‘Into Ireland’, wrote Maitland of the age of Bracton, ‘Englishmen have carried their own law. A smaller England has been created across the Channel, with chancery, exchequer, “benches”, council, sheriff, coroners, all reproduced upon a diminished scale. Statutes and ordinances and the “register of original writs” were sent from England into Ireland: the king's English court claimed a supremacy over his Irish tribunals and multitudinous petitions from Ireland came before the English council at its parliaments.’ Into Ireland then, Englishmen carried their own view of the relationship between the Church and the civil power. This ‘smaller England’ knew, too, the stresses and strains to which the evolving principles and practices of the common law subjected that relationship. This book attempts to tell something of the story of how Crown, clergy and papacy conducted themselves towards each other in the English colony in Ireland, in the first two centuries or so of its history. In a word, it treats of what men of a later age than the medieval will call the problem of Church and State.

In part it is a story which closely parallels the experience of the Church in England of which, to an extent, it was an extension. But in another part, and that its most fundamental, it is very different from any English experience.