Beyond the pale

"Pale" here means a fence made of wooden stakes (from the Latin palus, a stake), the same root as "impale." "The Pale" was used as a name for several real English-controlled territories with a boundary fence or ditch, most famously the area around Dublin under English rule in the late medieval and Tudor periods. To be "beyond the pale" meant being outside that zone of English law and control, and to the English who coined the phrase, outside civilisation as they saw it. Historians debate exactly which "Pale" (Ireland, or the English-held Pale of Calais) the idiom first referred to.