The government’s incursion into the midlands lordships of the O’Connors and O’Mores in 1546 is often identified as the root of the Tudor conquest of Ireland. Conversely, the years from 1535 to 1546 have been depicted as a period wherein a conciliatory approach to Gaelic Ireland was favoured. This paper argues that the origins of the Tudor conquest lie in the 1530s following the Kildare Rebellion. At this time a majority of senior officials in Ireland urged the regional conquest of the lordships of the O’Byrnes, O’Tooles and MacMurrough Kavanaghs in Wicklow and Carlow. This strategy was not adopted as Henry VIII refused to finance such a costly endeavour. Consequently a cheap political alternative now known as ‘surrender and regrant’ was briefly adopted in the early 1540s. However in 1546 the officials who favoured regional intervention in Leinster succeeded in initiating an incursion into the midlands. In light of the links between the campaign for the reduction of south Leinster in the 1530s and the incursion into the midlands in 1546, this paper argues that the origins of the Tudor conquest of Ireland can be traced to the campaign for the reduction of south Leinster in the mid-1530s.

Sir Piers Crosby, knight and baronet, lived for fifty-six years, but it is not perhaps too much to say that only a single day in that life has brought him to historical notice. That day was 28 November 1634. On the previous afternoon, Lord Deputy Wentworth had informed a joint meeting of the two houses of the Irish parliament that his government was not prepared to honour the promise which King Charles I had given to landed proprietors in Ireland six years earlier and would not permit the passage of acts relinquishing historic royal claims to Irish land. When the commons met on 28 November, a majority of the members vented their anger and disappointment by defeating an entirely uncontroversial government bill. Prominent among that majority, their ringleader if Wentworth is to be believed, was a renegade privy councillor, Sir Piers Crosby. That Wentworth’s account of what happened was seriously misleading is well established, and I have examined it elsewhere as an illustration of the proposition that one of Wentworth’s major achievements was to impose his version of the events of his deputyship upon generations of historians, approving and disapproving alike. His influence similarly colours historical impressions of the people with whom he dealt, and the purpose of this paper is to suggest the interpretative difficulties to which that may give rise by reconstructing the shape of the career of one individual who suffered the dual misfortune of crossing Wentworth’s path and being remembered only by what Wentworth wrote of him.

For the purpose of the extensive transfer of land to which the commonwealth government was committed, Benjamin Worsley, shortly after the date of his appointment in 1652 as surveyor general in Ireland, began to make a rough estimate of the land available. The slowness and inaccuracy of this survey caused a clamour among the soldiers and the adventurers. Large arrears of pay were due to the former, while many of the latter had, as early as 1642, advanced considerable sums of money for the purposes of the war in Ireland. Both classes wanted their estates with as little delay as possible. William Petty, then recently appointed as physician general to the forces in Ireland, became the severest critic of Worsley's proceedings. The upshot of the agitation was that the plan of survey was modified and Petty appointed on 11 December 1654 to map the forfeited lands set apart for the soldiers in 22 counties.

At first glance the low yield of books produced by the Dublin printing presses for circulation in early Stuart Ireland could lead to two hasty conclusions: first, that Irish society was unreceptive towards reading; and second, that the printing presses had to contend with a very small (literate) target audience. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. In recent years Raymond Gillespie has done much to dispel these suppositions. His appraisal of English port books, printing press accounts from the continent and library borrowing lists plainly demonstrates the appetite of an interested reading public in Ireland. The value of analysing book loaning lists was further underlined by William O'Sullivan when he partially revealed the borrowing records belonging to the historian and antiquarian, Sir James Ware. In so doing, he drew attention to the potential of a deeper exploration of Irish cultural and intellectual life.

By all accounts Michael O’Brien, that fine scholar and most generous and unassuming of men, was not happy about his Corpus genealogiarum Hiberniae, vol. i. He had it in hand for years and spent an incalculable mount of meticulous labour on it, but only near the end of his life, with great reluctance, did he consent to its publication. The proofs lacked what he considered final correction, and he feared leaving a legacy of avoidable error. Of course what he did leave was an instrument of scholarship, the value and uses of which other men will be decades in proving out. To our gratitude for his learning and labours we should therefore add an almost equal gratitude to those friends who insisted that he publish despite the probability that residual error might still amount to a fraction of one per cent. Our thanks may indeed be the greater since we learn from the introduction that this volume was intended as the first ‘of a series to contain all important Irish pedigrees and genealogical material from the earliest literary period down to c. 1500 A.D.’. If it seems unlikely now that we shall see vol. ii or any of the others, we might so easily not have had even vol. i.

The second World War was to find Germany and Italy as allies in a conflict in which their initial opponents were Britain, France and Poland. Italy did not immediately enter the war, but by the terms of the ‘pact of steel’ of 22 May 1939 she was to become a belligerent. The war broke out over the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. The circumstances under which it arose were peculiar in one particular point, namely in that Great Britain entered the conflict directly and immediately as an ally of a power in eastern Europe. She had entered the wars of 1914 and of 1793 in a secondary manner—as an ally of powers already at war and over commitments which related primarily to western and central Europe. It was novel therefore that she should have become involved directly in a conflict relating to eastern Europe.

