Unlike some members of his profession, Richard Hadsor (c. 1570–1635), a Middle Temple lawyer born in Ireland, has not been caught in the spotlight which historians have aimed at the dramatic political confrontations in England and Ireland during the early seventeenth century. Nor, since he was not a recusant, has he attracted the attention of Irish historians of the legal profession. Although canvassed for both, he never attained a seat in a parliament or a place on the English or Irish judiciary. He had no part in the ‘inflation of honours’ as either a broker or a recipient. Although he spent the whole of his professional life in London, nothing is known of his English social circle — apart from a single reference in his will to Sir lohn Bramston, a fellow Templar — or the value of his private practice, and only a little (which is, however, suggestive) of his clientèle. He wrote nothing for publication. He had no legitimate offspring and, therefore, none of the successful lawyer’s usual inclination to create a substantial patrimony. In consequence, it is hardly surprising that he does not figure in the standard works of biography or even in a commemoration of nearly one thousand Middle Templars straddling several centuries. Nevertheless, in his own time Richard Hadsor was no nonentity, and he deserves to be rescued from an entirely posthumous obscurity by something more generous than a scholarly footnote. His career as a devoted royal servant spanned a period in which the Old English were being relentlessly excluded from high office in Ireland, yet as crown counsel for Irish affairs he succeeded in establishing a distinctive niche in the Whitehall bureaucracy.

The destruction of the Royalist field armies at Naseby and Langport in 1645 did not end the English Civil War. Althought the king had suffered irreversible military defeats, Parliament was unable to govern effectively while politically important towns and fortresses remained in enemy hands. To ensure political stability Parliament’s army was forced to besiege and reduce a large number of strongholds in England, Ireland and Scotland, a task that was not finally completed until the surrender of Galway in 1652. In particular the war in Ireland was to test the army’s siege-making capacity more severely than any previous campaign. To complete the political conquest of Britain and Ireland the army and its generals were compelled increasingly to practise an aspect of warfare that had been traditionally neglected by English soldiers. In contrast, siege warfare was an area in which their continental counterparts had excelled.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European wars produced few set-piece battles. Conflicts were more frequently resolved by the assault and defence of fortified cities and towns. Consequently the art of siege warfare evolved rapidly. England’s political and military insularity during this period detached the country from advances in siege technology that had transformed the conduct of European warfare. No major siege had been undertaken by an English army since Henry VIII had invested Boulogne in 1544, and as there had been no siege of English towns or fortresses since medieval times, there had been little innovation in defensive fortifications. What improvements did occur were sporadic and unco-ordinated. In the sixteenth century a great fortress was built at Berwick-on-Tweed to counter Scottish infiltration and a number of coastal towns in the south-east were refortified against the threat of Spanish invasion. However, by the outbreak of civil war in 1642, even these were obsolete by contemporary continental standards.

Academic study of the development of Irish political parties has been hampered by a shortage of primary source material available to historians and political scientists. This is because the headquarters records of parties, where they have survived, are generally fragmentary and ill-organised, and because few national politicians or party organisers have left papers for research.

The shortage of primary sources on the major political parties is reflected in the standard academic works dealing with their development, from Maurice Manning’s Irish political parties (1972) and Michael Gallagher’s The Irish Labour Party in transition, 1957–1982 (1982) to Richard Dunphy’s recent The making of Fianna Fáil power in Ireland (1995). These are largely based on secondary sources, on interviews, and on the private papers of individual politicians. Where scholars have had access to party records, furthermore, it has generally been on an informal and improvised basis. It was in such circumstances that John Bowman, while preparing De Valera and the Ulster question, 1917–1973 (1982), and Dermot Keogh, while researching Ireland and Europe, 1919–1948 (1988), were given sight of some of the records of the Fianna Fail national executive committee and the parliamentary party.

This article will examine the unique power structure that governed the lives of inmates of Ireland's borstal institution from its foundation in 1906 until the end of British rule in 1921. The borstal system was developed at the close of the nineteenth century at a time when penal administrators were searching for new and more enlightened modes of detention. Reform became something of a catchphrase and the borstal was one of two approaches, the other being the inebriate reformatory system that captured the imagination of Home Office officials. During this time there was a transition of leadership in the British penal system as those who subscribed to the more outdated idea of imprisonment without reform were replaced with more enlightened idealists. Borstal offenders in Ireland and Britain were subjected to an authoritarian structure unlike that experienced by prisoners within mainstream institutions of the penal systems in both countries. The division of power involved a three-way process in Clonmel borstal between 1906 and 1921. Three different but inextricably linked bodies, the General Prisons Board (G.P.B.), the institutional management, and the aftercare body, the Borstal Association of Ireland (B.A.I.), cooperated in a type of alliance with the aim of bringing about the reform of the juvenile-adult offender. Ultimate power rested in the hands of G.P.B. administrators but it is clear that governors, warders and aftercare officials had considerable influence in the decision-making process.

