A series of great Confiscations put through an enslaved Pale parliament made smooth the way of conquest. An Act of 1536 for the attainder of the earl of Kildare confiscated his estates to the king, that is, the main part of Leinster. In 1570 the bulk of Ulster, as territory of the "traitor" Shane O'Neill, was declared forfeited in the same way. And in 1586 the chief part of Munster, the lordship of the "traitor" earl of Desmond. Another Act of 1536 forfeited to the crown all ancient claims of English lords to lands which had been granted to them, and afterwards recovered by the original Irish owners. Another in 1537 vested in the king all the lands of the dissolved monasteries. By these various titles given to the crown, it was hard for any acres to slip through unawares, English or Irish. An Act of 1569 moreover reduced all Ireland to shire land; in other words, all Irish chiefs who had made indentures with the crown were deprived of all the benefits which were included in such indentures, and the brehon or Irish law, with all its protection to the poor, was abolished. These laws and confiscations gave to the new sovereigns of the Irish the particular advantage that if their subjects should resist the taking of the land, they were legally "rebels," and as such outside the laws of war. It was this new fiction of law that gave the Tudor wars their unsurpassed horror. Thus began what Bacon called the "wild chase on the wild Irishmen." The forfeiture of land of the tribe for the crime of a chief was inconceivable in Irish law; the claim of the commonalty to unalterable possession of their soil was deeply engraven in the hearts of the people, who stood together to hold their land, believing justice and law to be on their side, and the right of near two thousand years of ordered possession. At a prodigious price, at inconceivable cost of human woe, the purging of the soil from the Irish race was begun. Such mitigations as the horrors of war allow were forbidden to these "rebels" by legal fiction. Torturers and hangmen went out with the soldiers. There was no protection for any soul; the old, the sick, infants, women, scholars; any one of them might be a landholder, or a carrier on of the tradition of the tribal owners, and was in any case a rebel appointed to death. No quarter was allowed, no faith kept, and no truce given. Chiefs were made to "draw and carry," to abase them before the tribes. Poets and historians were slaughtered and their books and genealogies burned, so that no man "might know his own grandfather" and all Irishmen be confounded in the same ignorance and abasement, all glories gone, and all rights lost. The great object of the government was to destroy the whole tradition, wipe out the Gaelic memories, and begin a new English life.