Kilkenny Bylaws

With the Kilkenny Statutes (Statute [s] of Kilkenny) of 1366, the English crown aimed to separate the English upper class from the population of the conquered or still to be conquered Ireland .

The 35 statutes were adopted at a meeting of the Irish Parliament in Kilkenny chaired by the son of King Edward III. enacted by England, Lionel, Duke of Clarence . The main aim was to separate the English way of life from the supposedly barbaric of the Irish people. Above all, one wanted to prevent the intimate mixing of the alleged master with the (expressly so-called) enemy people. By creating social spheres that were as unconnected as possible, the antagonism between the Gaelic-Irookeltic indigenous population on the one hand and the society of the originally Anglo-Norman conquerors on the other was to be cemented. In this way the English crown believed it was structurally securing its rule.

The prohibition of all kinds of unpopular forms of behavior - curious among other things is the ban on the Gaelic popular sport of hurling (Art. 6), which is considered pernicious, on the other hand, shows that the ideal of separating subjects and subjects in social reality had long been undermined by an opposing practice. The statutes thus reflect less the social and cultural reality in late medieval Ireland than the norm.

source

• Edmund Curtis, RB McDowell (Ed.): Irish Historical Documents. 1172-1922 . New York / London 1922, no.17.
• Online version in English with a link to the original in French, Les statuts de Kilkenny (1366). ( Memento from December 7, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
• Text in English

literature

• Geoffrey Joseph Hand: The forgotten statutes of Kilkenny. A brief survey. In: Irish Jurist. 1, 1966, pp. 299-312.
• Michael Maurer: A Little History of Ireland . Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-15-009695-2 .
• Michael Richter: Ireland in the Middle Ages. Culture and history . Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-17-007955-7 .