186 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



directed to choose some apt place in Thomond ; and Quin, Xillaloe, and 

 Ennis were suggested as suitable. 



We may pause at tMs point to consider the subsequent admiaistra- 

 tive history of Thomond. It continued to be included, under its new 

 designation of Clare, in the government of Connaught almost to the 

 end of Elizabeth's reign. It was then erected into an entirely distinct 

 division, and governed as a distinct entity under a separate Commis- 

 sion, by Donagh, Henry, and Barnaby, successive Earls of Thomond.'^ 

 In 1639, however, under Strafford's Government, it was arranged 

 that on the death of the last-mentioned earls the territory should be 

 reannexed to Munster; and though the ensuing disturbances delayed 

 the fulfilment of this intention, the County of Clare was finally 

 reunited to Munster at the Eestoration. 



But to revert to Sir Henry Sydney. If he was successful in his 

 operations in the distant provinces of Connaught, he was less fortunate, 

 not only in the north, where, indeed, the conditions were hardly ripe 

 for such work, but in a district much nearer to the seat of his Govern- 

 ment. It is certain that the County of Dublin was originally much 

 larger than its present area indicates; and it appears probable that it 

 anciently extended from Skerries, in the north, to Arklow, in the 

 south. It had been conterminous, in fact, as has been pointed out, 

 with the ancient Scandinavian kingdom of Dublin — a territory still 

 marked for us by the ecclesiastical division of the United Dioceses 

 of Dublin and Glendalough.^ But the Danish rulers of Dublin 

 troubled themselves little about the interior of the country,^ and it is 

 doubtful whether at any time prior to Henry YIII. the wild septs of 

 the Byrnes and Tooles, whose incursions in the neighbourhood of the 

 city Stanyhurst describes so graphically, had given even a nominal 

 recognition to the IS'orman or English power. In the thirty-fourth 

 year of that monarch's reign they are said to have petitioned the Lord 

 Deputy and Council to make their county shire ground, and to call it 

 the County of Wicklow, but nothing came of the proposal.* Be that as 

 it may, the sway of these Wicklow chieftains was exercised without 

 dispute down to Sydney's day right up to the near neighbourhood of 

 Dublin, and the inhabitants were ever, as Davies observes, "thorns 

 in the side of the Pale." Indeed, it may be said that the whole 



1 Liber Munerum Hibemise, Part II., p. 185. 



2 Haliday's ■' Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin," pp. 139 and 246. 

 ^ Stokes's " Ireland and the Celtic Church," p. 277. 



* Book of Howth, p. 454. 