Writing to a ‘Friend in Scotland’, in 1888, the Rev. Hugh Hanna declared: ‘it is the duty of Christian people in these lands to do the best they can for all parts of the United Kingdom’. Having explained why Irish Protestants were opposed to home rule, he then asked how any

Historical scholarship has interpreted the Public Dance Halls Act, 1935 in a relatively uniform manner. Most works on the subject have emphasised the expanding influence of Catholic church authorities over dancing following the enactment of the legislation, as well as the increasing restrictions placed on the freedom of dancers. The act has been viewed as one element in a sequence of pieces of legislation passed by successive Free State governments that aimed to limit and control citizens, including the Censorship of Films Act, 1923, and the Censorship of Publications Act, 1929. Using previously unexamined Department of Justice records, this article questions the dominant interpretation of the Public Dance Halls Act. It analyses whether dances moved predominantly into parochial halls, as has been the common understanding, and also considers whether the supposedly harsh restrictions imposed on dancers were actually enforced or observed. The article also proposes that two largely unexamined facets of the legislation and its subsequent implementation be given more consideration. Safety concerns played a sizeable part in shaping dancing regulations, as did the interests and worries of local communities. The article concludes by suggesting that lacunae in the historiography of dance halls in the 1930s are emblematic of wider gaps in Irish social and cultural history and recommends avenues for future research.

The dominance of successive earls of Kildare in Anglo-Irish politics between 1470 and 1534 has prompted historians to label the period that of ‘the Kildare ascendancy’. This term denotes more than just the years in which the earls were in office; it includes assumptions about government policy, and the king’s relations with his Anglo-Irish magnates. From the later fourteenth century, the crown had normally maintained a deputy in Ireland directly from its English resources; and from his salary the deputy agreed to provide a retinue for the defence of the lordship. The scale of subvention and size of the retinue declined progressively, however, and the Irish revenues were too small to support a deputy lacking a substantial landed interest there: the king therefore sacrificed a degree of political control for financial economy and after 1478 relied almost exclusively on the local power of Kildare.

This article examines the 1641 Irish rebellion through a neglected manuscript account from 1643, written by Henry Jones and three of his 1641 deposition colleagues. The ‘Treatise’ offers important insights into the rebellion, but also advances a broader understanding of the significance of the early modern efforts to civilise Ireland and the impact of these schemes, especially plantation, on the kind of conflict that erupted in the 1640s. It is an evaluation that brings together both the long pre-history of the rebellion, and what eventually unfolded, offering new perspectives into a crucial and contested debate within modern historiography. The ‘Treatise’ also presents the opportunity to interrogate the position of the settler community, and their careful construction and presentation of a religiously- and culturally-driven improvement of the country. While it was a period of crisis, the rebellion offered an important opportunity to reflect on the wider project of Irish conversion and civility. It was a moment of creation and self-creation, as the emerging ‘British’ community not only digested the shock of the rebellion, but sought to fashion narratives that underlined their moral claims to Ireland on the grounds of true religion and civility.

The English invasion of Ireland is of central importance to the interconnected histories of Britain and Ireland. Yet there is still disagreement over the agency of its ultimate sponsor, King Henry II. This article argues that from the very beginning of his reign as king of England, Henry utilised a rising tide of intolerance among Europe’s clerical elite for those holding non-standard beliefs and customs to secure reluctant papal approval for an invasion of Ireland. Once that invasion finally got underway a decade and a half later, members of his court portrayed Henry’s firm rule as the necessary precursor to the reform of Irish religion and culture. This propaganda sought its justification in the intellectual and cultural flourishing of the twelfth-century renaissance, which provided European commentators with newly-revived models of logic and classification. In was also carried out amidst Crusade-inspired justifications for the violent subjugation or killing of religious non-conformists. The essential point, however, is that these clerical descriptions did not necessarily reflect contemporary secular opinion. When works written for secular audiences in the vernacular are analysed, they present a much more nuanced image of Ireland and the Irish. Gone are the references to civilising or reforming missions, and the clear sense of cultural superiority. What remains, however, is the fundamental belief that strong, centralised order is required for the successful running of society. This is what the English invaders told themselves, and this is what informed the first generation of settlement in Angevin Ireland.

