ABSTRACT
The early Tudor strategy of state formation gradually assimilated outlying territories through the imposition of English administrative structures and common law, by building towns and promoting 'civility'. Initially Ireland was seen as a backward borderland with most of its inhabitants, the native Irishman, held back by environmental influences like the pastoralism that supposedly encouraged footloose idleness and thieving. 1 This relatively benign image gave way to perceptions of the Gael as inherently barbarous rather than circumstantially backward. A facile characterisation of civil and barbarous drew on classical models of barbarism, on Atlanticist or colonial analogues and, above all, on the wonder stories of the Topographia Hiberniae and Expugnatio Hibernica written by the twelfth-century cleric Giraldus Cambrensis. 2 'Plantation' epitomised the requisite violent and radical response to irreformability. The first plantations in this sense date from 1570-73 and include Sir Thomas Smith's plantation in the Ards peninsula and the Earl of Essex's effort around Carrickfergus.
