presumably qualified to signify royal assent IS7 participates in the legislative 
act, but in neither case does this preclude the exercise of supervening royal 
prerogative. Whatever may have been the implications in England of the 
fourteenth-century legal theory that it is the King who makes the laws with 
the assent of peers and commons, 188 this involved for Ireland a right of personal 
action by the overlord exactly as was subsequently claimed and exercised 
by the sovereign in the American plantations. This comprehended in medieval 
times a power of avoidance, a fact which is demonstrated by the order of 
Edward 111 commanding the cancellation of the enrollment and record of 
certain imposts granted by William of Windsor's first Parliament, on the 
ground of alleged irregularities in the procurement. 189 
The succession of events which led to an eclipse of the principles by which 
the Irish dominion was governed need not here be examined. They are important 
to our discussion only in their results—the enjoyment of a season of 
autonomy and the open rejection of the dependency of Irish law. The latter 
was imbedded in an act of the Irish Parliament (1460) 19 ° which very explicitly 
renounced ancient feudal conceptions by laying claim to a corporate 
existence, limited only by an obedience to the "realm of England." This obedience 
was in turn qualified by a further claim to separateness with respect to 
laws and statutes except as specifically adopted, a declaration fortified by a 
provision designed to restrict the process of the Great Seal and substituting 
therefor the Irish seal, which alone could compel a man to answer an appeal. 
That the Irish Parliament was intent upon a restatement of the imperial relation 
may be inferred from the reference, by way of justification, to the separate 
legal systems of the Norman and Gascon duchies. 
The new dispensation was to be short-lived, for once the English civil wars 
came to an end, the first Tudor, although in other respects no friend of feudal 
institutions, set about to revive the incidents of his lordship over Ireland. The 
steps by which this was accomplished are well known. 191 We are concerned 
here with two of the acts of the Drogheda Parliament (1494-95) held by the 
187 Explicit powers with respect to the Parliament 
were apparently not incorporated in the 
viceroy's commission until the fifteenth century 
(cf. the commission to Ormond in Prynne, 
Animadversions on the Fourth Part of Coke's 
Institutes [1669], 412). They certainly were 
implied before that time. Some of the royal confirmations 
recite the assent or agreement of the 
viceroy (e.g., 1 Berry, op. cit., 278 [1316]; 280 
[1320], and cf. the recital in the Statute of 
Kilkenny [1366], ibid., 430). 
188 YB 22 Edw. 111, Hil., f. 3b. 
189 p r y nne) Animadversions, 303. The mandate 
requires an examination of the premises. This 
distinguishes the annulment from the singlehanded 
revocation of the English statutes enacted 
in 1340 (on which see 2 Stubbs, Constitutional 
History of England [4th ed.], 410-11). 
On the Windsor administration, see Clarke, 
Fourteenth Century Studies, 149. 
190 2 Berry, op. cit., 649, 662-65. 
191 Conway, Henry VU's Relations with Scotland 
and Ireland (1932), 42 et seq.