The Statutes of Kilkenny

1366: A law passed to stop English settlers turning Irish, and proof that they already had.

Two centuries after the Normans arrived, the colony had a problem that no army could fix. The settlers were going native. They were marrying Irish women, fostering their children with Irish families, taking Irish names, wearing Irish dress, riding in the Irish fashion without stirrups, and speaking Irish at home. The phrase attached to them afterwards, more Irish than the Irish themselves, catches it even if nobody can say for certain who coined it.

In 1366 a parliament at Kilkenny passed a long statute to stop it. English settlers were forbidden to marry the Irish, to foster children with them, or to stand as godparents to their children. They were not to use Irish names, Irish dress or Irish law. Any settler who could not speak English was required to learn it. The penalty for breaking the language and dress provisions was forfeiture of land until the offender gave security that he would conform.

The crucial thing about the statute is who it was aimed at. Not the Gaelic Irish, most of whom lived well beyond the reach of the Dublin government and could be legislated at but not governed. It was aimed at the king's own colonists, and it is a confession dressed as a law. A state does not forbid its own people to speak a language they are not speaking.

It did not work. The colony kept shrinking for another hundred and fifty years until English authority ran to little more than the Pale around Dublin, and the great Hiberno-Norman families, the Fitzgeralds, the Burkes, the Butlers, went on being as Irish as their neighbours.