ABSTRACT
In 1537, “An Act for the English Order, Habit and Language” was published in Ireland which, even as it acknowledged cultural differences between English and Irish, attempted to erase them. The Act claimed that there was
As we shall show, the problems of hair, clothes and language were returned to again and again by English colonizers and commentators in Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But by the 1590s, the New English, as they came to be called, adopted a radically different perspective on cultural diversity. Their whole enterprise depended upon the denial that Ireland was “wholly together one body,” governed by English common law. While the New English, and particularly writers like Edmund Spenser, Bamabe Rich and Fynes Moryson, repeated the concerns of the 1537 Act, they did so to insist that there was no hope of a gradual assimilation of the Irish to English customs and manners. On the contrary, for them conquest, through military repression, starvation, dispossession and plantation, was the desired goal. And to justify the expense of such repression, as well as to justify its moral necessity, they insisted upon the absolute difference between English and Irish.
