The sixteenth century in Ireland was action-packed and dynamic. The transformations that occurred were so sweeping that the century, which opened with Gerald FitzGerald, the future ninth earl of Kildare and Lord Deputy, travelling to Court to marry Elizabeth Zouche, seems to close, on the eve of Kinsale, on a different world. In that time, Ireland had moved from being an almost forgotten ‘distant border province’ (Ellis, Tudor Ireland, p. 86), left to its own devices and those of its Old English and Gaelic magnates, to a colony in revolt at the centre of Elizabethan attention. In the interim, the country was the stage for a bewildering variety of policy changes; the cast was swelled by an influx of bureaucrats, aristocrats, adventurers, soldiers, settlers and proselytisers; and the nature of the military engagement shifted from marcher skirmishes to full-scale war with an international dimension. Caught up in all of this was language: as medium of negotiation, as subject of interdictions, as badge of identity, as index of civility, as symbol of otherness, as bearer of ideology, as words in the mouth of a preacher, as battlecry, as lines tumbling off the newly established printing presses, as – when O'Donnell, on a hosting in Sligo, slaughtered all males unable to speak Irish (O'Sullivan, Ireland under Elizabeth, p. 82) – death-warrant.