Falkiner — The Coitiitiefi of Ireland. 187 



country south-west of Dublin, including large portions of Kildare, 

 Carlow, and Wexford, as well as the modern Wicklow, long remained 

 a rude "hinterland" into which law and order seldom penetrated. 

 The State Papers are full of such entries as this of 1537 — "Devices 

 for the ordering of the Kavanaghes, the Byi-nes, Tooles, and O'Maylcs 

 for such lands as they shall have within the County of Carlow and 

 the marches of the same county, and also of the marches of the County 

 Dublin, ' ' — which plainly show the unsettled state of these districts. In 

 1578, however, a Commission issued under the Act of 11th Elizabeth 

 and " the Birns' and Tooles' country, with the Glens that lie by 

 South and by East of the County of Dublin, was bounded out into a 

 shire, to be named and called the County of Wicklow."^ But though 

 this Commission was carried out, and the boundaries of the counties 

 defined by Sir "William Drury, who succeeded Sydney as a Lord 

 Justice, the troubles of Elizabeth's latter years in Munster and Ulster 

 left little leisure to her Deputies to attend to the "Wicklow septs. 

 The Byrnes and Tooles resumed their independence ; and in 1590, as 

 Sir George Carew wrote, " those that dwell within sight of the smoke 

 of Dublin" were not subject to the laws.- When Sir Arthur 

 Chichester came to complete the work Sydney had begun a genera- 

 tion earlier, of " adding or reducing to a county certain, every border- 

 ing territoiy whereof doubt was made in what county the same should 

 lie,"^ he found that the mountains and glens of Dublin were almost 

 as far as ever from " civility," and contained such a multitude 

 of untutored natives that it seemed strange that "so many souls 

 shoTild be nourished in these wild and barren mountains." The 

 shiring of Wicklow was only finally accomplished in 1606, and it thus 

 fell out that the county nearest to the metropolis was of all the last 

 to be brought effectively within the scope of English government. 



In connexion with this attempt towards the formation of the 

 County Wicklow, Sydney had also a project for dividing Wexford into 

 two shires, of which the northern part should be called Ferns. This 

 county, severed by the Wicklow mountains from the metropoKs, had, 

 though less distui-bed than its neighbour's, been practically outside the 

 Pale.* The southern part of it, indeed, according to a "Description of 



1 Fiant of Elizabeth, No. 3,603, Irish Eecord Office. 

 - Carew Cal., iii., p. 44. 

 ^ Sir J. Davies's "Discovery." 



* See Hore and Graves's " Social State of the South-Eastern Counties in the 

 Sixteenth Century," p. 27. 



