The runaway British slave who called himself Patricius tells us in this Confession that on making land after his escape from Ireland the and the ship’s crew had to journey for twenty-eight days before coming across any other human beings. Bury (Life of St Patrick, London, 1905) offered the explanation that they must have found themselves in a part of Gaul which had just been devastated by the Vandals, who burst into the west in the first days of 407. The idea was tempting. The date 407, combined with 431 (the year which is known from Prosper’s contemporary chronicle to have been that in which Pope Celestine sent Palladius as ‘first bishop’ to the Irish Christians), not only gave a fairly firm chronological anchorage to Patrick’s career, but also forged for him an early link with the continent, whence, according to his seventh-century Irish biographers, Muirchú and Tírechán, he ultimately returned to Ireland as successor to Palladius.

It is rare that a book's dedication is quite so apposite to its theme as Maria Luddy and Mary O'Dowd's in their new history of marriage, which reads: ‘For Mary Cullen and Margaret MacCurtain who began it all.’ Indeed, they did, and this tour de force is a fitting testament to the significance of that women's history project started in the 1970s, which has ‘paved the way for all of us who engage with Irish gender history’ (p. xiii). Luddy and O'Dowd, both pioneers in the field in their own right, set themselves the not inconsiderable task of producing ‘an extended study of the history of heterosexual marriage on the island of Ireland from 1660–1925’ (p. 1). The result is a rich, colourful, at times playful, but also often depressing, five-hundred-and-fifty-page study of the most popular sexual bond between men and women in history — marriage. Indeed, that complex institution was obviously on the historical mind because Diane Urquhart's erudite study of Irish divorce from 1800 to 1997 and Sonja Tiernan's deftly navigated history of the marriage equality campaign in Ireland were also published in 2020.

Between the summer of 1770 and the close of the year 1772, large areas of rural Ulster were rendered ungovernable by the activities of the Hearts of Steel or Steelboys. Agrarian agitation was not new, of course — during 1763 Tyrone, Armagh and Mormghan had been similarly affected by the Oakboys — but apart from the more serious and more prolonged nature of the Hearts of Steel outbreak, which gave it a notoriety and importance of its own, and the curious fact that the agitators were presbyterians, it had this unique feature: its outbreak and the heavy emigration which followed its spread and suppression were almost universally ascribed to the wicked greed of a single great landowner, the fifth earl (later first marquis) of Donegall.

Throughout the Irish cultural revival of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wales was held up as an example by some Irish nationalists of how a nation could revive its traditional culture and language. These writers told their audience of the heroic deeds of the Welsh in restoring their language to show Irish language revivalists that their task was not impossible. The Welsh example was studied by enthusiasts to see what steps were needed to improve the position of Irish. Organisations such as the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language (S.P.I.L.) and the Gaelic League noted with envy the levels of literacy among Welsh speakers. Revivalists believed that literacy had prevented Welsh from disappearing, and they hoped to boost literacy rates in Irish to save that language. They noted how successful the eisteddfodau were in instilling pride among the Welsh people in their culture. Accordingly, members of the Gaelic League established the Oireachtas to encourage the people of Ireland to celebrate their own distinctive characteristics. Yet while the example of the Welsh language was regularly discussed, this did not reflect a deep understanding of linguistic developments in Wales.

In the mid-1880s English political leaders found it essential to develop new policies for Ireland. While the liberals, led by Gladstone, were converted to the home-rule solution, the tories sought to preserve the union with a two-pronged policy. First, Ireland’s economic disorders were to be cured by vigorously developing the system of state-aided land purchase, and by having the imperial treasuly assume a large portion of the cost of developing the country’s natural resources and industrial potential. This aspect of the policy rested upon the tory conviction that Irish support of home rule would diminish in direct proportion to significant economic and social advance. The second part of the policy called for the establishment of a democratic system of local government which was to be the limit of political concessions to Irish nationalist sentiment.

This doggerel vindication of Fitzwilliam’s Irish viceroyalty of 1795 gave one contemporary interpretation of this controversial episode. Such a favourable verdict was far from universal at the time and subsequently has been seriously questioned by historians. In one respect, however, this verse succinctly highlighted one of the most striking features of the Fitzwilliam episode. It appeared that the lord lieutenant had been recalled before ‘he scarcely could explain himself’. The English minister principally responsible for initiating the swift recall was the home secretary, the duke of Portland. Since Portland was a close friend and longstanding political ally of Fitzwilliam, this seeming betrayal excited widespread comment and, in certain circles, gave rise to heartsearching consternation. Yet Portland’s motives have never been satisfactorily explained by historians. Attention has repeatedly been paid to the motives of Fitzwilliam himself, and the conduct of the prime minister, the Younger Pitt, has been carefully scrutinised. Explanations of Portland’s behaviour have been left rather on the sidelines. He is usually portrayed as a weak-minded dupe and traitor to his own avowed principles. A re-examination of the evidence permits a more rounded characterisation. Portland’s attitude was complex but coherent. Instead of the conventional picture of a weak man with weak views, Portland emerges as a man with strong views and some failings.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were six superior courts in Ireland—chancery, the three common law courts (king’s bench, common pleas and exchequer), the admiralty court and the prerogative court (an ecclesiastical court with jurisdiction over testamentary matters).Four of these courts were of medieval origin. The exchequer was probably in existence before the close of the twelfth century, the Irish chancery was founded early in the thirteenth century, the first Irish chancellor being appointed in 1244, and the antecedents of the courts of king’s bench and common pleas are to be found in the thirteenth century. The other two courts were comparatively modern. The court of prerogative and faculties based its rights to exercise jurisdiction on two sixteenth century acts and two seventeenth century patents, one of James I and one of Charles I. And though admiralty jurisdiction had been exercised in Ireland from medieval times, the Irish court of admiralty had been created by statute in 1784. From the court of chancery and the three common law courts there was an appeal to the court of error (known as the court of exchequer chamber) composed of the judges of the three common law courts, and in 1857 it was enacted that the court of exchequer chamber when hearing an appeal should consist of the judges of the two courts from which the appeal did not arise. From the admiralty court and from the prerogative court there was an appeal to delegates in chancery.

