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The Pale (Irish language: An Pháil) or the English Pale ( An Pháil Shasanach or An Ghalltacht) was the part of Ireland directly under the control of the English government in the Late Middle Ages. It had been reduced by the late 15th century to an area along the east coast stretching north from Dalkey, just south of Dublin, to the garrison town of Dundalk. The inland boundary went to Naas and Leixlip around the Earldom of Kildare, towards Trim and north towards Kells. In this district, many have English or Norman-French names, the latter associated with Anglo-Norman influence in England.
The Lordship controlled by the English king shrank accordingly, and as parts of its perimeter in counties County Meath and County Kildare were fenced or ditched, it became known as the Pale, deriving from the Latin word palus, a stake, or, synecdoche, a fence. Parts can still be seen west of Clane on the grounds of what is now Clongowes Wood College. The military power of the crown itself was greatly weakened by the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), and the Wars of the Roses (1455–85). The Parliament of Ireland was created, often sitting at Drogheda until the Tudors took a greater interest in Irish affairs from 1485 and moved it back to Dublin. The Pale generally consisted of fertile lowlands which were easier for the garrison to defend from ambush than hilly or wooded ground. For reasons of trade and administration, a version of English became the official language. Its closest modern derivative is said to be the accent used by natives of Fingal. In 1366, so that the English Crown could assert its authority over the settlers, a parliament was assembled in Kilkenny and the Statute of Kilkenny was enacted. The statute decreed that intermarriage between English settlers and Irish natives was forbidden. It also forbade the settlers from using the Irish language and adopting Irish modes of dress or other customs, as such practices were already common. The adoption of Gaelic Brehon law property law, in particular, undermined the feudal nature of the Lordship. The Act was never implemented successfully, even in the Pale itself. This inability to enforce the statute indicated that Ireland was withdrawing from English cultural norms.
By the Tudor period, the Irish language had reestablished itself in regions conquered by the Anglo-Normans: "even in the Pale, all the common folk ... for the most part are of Irish birth, Irish habit and of Irish language". At a higher social level, there was extensive intermarriage between the Gaelic Irish aristocracy and Anglo-Norman lords, beginning not long after the invasion.
By the late 15th century, the Pale became the only part of Ireland that remained subject to the English king, with most of the island paying only token recognition of the overlordship of the English crown. The tax base shrank to a fraction of what it had been in 1300. A proverb quoted by Sir John Davies said that "whoso lives by west of the River Barrow, lives west of the law." The earls of Kildare ruled as lords deputy from 1470 (with more or less success), aided by alliances with the Gaelic lords. This lasted until the 1520s, when the earls passed out of royal favour, but the 9th earl was reinstated in the 1530s. The brief revolt by his son "Silken Thomas" in 1534–35 served in the following decades to hasten the Tudor conquest of Ireland, in which Dublin and the surviving Pale were used as the crown's main military base. A book A Perambulation of Leinster, Meath, and Louth, of which consist the English Pale (1596) expressed contemporary usage.
The Pale was composed of Dublin and its surrounding area, the population of which was mainly made of Old English merchants who were loyal to the crown.
In the period immediately after the Norman Settlement was constructed the barrier, known as the "Pale," separating the lands occupied by the settlers from those remaining in the hands of the Irish. This barrier consisted of a ditch, raised some ten or twelve feet from the ground, with a hedge of thorn on the outer side. It was constructed, not so much to keep out the Irish, as to form an obstacle in their way in their raids on the cattle of the settlers, and thus give time for a rescue. The Pale began at Dalkey, and followed a southwesterly direction towards Kilternan; then turning northwards passed Kilgobbin, where a castle still stands, and crossed the Parish of Taney to the south of that part of the lands of Balally now called Moreen, and thence in a westerly direction to Tallaght, and on to Naas in the County of Kildare. In the wall bounding Moreen is still to be seen a small watch-tower and the remains of a guard-house adjoining it. From this point a beacon-fire would raise the alarm as far as Tallaght, where an important castle stood. A portion of the Pale is still to be seen in Kildare between Clane and Clongowes Wood College at Sallins.
Within the confines of the Pale, the leading gentry and merchants lived lives not too different from those of their counterparts in England, save for the constant fear of attack from the Gaelic Irish.
Portions of the Pale ditch can still be seen in the Sandyford/Kilgobbin/Ballyogan areas of South Dublin. The best-preserved section can be visited and lies just south of the Ballyogan Road within the Ballyogan Recycling Park. It consists of pair of ditches on either side of a high flat-topped bank. The bank is 2 to 3 meters wide on the top and is approximately 2 meters above the bottom of the ditches. The entire length of this section is roughly 500 meters and the top of the bank is planted with hedgerow shrubs, indicating that the Pale ditch subsequently served as a field boundary.
Another section of the Pale ditch lies in the Clay Farm Ecopark, near the Ballyogan Road. This section is very different from the previous section, in that it does not consist of a double ditch and bank. Rather, the builders made use of an existing shallow escarpment, steepening the slope to create a 2 meter high barrier to movement from north to south. The purpose of this was probably to make it hard for Irish raiders to herd stolen cattle from the Pale to the Wicklow mountains to the south. That this feature was part of the Pale ditch was originally proposed by Rob Goodbody in the 1990s, and recently confirmed by archaeology during the building of the Clay Farm housing development.
Both the sections described above are part of a single linear earthwork, designed to connect Kilgobbin and Carrickmines castles, fortifications built by the Walsh Family during the medieval period to defend the southern marches of the Pale. Another, slightly less well-preserved section of the Pale ditch can be seen at Kilcross Crescent within the Kilcross housing estate near Sandyford village. This section consists of a bank approximately 200 metres long, although the associated ditches are no longer clearly visible.
The Kiltalown earthwork belongs to the late medieval tradition of protective enclosure that reaches its apogee in the attempted enclosure of the English Pale in 1494–5, and the identification of it as part of the Pale is a reasonable one, but it may equally have enclosed an area of medieval parkland.
The term continues to be used in contemporary Irish speech to refer to County Dublin and nearby counties, generally critically—for example, a government department may be criticised for concentrating its resources on the Pale.
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