The Pale

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This article refers to the Pale in Ireland. Pale may also refer to any of several other jurisdictions and has other meanings. For other uses, see Pale (disambiguation).

The Pale or the English Pale comprised a region in a radius of twenty miles around Dublin which the English in Ireland gradually fortified against incursion from Gaels. From the thirteenth century onwards the Hiberno-Norman invasion in the rest of Ireland at first faltered then waned, allowing Gaelic Ireland to become resurgent.

The word pale derives ultimately from the Latin word palus, meaning stake. (Palisade is derived from the same root.) From this came the figurative meaning of "boundary", and eventually the phrase "beyond the pale". Also derived from the "boundary" concept was the idea of a pale as an area within which local laws were valid. As well as the Pale in Ireland, the term was applied to various other English colonial settlements, and the Pale of Settlement, the area in the west of Imperial Russia where Jews were permitted to reside.

In the 15th century the Pale became the only real piece of Ireland under the control of the English King's Dublin government and a tenuous foothold for the English on the island of Ireland.

The Pale boundary essentially consisted of a fortified ditch and rampart built around parts of the medieval counties of Louth, Meath, Dublin and Kildare, actually leaving half of Meath and Kildare on the other side. The pale border line cut off an area south of the modern day M50 in Dublin. In 1366, in order for the English Crown to assert its authority over the settlers, a parliament was assembled in Kilkenny and the Statute of Kilkenny was established. The statute decreed that inter-marriage between English settlers and Irish natives was forbidden. It also forbade the settlers using the Irish language and adopting Irish modes of dress or other customs.

Within the confines of the Pale the leading gentry and merchants lived lives not too different from that of their counterparts in England, except that they lived under the constant fear of attack from the Gaelic Irish.

Eventually, after the 1500s and 1600s, and especially after the Anglican Reformation and the Plantation of Ulster, the English settlers were gradually assimilated into the Irish nation, in large part due to their relative reluctance to give up Roman Catholicism (those who became Protestants were rewarded with a higher status); but they kept the English language for the most part and were in fact joined by other English Catholics fleeing persecution under Queen Elizabeth I and subsequent monarchs. (Even in the 1800s, Leinster had few Gaelic-speakers.) This large body of middle- and lower-class English speakers, combined with their rejection by the ascendant Protestant upper class, provided much of the impetus for the displacement of Irish Gaelic from Ireland's population. This is also why the English spoken in the Dublin area sounds more like early Modern English^{[citation needed]} and is quite different from the Hiberno-English in the formerly-Gaelic-speaking parts of Ireland, such as County Cork (which has the stereotypical sing-song accent which replaces /θ/ with /t^h/).