This book offers an extended reinterpretation of English policy in Ireland over the sixteenth century. It seeks to show that the major conflicts between Tudor governors and native lords which characterised the period were not the result of a deliberate Tudor strategy of confrontation as conventional interpretations have assumed, but argues that they arose from a failed experiment in legal reform and cultural assimilation which had been applied with remarkable success elsewhere in the Tudor dominions.

The book seeks to explain the course of this exceptional failure, and it identifies a distinct administrative style which evolved in Irish government during the middle of the century under a complex set of pressures acting on the would-be reformers both in Ireland and at the Tudor court.

It argues that it was this distinctive, highly centralised and intensely activist mode of government that inadvertently undermined the aims of reform policy and provoked the alienation and hostility that was precisely the opposite result to that which was originally intended.