especially of late years, took little part in it.[180] I turn from the administration of local rural affairs in Ireland to that of its chief cities and its towns. The Irish towns, conquered and settled by the Danes, had, perhaps, a kind of municipal government; the Plantagenet kings conferred municipal rights as freely in Ireland as they did in England. Thus Dublin received a charter from John, modelled on that of his 'liegemen of Bristol;' Limerick, Waterford, Kilkenny, and several other towns were incorporated and given powers of self-government at different periods of the Middle Ages. But the municipal life and the municipal spirit which grew up and gained strength in the thriving towns of England, and secured for them a large measure of local liberty, had hardly any existence in a land like Ireland, distracted by feudal and tribal anarchy; the corporate cities and towns of Ireland fell into the hands of great Anglo-Norman nobles and Celtic chiefs, and seem to have all but lost their local franchises. During the long agony of the sixteenth century, when Ireland was devastated by a horrible strife of race and faith, these privileges were still further effaced; at the death of Elizabeth the Irish municipal centres, with the exception of the capital, were mere names and shadows. A great change took place when the subjugated land passed under the domination of the first Stuarts. English law was now extended over the whole of Ireland; a colonial caste of settlers was becoming lords of the soil; the Government was conducted by the men at the Castle, ruling through a Parliament largely composed of the new settlers. James I. created forty-six Irish boroughs with a stroke of the pen, and gave them a representation in the Parliament and municipal rights; but these, for the most part, were mere villages; they obtained their large privileges solely in order to support 'the English interest,' as it was called, in the Irish House of Commons. This system was continued by the later Stuarts; besides Dublin and the larger towns of Ireland, there were about a hundred of these petty municipalities and parliamentary boroughs in the eighteenth century. These places, however, could have no municipal freedom, and were wholly devoid of municipal feeling; they became nearly all the mere appanages of the neighbouring leading families; and, with hardly an exception, they were extreme types of the Protestant ascendency which prevailed everywhere. Something of the same kind was witnessed in England, under the aristocratic rule of that age, but there was the difference between a sorry caricature and a picture; the great cities and the better towns of England still retained an ample measure of municipal liberty, and, especially, did not lose the municipal spirit; the exact contrary was the case in Ireland.