Literary evidence for political and social developments in medieval Ireland comes down to us in a variety of languages: Latin; a rich and — by European standards — early production in the Irish vernacular; Old Norse; Middle English; with sparser reference in Old English, Welsh and other nearby linguistic communities. Some of this evidence, tightly circumscribed in time, is also in Anglo-Norman French, and reflects a very different Ireland from that of Arthurian romance. These Anglo-Norman works, composed in Ireland or in Britain on the basis of eye-witness testimony, constitute a unique body of material, though their value as historical evidence is constricted in two ways: firstly, they are limited to three preserved texts; secondly, they are rigorously selective in their criteria of historiographical relevancy and in their treatment of the native Irish population, culture and political presence.

Before considering the manner in which the house of lords handled Irish questions in the age of Peel a brief examination of the ties between the United Kingdom upper house and Ireland is necessary A striking fact that requires emphasis is the growth between 1783 and 1832 of the ‘Irish interest’ in the lords. In the eighteenth century, when the British house of lords was a relatively small body of little over 200 members, the number of peers with a stake in Irish land was only about one eighth of the whole body. Several of these, too, owned wide lands in England and their main interests lay there. But by the time the first reformed parliament was opened on 29 January 1833 the Irish interest’ in the lords had become a formidable body In a house that had doubled in numbers since 1783 virtually one peer out of every four had a stake in Ireland through the ownership of land, and the majority of these were men whose economic interests were exclusively centred on their Irish estates. Moreover this ‘Irish interest’ maintained its strength in the lords right down to the formation of Gladstone's first ministry as the table below makes clear.

Why certain Irishmen came to use violence to obtain their political objectives during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21 has proved a difficult question. A number of local studies of the experience of volunteers, following the example of David Fitzpatrick, have provided insights into the process of radicalisation but have not dealt with this aspect of the subject explicitly. A more systematic approach has been taken in the attempt to explain the strong variations in the intensity of activity throughout the country. What caused these variations has indeed been a matter of contention ever since the Anglo-Irish War itself. Michael Collins often voiced complaints about ‘slack’ areas in language that left little to the imagination. Since the publication of Erhard Rumpf’s Nationalismus und Sozialismus in Irland in 1959 historians have sought to explain the unequal distribution of violence by comparing the level of I.R.A. activity in a particular county with certain geographically distributed social and economic variables. Hitherto these attempts have been unable to produce a full explanation for regional variations.

On the intelligence side, the Irish wars in this period were little different from any of the large-scale enterprises overseas of the 1590s. The expedition to Ireland of 1599, as in the case of the Cadiz expedition of 1596 and its successor to the Islands in 1597, is preluded by a crop of ‘projects’ and ‘espialls’ in the state papers, and the preparations traceable there have the distinctive marks of a special service. Among the many eye-witness accounts of oversea operations in the 1590s, however, which take the form of private journals, as distinct from dispatches to the queen or the privy council, Sir John Harington’s journal of Essex’s command in Ireland stands by itself in importance, though its position appears to be challenged by the contemporaneous Treatice of Ireland, by John Dymmok, who like Harington served under Essex there. It was pointed out long ago that these two works, so far as they cover the same events, agree almost word for word with each other. The question of authenticity is not helped by the fact that Harington’s journal has shared the fate of all his letters and papers in that neither the original nor any contemporary copy of it are to be found. Internal evidence, however, shows that the borrower was Dymmok, perhaps acting with the indifference in these matters that was characteristic of the period, though more commonly found among the chroniclers. The wonder perhaps is that Dymmok has allowed himself to repeat a number of Harington’s misplaced verbal ‘conceits’, for the existing differences tell strongly in favour of Dymmok as witness. Where the differences are not due to copyists’ errors Dymmok has invariably improved the sense, and the matter-of-fact ending to his relation of the Munster journey is in noteworthy contrast to an unfair gloss in the corresponding passage in Harington.

In recent years our understanding of the attempts of the Irish Protestant élite to convert and ‘civilise’ Ireland in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries has increased substantially. Some historians have examined the various campaigns to convert the largely Irish-speaking Catholic native population to Protestantism, through schools, the employment of Irish-speaking clergy and the publication of key religious texts in Irish. Others have explored Protestant efforts to civilise Ireland by bringing its governmental and legal infrastructure into line with those of England and through the spread of English dress, language, industries and agriculture.