Where Does the Phrase ‘Beyond the Pale’ Come From?

Towards the end of Jane Eyre, our eponymous hero—having rebuffed her cousin St. John’s marriage proposal—lets us know that a touch of frost has settled on their relations as a result, and “he contrived to impress me momently with the conviction that I was put beyond the pale of his favour.”

Much like St. John, who eventually made a long journey to India without Jane, beyond the pale—which means “unacceptable”—has made its own long journey: not to India, but to idiom. It’s a trek involving wooden stakes, Catherine the Great, and, of course, Shakespeare. 

1. The Etymology of Pale
2. Historical Pales
3. Pale Goes Figurative
4. The Origins of Beyond the Pale

The Etymology of Pale

To chart the journey, we must first dust off our Latin dictionaries. Pale ultimately derives from the Latin word pālus, meaning “wooden stake.” (It also gives us the extant verb impale, and the noun palisade, or a fence made from pales.) The Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) first citation for pale in this sense dates back to the Wycliffite Bible—a 1382 translation from the Latin Vulgate into English—in which a passage from Ecclesiasticus describes someone camping near a house, “and in the walles of it pitcheth a pale.”

Within just a few years, pale left its post as a noun for a wooden stake and began to be used to describe a fence made of wooden stakes; around the 1450s, it came to mean “A district or territory within determined bounds,” per the OED.

Historical Pales

History is rife with these large boundaries. Following the Battle of Crécy in 1346, English monarchs ruled an area of northern France known as The Pale of Calais. For more than 200 years, this area became an important economic center for England—as well as a strategic outpost on the continent. In 1558, France unexpectedly reclaimed the area following a siege. The retaking of the Pale precipitated a terrible year for the ruling English Queen Mary I (a.k.a. Bloody Mary), who died that November.

In 1791, Catherine the Great’s Pale of Settlement kettled Jewish people into a designated living area within a corner of the Russian Empire, where they lived in impoverished conditions and were heavily restricted in how they could make a living. The Pale of Settlement lasted right up until World War I, when many parts of the area became an active warzone and Jews were forced to flee from the invading German army into interior Russia. The Pale was officially abolished after the February Revolution in 1917.

One of the most famous of these boundaries was the one in Ireland known simply as The Pale; it centered around Dublin and stretched from Bray in Wicklow to Dundalk in County Louth. In 1470—a century before the Tudor Conquest of Ireland got going in earnest—the Pale represented the last part of Ireland under English control. Inside its fortified ditches and ramparts, the Pale’s occupants lived separately from the Irish natives.

Pale Goes Figurative

Having first referred to an actual stake, and then gaining another sense as a word for a large boundary, pale still wasn’t done evolving: The word came to be used to delineate figurative rather than actual boundaries—or, as the OED puts it, “A realm or sphere of activity, influence, knowledge, etc.; a domain, a field.”

The first figurative use of pale comes from a 1483 translation of J. de Voragine’s Golden Legende. Rendering the Latin into English, W. Caxton uses pale to describe permissible conduct in the monasteries: “monkes wyth hym went for to dwelle in deserte / for to kepe more straytelye the professyon of theyr pale.”

Shakespeare also uses the figurative sense of pale in The Winter’s Tale when he writes about “the red blood raigns in ye winters pale.”

The earliest appearance of the phrase beyond the pale identified so far is a 1612 commentary on the Epistle to Titus. As explained by WordOrigins.org, the writer “connects Paul’s admonition in Titus 2:3 that women should not gossip and slander with his commanding women be silent in church from 1 Corinthians 14:33,” saying (in modern spelling), “And thus the Apostle by this precept backeth the former, the due observance of which would cut off much false accusing in such meetings; and in the neglect of it, it is impossible but that the tongue will be walking without his own hedge, and wandering beyond the pale of it.” Pale is clearly being used both metaphorically and literally as an enclosed area. But what enclosed area?

The Origins of Beyond the Pale

According to various sources, the origin tale of beyond the pale is an open and shut case. In Ireland, English colonizers barricaded themselves from what they believed to be an uncivilized native population. Lawlessness lay outside the pale; therefore, anything beyond that was unacceptable.

It’s a neat story, but almost certainly apocryphal. According to the OED, “the theory that the origin of the phrase relates to any of several specific regions, such as the area of Ireland formerly called the Pale … is not supported by the early historical evidence and is likely to be a later rationalization.” While there’s no definite answer to where the phrase actually comes from, the best guess is that it’s a reference to a generic bounded area (or even a metaphorical bounded area) like the hedge in 1612 rather than any particular historical Pale.

The OED’s earliest example of beyond the pale meaning “outside the limits of acceptable behaviour; unacceptable or improper” can be found in the daintily-titled book The Compleat History of the Lives, Robberies, Piracies, and Murders Committed by the Most Notorious Rogues, published in 1720. In it, we learn about Acteon’s roving eye being “beyond the Pale of Expedience.” From there, it grew in popularity, appearing in works like The Pickwick Papers (in which Charles Dickens has Mr. Pott say that Mr. Slurk is “a man who has placed himself beyond the pale of society”), Jane Eyre, and others.

When we hear the word pale today, we probably think of complexion first, maybe a bucket (pail) second, and fence later (if at all). But as long as there are people around to transgress, there will always be a handy way to tell them their behavior is unacceptable. Lose this from our language, however, and that truly will be beyond the pale.

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