The history of eighteenth-century Ireland prior to the Volunteer movement is remarkably uneventful, but two episodes ruffled its political calm. They were the Wood's halfpence dispute of 1723–5, and the conflict between the Irish administration and parliament, 1753–6.

It was the extent and vehemence of the opposition experienced by the administration in 1723–5 that led to the evolution of the undertakers—powerful members of parliament who undertook to conduct government business through the house of commons in return for a share in the disposal of patronage.

The ‘ Tigernach ’ Annals—the name is preferable to the current term ‘ Annals of Tigernach ’, which has grown out of a misunderstanding of an anonymous gloss—is one of the many varieties of a document which needs some such specific name as ‘ The Irish Annals ’ All the books of annals—‘ Ulster ’, ‘ Boyle ’, ‘ Inisfallen ’, ‘ Clonmacnois ’, ‘ Chronicum Scotorum ’, and the rest—are merely diversified forms of one fundamental text; this would be obvious if they were printed in parallel columns. The differences between them are due chiefly to interpolations, made not so much by compilers or scribes as by an endless succession of glossators.

Why did a minority succeed in defeating the League of Nations? The failure of the United States senate to ratify President Woodrow Wilson’s peace treaty has invited explanation for half a century and more. Historians argue that the intraisigence of Wilson and of his outright opponents, the ‘Irreconcilables’, forced a sufficient number of senators to drop their support. They attribute significance to the sensitivities of Republicans and congressmen smarting under the wartime powers of a Democratic president. They have also, rather reluctantly, turned their attention to the senators’ constituents. In dealing with the latter, historians have emphasised the influence of Irish-Americans. The Irish contingent, Link argues, ‘were up in arms because Wilson had refused to press the cause of Irish independence in Paris and because the treaty allegedly benefited the hated English’. According to Adler, even those who considered that ‘American-Irishmen were asses’ conceded their influence: ‘each jackass had one vote and there were lots of them’. Stone agrees that the ‘Irish vote, always important in American politics, had added significance for the league fight’.

Convents and convent-run institutions occupied an undefined legal space during the late nineteenth century. As homes for unmarried women, they combined religious ideas of holy seclusion with contemporary ideas of the feminine private sphere. However, women religious were also major providers of charity and welfare in Britain and Ireland, with many running charitable institutions. This brought them in closer contact with the state. As factory and workshop legislation towards the end of the nineteenth century expanded to include laundries, Catholic politicians used this ambiguous societal role to argue that Magdalene asylums deserved less inspection than for-profit laundries. In so doing, they both re-enforced nuns’ right to domestic privacy and promoted their operations as a social good. This created a legal exemption for convent-run laundries, which allowed them to operate with limited scrutiny or interference. An examination of the debates surrounding factory and workshop legislation from 1895 to 1907 exposes a precedent which continued well into the twentieth century.

Throughout much of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries linen textile production made an important contribution, in terms of output, exports, employment and capital accumulation, to the economy of north-east Ireland. However, for a brief period of a few decades, from the 1780s to the 1830s, the dominance of linen was challenged by a mechanised cotton industry centred on the Belfast area producing both mill-spun yarn and hand- and machinewoven piece goods. This period witnessed a shift of local resources of capital and labour from linen into cotton and back into linen in the space of half a century.

The story of Belfast’s brief flirtation with cotton is a difficult one to put together. Both narrative and analysis are constrained by a lack of records, especially by a dearth of statistics on inputs and on output. The traditional view has been that the industry was made up of units of production which, smaller than their British rivals and lacking supplies of local coal, produced at an uncompetitive unit cost. Its relatively brief existence was sustained by a combination of war and protective tariffs and with their removal the cotton industry in Belfast, unable to compete with its rivals in Great Britain, quickly disappeared. The validity of this view has been challenged recently. It has been shown that at least for the 1830s when data are available horse power per establishment was not significantly lower in Belfast than for the United Kingdom as a whole; nor was the absence of local supplies of coal a major disadvantage given local wage costs. These revisions cast doubt on the notion that Belfast cotton spinning establishments were inherently uncompetitive. Not every observer is convinced however. Ollerenshaw in his essay on industry in nineteenth-century Ulster remains certain that the exit from cotton spinning was to a large extent forced and that wet spinning was a timely and fortuitous alternative. Similarly Cullen argues that the local industry was uniquely unable to withstand the depression of 1825 and after.

