The Statute of Kilkenny (1366): Legislation and the State

Abstract

This article offers a re‐evaluation of the notorious Statute of Kilkenny by placing it within a broader context of English state development in the fourteenth century. It argues that the Statute needs to be understood as part of a wider political and legislative programme shaped by military expansionism and the upheaval of the Black Death. Although racially motivated, at least in part, the Statute should not be seen as attempting to engineer a form of apartheid in Anglo‐Ireland. Rather it was representative of a broader governing culture and compares closely with legislation enforced not only in the other Plantagenet dominions but also in England itself.

Racialization and its paradigms: From Ireland to North America

“…New laws against such mixing were enacted; and the 1367 Statutes of Kilkenny made it punishable for English persons to trade with the Irish, intermarry with them, wear Irish dress or hairstyles, speak the Irish language, and they even 'outlawed Irish games, poetry, and music, apparently under the assumption that these cultural features were too seductive for young Englishmen to resist. These prohibitions and others stayed in effect until the seventeenth century' (Smedley, 2007: 55-56), although they ultimately failed after 200 years of intermixing and assimilation (Green, 2014).…”