History/identity:

John Davies is a poet and lawyer during the reigns of Elizabeth and James who, like Spenser, lived for a significant period of time in Ireland; he is appointed Solicitor General 1603 and then Attorney General in 1606 in Ireland, which raises some questions about the connections between his legal rhetoric in A Discoverie and his role as a major legal official in Ireland; Hans Pawlisch notes that Davies, in a 1610 petition for another appointment, lists achievements in administrative reform that he also calls for in A Discoverie, such as getting Irish lords to assimilate/submit to the English monarchy and directing revenues in Ireland back to the crown. So it seems that he is also trying to legally enact in his present moment the policies he claims other monarchs, lords, and Anglo-Irish needed to make in Ireland in the past (and that, he claims, King James has made)

Overall summary:

The text itself tells us a lot about its intentions in its title: A Discoverie of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued, nor brought under obedience of the crowne of England, until the beginning of his majesties happie raigne (published in 1612). I’d argue that Davie’s Discoverie could be categorized, in keeping with Braden McCormack’s piece on Law and Literature, as a “retrospective hypothesis,” in that it tries to make a case for concrete causes–historical and legal precedents–that kept England, from Henry II until King James, a long span of years, from entirely “subduing” Ireland.¹ It is dedicated to King James, whom he praises for finally bringing Ireland under the control of the crown, and on a wider scale he argues that a major reason why the Irish were NOT subdued was a lack of central English authority–the presence of kings and “great personages” on a regular and persistent basis in Ireland. Thus, his claim for why Ireland was not subdued is two fold 1) “the faint prosecution of the war” and 2) “the looseness of civil government” (3). In other words that English monarchs did not “perfect” their conquest of all of Ireland, instead letting several lords act autonomously while the kings themselves mostly focused their attention on affairs at home and at other places abroad; more to the point, though, he locates the main hindrance in the failure to establish English common law throughout Ireland, and criticizes the exclusion of the Irish themselves from what he considers the civilizing benefits of the law While he argues both for the need for the Sword and for the Law, his emphasis is overwhelmingly on the Law.

Structure: He covers the two defects in order, running chronologically through the reign of each monarch.

1. Faintness of war
2. Looseness of civil government –not communicating laws to Irish, overlarge land grants to the English, not making plantations of the forests as well as the plains
3. What kings and deputies DID do to bring civil policies to Ireland
4. How Elizabeth and mostly James succeeded in finally subduing Ireland.

Time period and tone compared to Spenser:

In considering Davies’ position and tone, it’s important to consider when he is writing: this work is written in 1612, after Davies has been in Ireland for 9 years; he arrived in Ireland in 1603, a few months after Lord Deputy Mountjoy accepted the surrender of Hugh O’Neill and the Nine Years War/Tyrone’s rebellion ended; the prominent rebels, at that point, surrendered their titles and armies and regained their land in return for loyalty to the king. Davies, then, comes into Ireland on the heels of major English victory. Spenser, in comparison, is writing in the 1590s, in the thick of battles between new English settlers, the Anglo-Irish, and the Gaelic Irish; as Edwards writes, Spenser himself is embroiled in struggles with native Irish as a settler on the Munster plantation, during a period where Queen Elizabeth was retreating from the use of martial law as too tyrannical and bloody. Spenser is in the midst of war and carries with him his embattled consciousness–he looks to the sword, whereas Davies, detached from these struggles, believes more firmly in the law.