If one had tried to predict, in 1919, the circumstances under which Britain would fight another war with Germany, few would have hazarded the opinion that she would choose the crossing of the Polish frontier as a casus belli. In addition, if one had, in 1938, tried also to predict Britain’s ally in an eventual conflict, Poland would have come towards the end of the list. Since 1934, Poland had generally been regarded as a power which was endeavouring to keep out of conflicts between Germany and the western powers—at least in the early stages of such a war. The relations between Berlin and Warsaw were, as from their agreement of 26 January 1934, surprisingly cautious; and the personal relations between leading Germans and Poles reflected—or so it appeared—the existence of such friendly relations. However, within a very short period after the Munich agreement of 30 September 1938, Britain was to become deeply involved in the defence of a frontier which British public opinion had previously regarded as the most open to criticism and revision of all the arrangements concluded at Versailles.

The purpose of this note is to identify the place-name Telach Cail as Castletown Delvin, County Westmeath, and to demonstrate the continued use of the site from the pre-Norman into the post-Norman period. While archaeologists have identified a number of earthwork sites which had a continuous use from the pre-Norman into the post-Norman period, documentary sources may also provide valuable evidence. A combination of near-contemporary pre-Norman and Anglo-Norman documentary evidence indicates that the pre-Norman royal site of Telach Cail in Delbna was chosen for the location of an Anglo-Norman motte.

When the Irish rebellion broke out in October 1641, Charles I was in Scotland, where, closely watched by agents of his dissident English parliament, he was attempting, by a policy of tardy retreats and unwonted largesse, to make of the Scottish kirk a pillar of the throne, and to transform wily old enemies like Argyle, Hamilton and Leslie into trusty retainers. Accordingly, when the Scottish estates—then in close liason with Westminster—suggested that the English parliament be entrusted with the management of the Irish war, Charles quickly agreed and sent a message to that effect to London.

In the house of commons, on November 1, the radicals, aware that Ireland formed a common focus of interest for the Scots, the London merchants and many of their supporters in the house, received the news of the rising with ‘smooth brows’. The well-known London interest in Ulster had long been shared by the Scots who had, indeed, attempted to supplant the Londoners in 1638. Hamilton himself appears to have fancied himself as Strafford’s successor.

Daniel O’Connell, asked when appearing before a select committee of the House of Commons on 1 March 1825 whether there had been many Catholics among the United Irishmen, replied that there were scarcely any among the leading United Irishmen. The leading United Irishmen were almost all Presbyterians or Dissenters. In the north the lower classes of United Irishmen were at first almost exclusively Dissenters. It spread then among the Roman Catholics and as it spread into the southern counties and of course, as it took in the population, it increased in its numbers of Roman Catholics. In the county of Wexford, where the greatest part of the rebellion raged, there were no United Irishmen previous to the rebellion and there would have been no rebellion there if they had not been forced forward by the establishment of Orange lodges and the whipping and torturing and things of that kind.

Twentieth-century scholars critically re-examining Ireland's origin myths explained how ‘synthetic pseudo-history’ such as the Lebor Gabála érenn arose. Sports, like nations, have need of origin myths, chess being no exception; moreover, sporting preferences have sometimes become bound up with a nation's sense of its unique identity. In the same ancient manuscripts where Celtic revivalists found legends of the earliest people in Ireland, they often also found references to board games. What may be called the myth of Celtic chess then emerged.

In the late nineteenth century Irish rural labourers had few consistent advocates willing to pursue their social and economic claims at a national level. Those that did exist, such as P.F. Johnson of Kanturk, have generally managed to elude the scrutiny of historians. A number of studies on the Irish land question have referred to Johnson, but he has remained a shadowy figure despite his role as the leading labourers’ advocate between 1869 and 1882. Rural agitation during this period is most often associated with tenant farmers and their perturbations with regard to the prevailing land-tenure system and its administration. The rural working class, especially before 1885, had limited political influence, and neither the British government nor the Irish Parliamentary Party treated its claims with the seriousness that they accorded to the perceived needs of tenant farmers. Nonetheless, many commentators remarked on the wretched condition of the rural labouring population in Ireland, and it was undoubtedly the greatest demographic and socio-economic casualty of the Famine. Wages, working conditions, unemployment and underemployment, housing and access to land were all issues that agitated labourers in the late nineteenth century.

Ulster Protestant, farmer’s son, journalist, I.R.B. member, Irish Volunteer organiser, hunger-striker, Sinn Féin T.D. and Minister for Trade and Commerce, advocate of the Anglo-Irish treaty, Cumann na nGaedheal Minister for Local Government, Finance and Posts and Telegraphs, Vice-President of the Executive Council, Blueshirt intellectual (but no fascist): these successive designations capture the varied early career of Ernest Blythe. Far less is known of his interests and writing after his retirement from political life: the Irish language, theatre and, in particular, the partition question.

