People will not come to inhabit where there is no defence of law.' After six years of _discipline and improvement_ Sir Henry Sidney, in 1566, described the state of the four shires, the Irish inhabitants, and the English garrison, in the following terms:--'The _English Pale_ is overwhelmed with vagabonds--stealth and spoil daily carried out of it--the people miserable--not two gentlemen in the whole of it able to lend 20 l.

They have neither horse nor armour, nor apparel, nor victual.

The soldiers be so beggerlike as it would abhor a general to look on them; yet so insolent as to be intolerable to the people, so rooted in idleness as there is no hope by correction to amend them, yet so allied with the Irish, I dare not trust them in a forte, or in any dangerous service.' A sort of 'special correspondent' or 'commissioner,' as we should call him now, furnished to Cecil a detailed account of the social condition of the people, which of course he viewed with English eyes.

He found existing among them a general organisation wherever the Irish language was spoken--the remnants of a civilisation very ancient, but now fast tending to ruin.

Next to the chiefs were the priesthood, and after them came a kind of intellectual hierarchy, consisting of four classes of spiritual leaders and teachers, which were thus described.