout the island, there came
in time the establishment of Norman French, and later English, as the
language of law and government. The nature of the conquest, however,
was such that the invaders, known as the old English , were assimilated to
the native culture. The process of assimilation, which took place primarily
at the level of culture and language, though gradual, clearly came to
represent a threat to colonial rule. And indeed, outside the area of the
pale , the area of English writ and jurisdiction which encircled Dublin,
Gaelic culture in general followed its traditional patterns. Hence the
phrase beyond the pale , indicating that which is beyond acceptability or
decent constraint. This threat, constituted by the wyld Irish , as Boorde
later described them in 1547, was met with the measures known as the
Statutes of Kilkenny (1366). Assimilation, it was held, put at risk the
whole political and cultural legacy of the colonial settlement:
the said land, and the liege people thereof, the English language, the
alliegance due to our lord the king, and the English laws there, are put
in subjection and decayed, and the Irish enemies exalted and raised up,
contrary to reason.
(Irish Archaeological Society 1842:6 7)
The threat was countered by harsh measures:
it is ordained to be established, that every Englishman do use the
English language, and be named by an English name, leaving off
entirely the manner of naming used by the Irish; and that every
Englishman use the English custom, fashion, mode of riding and
apparel, according to his estate; and if any English, or Irish living
amongst the English, use the Irish language amongst themselves,
contrary to this ordinance, and thereof be attainted, his lands and
tenements, if he have any, shall be seized into the hands of his
immediate lord, until he come to one of the places of our lord the King,
and find sufficient surety to adopt and use the English language, then
he shall have restitution of his said lands, by writ issued out of said
places.
(ibid.: 11 13)
102 Forging the nation
In a sense the statutes offer a blueprint, and one which was to be realised
many times, of cultural colonialism. By the time of Tudor rule in Ireland it
had become so familiar as to sound, in Spenser s words, almost
commonsensical: It hath ever been the use of the conquerors to despise
the language of the conquered, and to force him by all means to use his
(Spenser 1949:118 19). The speech being Irish , he warned, the heart
must needs be Irish.
The eradication of Irish sentiments by way of the destruction of the
Irish language was a policy actively pursued by the Tudors and their
descendants. A peace treaty between the MacGilpatrick s and Henry VIII,
for example, stipulated the following as one of its conditions:
Item, the said MacGilpatrick, his heirs and assigns, and every other the
inhabiters of such lands as it shall please the king s majesty to give unto
him, shall use the English habits and manner, and to their knowledge,
the English language, and they, and every of them, shall, to their power,
bring up their children after the English manner and the use of the
English tongue.
(Jackson 1973:22)
This was so effective that the flight of the earls , the fleeing of the Gaelic
chieftains after their disastrous defeat at the battle of Kinsale in 1601, is
often taken by nationalist historians as signalling the end of Gaelic Ireland.
In fact, however, this did not mark the end either of Irish resistance to
colonial rule or of the use of the Irish language by the indigenous
population. Both of these processes were hastened, though, by the onset of
the Ulster plantation.
The plantation of the new English , resisted by native revolt in both the
Cromwellian and Williamite periods, was consolidated by the victory of
William of Orange over James II at the battle of the Boyne in 1690. This
date, a crucial one in all the differing forms of Irish historical
consciousness, marked the real beginning of the end for Gaelic Ireland,
the gradual historical process which was to produce what one writer has
called the great silence (De Fréine 1965). Again, as with the Statutes of
Kilkenny, the process took legal form. The Penal Code, a set of laws upon
which Protestant ascendancy rested, were enacted between 1695 and 1728,
and ranged from restrictions on the rights of Catholics to bear arms, to
own property, to marry, and to seek education abroad, up to the
deprivation of the franchise in parliamentary elections. In short it was a
systematic attempt to deprive Catholics of the rights enjoyed by their
Protestant neighbours. It did not directly prescribe measures against the
Irish language, but then it did not need to, for what it set in place, a
Protestant ascendancy in which cultural, political and economic life was
conducted in the English language, was sufficient to guarantee that Irish
Forging the nation 103
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