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This book describes a period which is a watershed in Irish history. In some ways, it marks the end of the middle ages and the beginning of the modern state in Ireland. But echoes of the conflicting struggles between royal power, ecclesiastical power, feudal individualism and Gaelic regional individualism were still to be heard in the Tudor period. Professor Edward's book is, in effect, a study of the growth of Engluish colonialism in Ireland in the sixteenth century. It traces the continuity of policy, if not of methods of executing policy, of the successive Tudor monarchs. The object of their irish policy was to subjugagte the hiterhto troublesome lordship of Ireland, administratively and , starting in the reign of Henvy VIII, religiously. As the colonial policy gained momentum under Edward VI, a recurrent theme was plantation and this was just as forcefully pursued by his sisters Mary and Elizabeth and James I. The Plantation of Ulster in 1608 set the seal of the destruction of Hiberno-Norman civilisation, a civilisation destroyed as much from without as within. -- Book jacket.