English soldiers married Irish women and had big Irish families, and power grew ever more distant from the Crown. The sons of men named James and Edmund became Seamus and Eamann. The daughters of Mary and Evelyn became Maire and Eibhlin. To the horror of the royal court, these offspring of the invaders had become ipsis Hibernicis Hiberniores—more Irish than the Irish. They had gone native. The remedy was one of the most exhaustive campaigns to strip a people of their pride of place that any government had ever devised—the Statutes of Kilkenny. Starting in 1367, assimilation was outlawed.