Spenser and Davies start from a common claim: a lack of central authority in Ireland. Spenser attributes the civilization of the English, and their adherence to the law, to “the continuall presence of their king; whose onely person is oftentimes in stead of an army, to contain the unrulie people from a thousand evill occasions, which this wretched kingdom, for want thereof, is daily carried into.” (View 21). From there, they diverge: to Spenser, if the Irish were reformable at all it is too late: the only way to make the Irish English is battle and martial law–to annihilate those who are unflexibly rebellious–which, as Edwards demonstrates, necessarily means common law has to be pushed to the side. Spenser argues in a View that the law does not fit the Irish people. But for Davies, the only way to make the Irish English is through law: while the sword provides the path to establish law, it’s the law that actually metamorphizes people into good or bad citizens. A great defect of the kingdom, he claims, is that the English laws were not communicated to the Irish, and nor were they allowed to participate in English practices like primogeniture or be judged by magistrates under the common law; this, he says, pushes them to continue with brehon law and tanistry. While Spenser, as David Edwards writes, pushes for martial law over common law–for provost marshals with a blank check for violence rather than justices and sheriffs– and looks askance at Lord Deputy Perrot for not ordering martial commissions, Davies looks back at the deputyship of Perrot and criticizes him for not sending sheriffs and justices of the assize to newly formed shires. He details moments where Irish lords claim their desire for law: drawing on his sources, he notes Irish lords who petitioned King Edward III, individuals asking for charters of denization to make them English subjects, and the general submission to the king by Irish lords. He asks a pretty good question: “for as long as they were out of the protection of the law, so as every englishman might oppress, spoyle, and kill them without controlment, how was it possible they should be other than outlaws and enemies to the crown of England?” (96). Why, in other words, would native Irish inhabitants be keen on coming under the rule of those who tried to dispossess and oppress them? Davies’ claim is the opposite of Spenser’s claim, that the Irish are far too entrenched in Brehon law, and too long unbroken to English law, to accept it.

Davies claims, multiple times, that the English err in accepting the promise of submission without first “breaking” the Irish through war and actually “perfecting” their conquest by taking over all of Ireland. He gives the numbers of soldiers and archers paid to accompany kings and lords who enter Ireland in order to subdue it, until he comes to the conclusion on p. 74 that the reason why all of Ireland is not conquered militarily is that armies are insufficient, recalled too soon if they are sufficient, ill paid and ill governed. But while he criticizes the lack of resources put to the military conquest of Ireland, he remains fuzzier on the details and on the human cost: talking of the Earle of Sussex, he writes, “who having thoroughly broken and subdued the two most powerful and rebellious Irish septs in leinster, namely the Moors and O’Connors…[reduced] those countries into two several counties.” The focus in this passage is that the Earle of Sussex can rezone the land to make it more amenable to a central power, rather than the details of how these septs are “broken” and “Subdued” (248). Indeed, he refers to Lord Deputy Leonard Gray’s battles against Irish lords as a preparation: “this preparation being made, he first propounded and past in Parliament these laws….” From Davies perspective, in fact, now that Ireland has been conquered, the military men remain in order to “give strength and countenance to the civil magistrate”  (259). For his part, Spenser, in discussing his program for annihilating the Irish, is detailed–infamously so, in his description of famine.

For Davies, the “prime impediment” to law being properly implemented are the English “blooded” dwellers of Ireland, who exclude the Irish from the law by considering them “alien” (146), who have too much control over large swathes of land–he implies that they are mini-kings–and who have too much liberty to decide when and where the common law will be implemented. He often refers to these lords as “adventurers” and “private men,” lords who are autonomous from the monarch they technically serve under. In what, read against Spenser, could be a critique against arguments that the Irish are necessarily and utterly different, he claims that “assuredly by these grants of whole provinces and pettie kingdomes, those few English lords pretended to be proprietors of all the land, so as there was no possibility of settling the natives in their possessions, and by consequence the conquest becomes impossible without the utter extirpation of all the irish” (144). In other words, to consider the annihilation of the Irish natives means that something has gone wrong already: the English lords have gathered too much power to themselves, and taken up space that also belongs to the Irish who, if given laws, could become obedient English subjects.

