A Game of Sorrows

To James

The wild or mere Irish have a generation of poets, or rather rhymers vulgarly called bards, who in their songs used to extol the most bloody, licentious men, and no others, and to allure the hearers, not to the love of religion and civil manners, but to outrages, robberies, living as outlaws, and contempt of the magistrates’ and the king’s laws … For the mere Irish, however … they nothing so much feared the Lord Deputy’s anger as the least song or ballad these rascals might make against them, the saying whereof to their reproach would more have daunted them than if a judge had doomed them to the gallows.

Fynes Moryson, hostile commentator on Ireland, 1617[1]