The misfortune for Ireland was that in the earlier stages of its development it borrowed so little, and retained so much of its primitive tribal decentralisation. England would have been no less unfortunate had William the Conqueror only succeeded in establishing a Norman Pale on this side of the English Channel, and had England retained its connexion with Normandy. As it was, the Normans and Angevins cured us of our primitive tribalism, and then left England to work out its own salvation. The severance of Normandy from England converted the descendants of William’s companions from a Norman garrison into an English aristocracy, while the successors of Strongbow’s followers were maintained by the English connexion as an alien garrison quartered in the barracks of a dwindling Irish Pale. At first, indeed, they had spread a thin veneer of Anglo-Norman conquest over the greater part of Ireland; but baronial feuds only added to the distraction of native septs; and when Edward I.’s premature imperialism provoked a general Celtic reaction under Robert Bruce in Scotland and Edward Bruce in Ireland, Anglo-Norman rule was doomed. The conquerors either threw in their lot with the natives and became more Irish than the Irish, or withdrew within the Pale and maintained a troubled existence by sowing division throughout the rest of the realm. Hence the Irish were always the enemies, seldom the subjects of the English Crown; and outside the Pale there was no English government of Ireland during the middle ages. Constitutional relations only existed between England and the Pale; relations with Ireland outside the Pale were in that state of nature, in which, says Hobbes, the life of man is “nasty, short, brutish, and mean.” The Government had not the means to govern; it felt and it acknowledged no obligations of duty or humanity towards its foes outside the Pale.