11. The Irish Heroine Who Wreaked Vengeance Upon the English
Sixteenth-century Irish heroine Grainne Ni Mhaille (circa 1530 – circa 1603) wreaked vengeance upon the English occupiers of her homeland. She fought them on land, and preyed upon their shipping at sea. Her English foes vilified her as “a woman who hath imprudently passed the part of womanhood“, and she was mostly ignored by contemporary chroniclers. Yet, her memory has lived on in native folklore, and nationalists would later lionize her as an icon of the Irish fight for freedom and struggle against foreign domination.
There were two Irelands in the sixteenth century, with two distinct cultures. There was Dublin and its surrounding counties, which constituted an enclave known as the English Pale of Settlement or just the Pale. Its English and Anglicized residents were ever fearful of the hinterland comprising the rest of Ireland. That rest of Ireland, which came to be known as and gave rise to the term “Beyond the Pale”, was the land of the native Irish and the Gaelicized Old English. They were viewed by those in the English Pale as uncivilized and wild, given to raid and strife and interminable violence.