The Pale (Irish:An Pháil) orthe English Pale (An Pháil Shasanach orAn Ghalltacht) was the part of Ireland directly under the control of the English government in theLate Middle Ages. It had been reduced by the late 15th century to an area along the east coast stretching north fromDalkey, south ofDublin, to the garrison town ofDundalk.^[1] The inland boundary went toNaas andLeixlip around theEarldom of Kildare, towardsTrim and north towardsKells. In this district, manytownlands have English or Norman-French names, the latter associated with Anglo-Norman influence in England.

The wordpale, meaning a fence, is derived from the Latin wordpālus, meaning "stake", specifically a stake used to support a fence.^[2] A paling fence is made of pales ganged side by side, and the wordpalisade is derived from the same root. From this came the figurative meaning of "boundary". TheOxford English Dictionary is dubious about the popular notion that the phrasebeyond the pale, as something outside the boundary—i.e., uncivilised, derives from this specific Irish meaning.^[3] Also derived from the "boundary" concept was the idea of a pale as an area within which local laws were valid. The term was used not only for the Pale in Ireland but also for various other English overseas settlements, notablyEnglish Calais. The term was also used to refer to specific regions in other nations: the termPale of Settlement was applied to the area in the west ofImperial Russia where Jews were permitted to reside.^[4]

The Pale was a strip of land that stretched north from Dalkey in Dublin to Dundalk in Louth; it became the base of English rule in Ireland. TheNorman invasion of Ireland, beginning in 1169, created theLordship of Ireland and brought Ireland under the theoretical control of thePlantagenet Kings of England. From the 13th century onwards, theHiberno-Norman occupation in Ireland at first faltered, then waned. Across most of Ireland, theNormans increasingly assimilated into Irish culture after 1300. They made alliances with neighbouring autonomous Gaelic lords. In the long periods when there was no large royal army in Ireland, the Norman lords, like their Gaelic neighbours in the provinces, acted essentially as independent rulers in their own areas.

TheLordship controlled by the English king shrank accordingly, and as parts of its perimeter in countiesMeath andKildare were fenced or ditched, it became known as the Pale, deriving from theLatin wordpalus, a stake, or,synecdochically, a fence. Parts can still be seen west ofClane on the grounds of what is nowClongowes Wood College. The military power of the crown itself was greatly weakened by theHundred Years War (1337–1453), and theWars of the Roses (1455–85). TheParliament of Ireland was created, often sitting atDrogheda until theTudors 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 ofFingal.

In 1366, so that the English Crown could assert its authority over the settlers, a parliament was assembled inKilkenny and theStatute of Kilkenny was enacted. The statute decreed thatintermarriage between English settlers and Irish natives was forbidden. It also forbade the settlers from using theIrish language and adopting Irish modes of dress or other customs, as such practices were already common. The adoption of GaelicBrehon property law, in particular, undermined thefeudal 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, theIrish culture and 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".^[5] 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 bySir John Davies said that "whoso lives by west of theBarrow, lives west of the law."^[6] Theearls 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 the9th earl was reinstated in the 1530s. The brief revolt by his son"Silken Thomas" in 1534–35 served in the following decades to hasten theTudor conquest of Ireland, in which Dublin and the surviving Pale were used as the crown's main military base. A bookA Perambulation of Leinster, Meath, and Louth, of which consist the English Pale (1596) expressed contemporary usage.^[6]

The Pale was composed ofDublin and its surrounding area, the population of which was mainly made ofOld English merchants who were loyal to the crown.^[7]

The Pale boundary essentially consisted of afortified ditch and rampart built around parts of the medieval counties ofLouth,Meath,Dublin andKildare, leaving out half of Meath, most of Kildare, and southwest County Dublin. Border or garrison towns of the pale includedArdee,Siddan,Kells,Athboy,Trim,Kilcock,Clane,Naas,Harristown,Ballymore Eustace,Rathmore,Kilteel,Saggart,Tallaght andDalkey. The northern frontier of the Pale was marked by the De Verdon fortress ofCastle Roche, while the southern border lay slightly south of the present dayM50 motorway in Dublin, which crosses the site of what wasCarrickmines Castle. The following description is fromThe Parish of Taney: A History of Dundrum, near Dublin, and Its Neighbourhood (1895):^[8]

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 most well-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,^[9] and recently confirmed by archaeology during the building of the Clay Farm housing development.^[10] Both the sections described above are part of a single linear earthwork, designed to connectKilgobbin andCarrickmines 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 idea of the Pale was inseparable from the notion of a separate Anglo-Irish polity and culture. After the 17th century, and especially after theAnglican Reformation and thePlantation of Ulster, the "Old English" settlers were gradually assimilated into the Irish population. This was in large part due to their relative reluctance to give upRoman Catholicism (those who did not worship in theChurch of Ireland bore a variety of legal disabilities). They kepttheir version of the English language, though by that time many of them also spoke Irish. Several of these men were notable contributors to literature in Irish, includingPierce Ferriter andGeoffrey Keating.Christopher Nugent, 6th Baron Delvin, wrote an Irish-language primer forElizabeth I.

The term continues to be used in contemporary Irish speech to refer toCounty Dublin and nearby counties, generally critically—for example, a government department may be criticised for concentrating its resources on the Pale.^{[citation needed]}

• Greater Dublin Area
• History of Ireland
• Kingdom of Dublin
• Pale of Settlement in Imperial Russia

• Fanning, Bryan; Veale, Angela; O'Connor, Dawn (July 2001). Beyond the Pale: asylum-seeking children and social exclusion in Ireland (Report). Dublin: Irish Refugee Council.doi:10.13140/RG.2.1.4018.6404.hdl:10468/3714.
• Jefferies, Henry A. (January 2001). "The Early Tudor Reformations in the Irish Pale".The Journal of Ecclesiastical History.52 (1):34–62.doi:10.1017/S0022046900005911.S2CID 162810438.
• Power, Gerald (2007)."Migration and Identity in Early Modern Ireland: the New English and the Pale community". In Ellis, Steven G.; Klusáková, Lud'a (eds.).Imagining Frontiers, Contesting Identities. Edizioni Plus. pp. 243–262.ISBN 978-88-8492-466-7.

• A map of the Pale (late 15th century)
• Origin of the word 'pale'
• World Wide Words: Beyond the pale