The organization of the medieval Anglo-Irish lordship was designed to reproduce as exactly as possible the administrative system of England, but it was not introduced suddenly or all at once. Of the eleven shires which were governed by royal sheriffs at the end of the thirteenth century, Dublin is the only one which can be traced back to the twelfth century, and even then does not appear in the records till the 1190’s. It seems probable that at this date no other shire yet existed in Ireland, though it is possible that Waterford, with Cork, was already organized as a shire.

Warfare in Ireland in the sixteenth century must be considered in close relation to the political conditions prevailing in the country during the century. In the beginning of the century the Pale, or that part of Ireland in which the writ of the king of England ran, comprised only half of the four counties lying near Dublin. Outside the Pale were ninety states or lordships ruled by lords, often called by the English captains, who, having despotic jurisdiction within the state, made peace or war as they chose. These lordships have, very appropriately, been called the autonomous states by a modern Irish historian. About one-third of these autonomous states were ruled by lords of English origin who had in language, manners, and customs become almost as Irish as the Irish themselves. Every state, even the smallest, had its armed forces.

The history of modern political parties is rich in examples of the law that a sharp change in the party line involves a tightening in party discipline, often including a structural re-organization. The Parnellite movement did not escape the operation of this law. The Kilmainham treaty, which marked the transmutation of Parnellism from a quasi-revolutionary movement into a completely constitutional one, could not have been implemented without a drastic subordination of the various branches of the movement to central control, i.e. the control of the parliamentary party itself. As the party had been reduced by secessions until it contained, for all practical purposes, no opponents of Parnell, this meant that the whole great movement of the ‘New Departure’, or what was left of it, was now to be steered, by the little group of Parnell’s lieutenants, out of land-agitation into the more or less peaceful ways of electioneering. It was not immediately necessary to tighten the internal organization of the party itself, partly because of the secessions and partly because its make-up was such that it was inclined to welcome rather than oppose shifts to the right. What was needed was to discipline the ‘peripheral organizations’, as they would now be called, one or two of which had in the past not merely acted independently of the parliamentarians but had exercised some control over them. Before going further with the description of how the party machine was perfected in the years following the Kilmainham treaty, it might be well, for the sake of clarity, to list these organizations and indicate briefly their relation to the parliamentary party in the immediate pre-Kilmainham era.