Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/297

 Folklore and History in Ireland. 287

corroborate, other encroaching strangers ere long took their place. Apart from the intermixture- of Danish, Norman, and English immigrants, the Plantation — or rather plantations— of Ulster were not the only ofihcial settlements of folk of alien blood in the land. King's County and Queen's County were " planted " among others; it is said that Cromwellian soldiers settled in Tipperary, which has been given as the explanation of the fine physique of Tipperary men, so different from the small dark type found in Longford for instance ; German Palatines were brought over at the commencement of the eighteenth century to Wexford, Limerick, and Kerry ; there was a considerable influx of French Huguenots after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Tradition has it that the glossy black hair seen in the south and the west are the heritage be- queathed to their descendants by survivors of the Spanish Armada. Either more survived than history wots of, or the survivors were unduly prolific. Actually Spanish blood must have been more frequently introduced through trade connections than by accident of war.

The Anglo-Norman invaders brought with them their own Feudal System, which, diametrically opposed as it was to the indigenous system, might have done for Ireland what Roman methods did for England, had the whole island been brought into subjection under it. This was not done. The Norman adventurers who settled in Ireland, removed from central constraint became, notoriously, " more Irish than the Irish," and succeeding efforts to superimpose English methods, laws, customs, and organi- sation were a continual seesaw between suppression and concession, the one raising hatred, the other contempt — a dangerous combination. The conditions that made for an absence of cohesion among the Irish themselves in a measure operated to hinder amalgamation of native and foreign elements in the population. The latter remained distinct or were submerged. And when to

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