Pale

Abstract: The word "pale" is attested as a common noun in English from the fourteenth century onward but took on more specific meaning to describe fortified regions of English-held France and Ireland in the later fifteenth century. From the outset, the "Pale" in Ireland was identified as "English," and applied to the community of a geographically bounded area, as well the land itself. The term had its greatest political and social resonance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and became increasingly historical thereafter, though it was preserved and disseminated in the vernacular though metaphorical use as in the phrase "beyond the pale," which likely has its origins in sixteenth- or early-seventeenth-century Ireland.