A few points in the text to consider:

• p. 166: He actually attributes the main impediment to conquest to the English, and their taking up of Irish customs. But he makes it clear he doesn’t see English and Irish law codes as “equal”–to him, the Irish have custom rather than law, and he claims that based on the “nature” of Irish customs, the people who partake in them “must of necessitie bee Rebelles to all good government”

• p. 170: While he still calls the Irish barbarous, he does not impute this barbarism to an innate, irrevocable savageness; rather, it is circumstances, again their laws, that make them so: “these two Irish customs (tanistry and fines for major crimes) made all their possessions uncertain, being shuffled and changed and removed so often from one to another by new elections and partitions, which uncertainty of estates hath been the true cause of such desolation and barbarism in this land” He reasons out that, without having a guarantee that land and property would be passed down to a family member, they have no reason to invest in improving their land, estate, or property.

• Davies goes so far as to attribute cultural qualities found in other ethnographic texts–a propensity for craftiness, gossip, and even a “whyning tune” in Irish speech, all of which he insists arise from being oppressed and enslaved on their own lands by exactions like coigne and livery (the accent, he presumes, also comes from suffering oppression) (177). This goes the other way too, though, Davies emphasizes: the Statutes of Kilkenny are passed, he says, after the Duke of Clarence finds English settlers have rejected English law. Submitting themselves to and intermarrying the Irish, Davies claims,  they become “meer Irish in their language, Names, apparrell, and all their manner of living” (32). While Davies mostly avoids talking about these customs at length, there seems to be an implied knowledge, on the readers part, of what they are or might be: and the point is that the origin of these “degenerate” customs is a degeneration from civil law and government.

• p. 183: law metamorphizes: “”These were the Irish customes which the english colonies did embrace and use, after they had rejected the civill and honorable laws and customes of england, whereby they become degenerate and metamorphized like Nabuchanezzar.” Jean Feerick in “Spenser Race and Ireland,” notes that in recent uses of the word degenerate, it is a stable descriptor of a group already, at origin, “contaminated,” but that early modern use of the word implies it was an active process, where one could become degenerate: “in early modern usages it described transformations experienced by colonizers themselves” (86).²  Where English laws can civilize, Irish laws can degenerate: here is the same movement in other texts about the Irish where the English are civilizing and Irish are degenerating, but this time it comes through the medium of the laws. In the end, it’s the same fear of contamination underlying Davies call to legal precedent: the fear that the English “which hoped to make a perfect conquest of the Irish, were by theme perfectly and absolutely conquered” (166) In a way he still sees the Irish as unable to help themselves: he claims that, without their customes being “abolished by the laws of England,” the Irish countries would continue “to be found wast and desolat” till the world’s end (172).

• p. 128-129: In fact, like Spenser, he claims that English themselves had to go through a civilizing process: he claims that the Roman general in Britain, Julius Agricola, turned the British away from being “rude and dispersed” by taking the time to “[give] them helpes in common, to build temples, houses, and places of publique resort. The noblemens sonns he took and instructed in the liberal science, preferring the wits of the Brittains before the students of France, as being now curious to attaine the eloquence of the Romaine language, whereas they lately had rejected that speech. After that, the roman attire grew to be in account, and the gowne to be in use among them, and so little by little they proceeded to curiosity and delicasies in buildings and furniture of household, in baths and exquisit banquets, and so being come to the height of civility, they were thereby brought to an absolute subjection.” In other words, civility itself causes subjection, or makes subjects willing to submit themselves absolutely to a civil, social, and cultural order. So within his logic, his constant resort to sources and legal and historical precedents, there’s a sort of sneaky, subversive argument for using law to utterly transform and erase a culture–to bring it totally in subjection to another one.³

(Davies’ Discoverie can be found on EEBO, but it is also available for free via Google books here).

1 See Bradin McCormack, “Law and Literature in Early Modern Studies,” Modern Philology, 101.1 (August 2003): pp. 79-91 .   

^{2 Jean Feerick, “Spenser, Race, and Ireland,” English Literary Renaissance, 32.2 (2002): pp. 85-117}

^{3In the early modern period, “subjection” had a less negative valence than it currently does, and here it means to be subject to another power or monarch. However, I believe the claim holds true, if we follow Davies’ logic: if to be subject to a realm and its laws transforms cultures and customs, then to be absolutely subject would be to risk an erasure of that culture and its customs.}