At the 2002 Hay Literary Festival, Sir Michael Holroyd, the prolific biographer, delivered a lecture outlining the development of British biographical writing, and indicating what he thought might be the key developments in the future of the genre. Quoting Keats, he condemned ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’, and called for a greater acknowledgement and utilisation of the fictional in the enhancing of our understanding of individuals. Such a readiness to shun or qualify empirical evidence when attempting to interpret and understand the past would be an anathema to most historians.

The only extant copy of this recension of the life of St. Brigit is found in Rawlinson B 512, a Bodleian MS. of the fourteenth or fifteėnth Century. This MS. has been frequently described and catalogued, most fully by Whitley Stokes (Tripartite Life of Patrick (1887), pp. xiv ff.) and again in his edition of the Martyrology of Oengus (1905, pp. xxii-xxiv). With the exception of the Lebor Gabála, the greater part of the Contents has been edited in various places. The arrangement of the gatherings, the various foliations and paginations of the MS., and the different hands have been described by Dr. Best in ‘Notes on Rawlinson B 512’ (ZCP, xvii. 388 ff.).

The history of modern political parties is rich in examples of the law that a sharp change in the party line involves a tightening in party discipline, often including a structural re-organization. The Parnellite movement did not escape the operation of this law. The Kilmainham treaty, which marked the transmutation of Parnellism from a quasi-revolutionary movement into a completely constitutional one, could not have been implemented without a drastic subordination of the various branches of the movement to central control, i.e. the control of the parliamentary party itself. As the party had been reduced by secessions until it contained, for all practical purposes, no opponents of Parnell, this meant that the whole great movement of the ‘New Departure’, or what was left of it, was now to be steered, by the little group of Parnell’s lieutenants, out of land-agitation into the more or less peaceful ways of electioneering. It was not immediately necessary to tighten the internal organization of the party itself, partly because of the secessions and partly because its make-up was such that it was inclined to welcome rather than oppose shifts to the right. What was needed was to discipline the ‘peripheral organizations’, as they would now be called, one or two of which had in the past not merely acted independently of the parliamentarians but had exercised some control over them. Before going further with the description of how the party machine was perfected in the years following the Kilmainham treaty, it might be well, for the sake of clarity, to list these organizations and indicate briefly their relation to the parliamentary party in the immediate pre-Kilmainham era.

There were two main concerns of Tudor and Stuart governments in relation to the sea surrounding the coast of Ireland. First, and most important, there was the need to defend it from hostile ships belonging to England's enemies. This involved the security of England as much as Ireland and, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was usually controlled by the admiralty establishment in London. The setting out and supervision of ships to defend the Irish and English coasts was rarely delegated to an Irish authority. The second concern was the administration of the law maritime in Ireland. The law maritime included within its jurisdiction all crimes committed at sea or on the coast such as the seizure and robbing of ships by pirates and other sea-rovers, as well as cases involving death aboard ship, seamen's wages, salvage, wreck, damage by collision at sea, and other disputes involving the sea or the men who earned their living from it. In the medieval period such matters were often dealt with in the courts of chancery and exchequer, but in the later middle ages a separate admiralty court emerged in England where the civil maritime law was practised. The existence of the court, however, remained shadowy until it was enlarged and established on a permanent basis in the 1530s. At the same time, procedure in the court was simplified by the passing of an act which allowed for the prosecution of crimes at sea by special commissions according to common law.

Alone amongst the major rebellions of the sixteenth century the Desmond rebellion of 1579 seems to have retained its romantic fascination untarnished. While the rebellions of 1534 and 1569 and the major uprising in Ulster at the end of the century have each been subjected to critical historical analysis, the uprising of the last Desmond earl seems to contain a mysterious element which has somehow deflected all attempts at detached assessment, and which continues to attract popular historians, like Richard Berleth, in search of a good Gothic tale at the close of the feudal age. The dramatic appeal of the Desmond rebellion, I suspect, lies in the aura of inevitability which appears to surround it. As Macbeth was doomed to be overthrown, as Othello was doomed to kill that which, he loved most, as Hamlet was doomed to do nothing, so it seems Desmond was doomed to destroy himself in rebellion.

The study of Irish historical demography has long been an area of complexity and controversy; and the further back into the past the search for patterns and trends is pushed, the more the problems multiply. Much of the difficulty stems from the inadequacy and/or variability of the available sources. Hearth-tax returns, enumeration lists of various types, estate records and registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, all pose problems of interpretation and in addition, for any single area, they are likely to provide only fragmentary and discontinuous evidence. $$Largely because of these difficulties, only a limited number of detailed analyses of population patterns in specific areas as far back as the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century have been attempted. Yet at the same time the work which has been done has made it apparent both that this is a crucial period in terms of demographic history and that only detailed case studies can provide the evidence necessary to enlarge upon our current very general understanding.