This article offers a critical analysis of the representation of early modern popular violence provided by the 1641 depositions. Exploring the problems of how reported ‘speech’ was produced and recorded in the 1641 depositions, the article challenges the tendency within the depositions to represent violence as a spontaneous and immediate act, explicable by a racialised reading of Irish ‘barbarity’ and Catholic treachery. Exploiting a large cache of depositions and examinations in the relatively resource-rich urban context of Galway, it offers a micro-historical narrative of two brutal episodes of popular violence there in 1642 to reveal the complex histories and politics that might lie behind acts of violence in the Irish rising. Examining the local impact of the state's policies of anglicisation and Protestantisation, the paper recovers the prolonged, but ultimately unsuccessful, negotiations that preceded popular violence. Contextualizing the episodes, the article locates that violence in the more complex (and divided) politics of the city and in the radical challenges it brought to traditional structures of rule in Galway. Referencing the developing body of work on the politics of early modern crowd actions in Ireland, the article argues that the popular violence was political, both a consequence of and contributor to political change there.

This article examines the Church of Ireland’s relationship with Scots Presbyterians after the Restoration, focusing on the churchmen’s regular complaints against the ‘disorderly’ practices of the Presbyterian communities in Ireland. The established church leaders spoke of the threat of political and social disorder from the Presbyterians, and they repeatedly targeted the spontaneous ex tempore prayer and preaching practised by Scottish ministers in order to illustrate their concerns. This article uncovers the theological roots of these apparently civic complaints to explain their ubiquity and vehemence. It argues that the churchmen feared that such uncontrolled, unscripted prayer could lead to blasphemy and provoke the wrath of God on the nation, thereby triggering war and unrest such as they had experienced in the preceding decades. In their view, there was little difference between holding to an improperly ordered church hierarchy and worship practice, and forcing this disorder on the state. By illustrating the links between theology, ecclesiology and the potential for political sedition as they were understood by Restoration churchmen, this article demonstrates the importance of theological nuance for clarifying the complex relationship between Ireland’s two largest Protestant denominations in the seventeenth century.

In several respects the great famine revolutionized Irish overseas emigration. Numbers rose abruptly from an annual average of some 50,000 in the early ’forties to more than 100,000 in 1846, more than 200,000 in 1847 and an aggregate of well over one and a quarter millions in the six succeeding seasons. A relatively small, steady and considered emigration was replaced, especially during 1846-9, by a headlong outrush, sometimes more a hasty, even hysterical flight of economic refugees than a population movement as ordinarily understood. Unprecedented disasters overtook these emigrations, as epidemics swept over a passenger trade still painfully adjusting its shipping and standards to the new phenomenon and the growing predominance of Liverpool as the point of embarkation.

In May 1974 the Ulster Workers' Council (U.W.C.), comprising loyalist trade unionists, paramilitaries and politicians, mounted a general strike backed by widespread intimidation. Their target was the Sunningdale Agreement, which produced a power-sharing executive for Northern Ireland and proposed a crossborder institution with the Republic of Ireland. After a fortnight the U.W.C. successfully brought Northern Ireland to a halt and the Executive collapsed, leading to the restoration of direct rule from Westminster. Three years later the United Unionist Action Council (U.U.A.C.) adopted the same strategy, demanding a return to devolution with majority rule and the repression of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (P.I.R.A.). This second strike was defeated. Many contemporary politicians were critical of the Labour government's failure to put down the U.W.C. strike. William Whitelaw, formerly secretary of state for Northern Ireland in Edward Heath's Conservative administration and the minister responsible for the bulk of the negotiations prior to Sunningdale, believed that the prime minister, Harold Wilson, and the new secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, did not have the same attachment to the political settlement and were less willing to support the Northern Ireland Executive in its hour of need. Paddy Devlin of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (S.D.L.P.) argued that the unwillingness to arrest those involved, ‘more than any other single action by the authorities ... caused thousands of law-abiding people who had earlier given support to the executive to switch loyalties’.

Down to the mid-nineteenth century, the rural population in Ireland was obliged by law to contribute to the upkeep of the Church of Ireland clergy by means of tithes, a measure denoting a proportion of annual agricultural produce. The document illustrates what was happening in the late sixteenth century, as separate ecclesial structures were emerging, and Catholics were beginning to determine how to support their own clergy. Control of ecclesiastical resources was a major issue for the Catholic community in the century after the introduction of the Reformation. However, for want of documentation the use of tithes to support Catholic priests, much less the impact of this issue on relationships within that community, between ecclesiastics and propertied laity, has been little noted. This text – a dispensation to hold parish revenues, signed by a papally-appointed bishop ministering in the south-east – illustrates how the recusant community in an anglicised part of Ireland addressed some issues posed by Catholic ownership of tithes in the 1590s. It exemplifies the confusion, competing claims, and anxiety of conscience among some who benefited from the secularisation of the church’s medieval patrimony; it also preserves the official response of the relevant Catholic ecclesiastical authority to an individual situation.