180 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



Whatever the precise origin of the coTinties so generally ascribed 

 to King John, there appears to be no doubt that the ^mits either of 

 the Hng er of his palatines ran in all of them for a fuU centory from 

 John's time, and that these counties represent the extent of the 

 eSective predominance of English po-vrer do^m to the invasion of 

 Ed^rard Bruce in 1315. Prior to that event some efforts seem to 

 have been made to extend the counties to Ulster, and to define 

 more accurately the limits of the Leinster counties. An Act of 

 25 Edward I. (1296), for the settlement of Ii-eland, enacted that 

 ■'henceforward there shall be a certain sheriff in Ulster, and that 

 the sheriff of Dublin shall not intermeddle henceforth in Ulster." 

 Meath was declared to be a county by itself; and Elldare, which 

 had been regarded as a liberty of Dublin, was discharged from the 

 jurisdiction of the Dublin sheriff, and given an independent position. 

 But from the wars of the Bruce the English colony received a blow 

 from which it did not recover until the Plantagenets had been 

 replaced by the Tudors. The authority of the State, so far as it 

 was efiective in the interior of the island, was exerted through the three 

 great earldoms of Ormond, Desmond, and Elldare, all of which date 

 from the fourteenth century. The area under the direct control of 

 the Crown was narrowed continually, until after a lapse of precisely 

 two centuries more the boundaries of the English Pale had shrunk 

 to its lowest limits, and, in the quaint language of Stanyhurst, were 

 " crampemed and crouched into an odd comer of the country named 

 Eingal, with a parcel of the King's land of ileath and the counties 

 of Elldare and Louth." Thus from the reign of Edward II. to that 

 of Henry Till, the extension of the Irish counties was politically 

 impossible.^ 



That the shrinking of the English Pale had been accompanied by 



^ The Pale at this period is thus described in the State Paper of Henry Till, 

 already referred to : — 



" Also the English Pale doth stretch and extend from the town of Dundalk to 

 the town of Derver, to the town of Ardee, alway on the left side leaving the 

 march on the right side, and so to the town -of Sydan, to the town of Kenlys,* to 

 the town of Dangle.t to Kilcock, to the town of Clane, to the town of Xaas, to 

 the hridge of Cucullyn, j to the town of Ballymore,§ and so backward to the town 

 of Eamore,[l and to the town of Piathcoole, to the town of TaUaght, to the town 

 of Dalkey, leaving alway the march on the right hand from the said Dundalk 

 following the said course to the said town of Dalkey.'T 



* Kells. f Dangan, i Klilcullen. \ Balljinore-Eustace. ,i Rathmore. 



*"< "State Papers," Henry VIII., vol. ii., part iii., p. 22. 



