Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/50

 parts, the De Burgos in the west, for instance, and the FitzGeralds and Butlers in the south. The old State was broken by their forcible seizure of land; but then we find it automatically setting to work to mend the broken fabric, to restore the stateships, and to include the stranger within its ancient constitution. In that it was successful. The De Burgos and FitzGeralds became, as the English declared, more Irish than the Irish themselves. The former publicly repudiated their very names, and took Irish names, as Mac William Uachtar and Mac William Iachtar. They simply displaced, or depressed, the kingly households of earlier territories. The same was true of the FitzGeralds, though with them, as far as we can judge, there w r ere certain changes introduced, not into the stateships, but into the larger territories in which these were comprised. The chief of these changes seems to have been that the FitzGeralds held their kingships by right of primogeniture and not by election. Yet in the main the changes were not many or fundamental. Irish was spoken as the native language; Irish courts were kept, of brehons, poets and historians, exactly as the older Irish kingships had maintained them; and by force of marriage in a few generations the intermixture of the new blood was hardly to be discovered beside the permanence of the old. Only the Butlers in the south-east kept their connection with England. The others broke away from the common centre of the invader, and, became included in the elder national continuity.

Nevertheless the State was scattered. The state-