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.

The magna carta of the Irish system of national education, established in 1831, was what came to be known as ‘ the Stanley letter ’, addressed on 31 October 1831 by the Right Honourable Edward G. Stanley, chief secretary for Ireland, to the duke of Leinster, president of the board of seven commissioners appointed by the government to administer the system.

A part from the surviving state papers (notably those of Lord Lieutenant Clarendon) one of the most important sources for the history of Ireland in the reign of James II is the ‘Narrative’ written in 1702 by Thomas Sheridan. Sheridan was appointed secretary to Lord Deputy Tyrconnell and first commissioner of the revenue at the end of 1686 and was dismissed, following allegations of corruption, early in 1688. Sheridan claimed that James had made him secretary against Tyrconnell’s wishes so that he could watch Tyrconnell’s behaviour on his behalf, and that Tyrconnell fabricated the charges of corruption in order to be rid of him. Most historians, especially those hostile to Tyrconnell, have accepted Sheridan’s account as accurate. Sir James Mackintosh, for example, wrote : ‘Clarendon and Sheridan’s MSS agree so exactly in their picture of Tyrconnell, have such an air of truth in their accounts of him that it is not easy to refuse them credit, though they were both his enemies’.

This article examines a letter from Cavan's political elite to the lord deputy and council in July 1629 in protest against the imposition of charges relating to the Graces. The letter, with its graphic description of a county gripped by famine, tells us much about conditions on the ground at this time. What is most interesting about this petition, however, are the more than one hundred signatures appended to it. The names include a mix of both Gaelic Irish and British settlers and indicate a plantation county whose two communities were prepared to work with each other, on this occasion at least, in order to achieve a common goal.

The act of the Irish parliament of 1494-5, known as Poynings’ Law, was of outstanding importance in the history of that parliament down to its virtual repeal in 1782, but, owing to the brevity of its text, the changing nature of the relations between the English government and the Anglo-Irish administration and the development of the organisation of the Irish parliament, it passed through various stages of interpretation and significance which require to be studied separately.

In December 1973, the British and Irish governments and the Northern Ireland Executive designate agreed to the formal establishment of a ‘Council of Ireland’ as part of the historic Sunningdale Agreement. This council was to have executive functions and co-ordinate the provision of certain services on both sides of the border; it would have ‘executive and harmonising functions and a consultative role, and a consultative assembly with advisory and review functions’. The Council of Ireland proposal was the British government's formal recognition of the ‘Irish dimension’ which it had accepted in the March 1973 White Paper, the Northern Ireland Constitutional Proposals. The proposed council was one of the most divisive issues in Northern Ireland politics during the 1972–4 period, and was strongly resisted by a majority of unionists. The council issue led to the collapse of the power-sharing Executive which had taken office in January 1974. Loyalist opponents of Sunningdale argued that the Council of Ireland, if allowed to operate, would be a stepping-stone to a united Ireland. Recently, some scholars have retrospectively endorsed this interpretation of the council, arguing that the Irish government, in concert with the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (S.D.L.P.), sought a particularly strong institution – with the goal of Irish reunification. But was the proposed Council of Ireland really intended as a vehicle for future Irish unity?

One of the most familiar facts in the history of the medieval lordship of Ireland is that, despite plans by Henry III in 1243 and by Edward III in 1331–2, no king of England came to Ireland between the expedition of King John in 1210 and those of Richard II in 1394–5 and 1399. I am not about to subvert the historical record by revealing a previously unknown royal visit to Ireland, but there is, as I shall try to demonstrate, enough evidence, some of it very strange indeed, to justify the title of this article. The unknown author of the prophecy entitled the Verses of Gildas, who was apparently writing in the middle of the reign of Edward II, forecast that in 1320 the king of England would come to Ireland after the passing of a certain grave crisis. Once in Ireland, he would bring about peace between the English and the Irish, who would live together in harmony under one English law. The English would demolish the walls of their fortifications, while the Irish would cut down the woodlands which served as their defences. On a charitable interpretation, one might find a parallel between these predictions and the letter written to Edward II by Pope John XXII in May 1318, in which the pope asked the king to give his attention to the grievances of the Irish: these grievances had been expressed at length in the famous Irish Remonstrance, which had probably been composed towards the end of 1317 and had recently been received in Avignon.

On the Ulster borderlands, the years 1849 to 1852 represented a crucial period in the development of a correlation between agrarian violence and constitutional political agitation. The emergence of the Tenant League in the region from 1848, along with a parallel clandestine violence from 1849, foreshadowed the better-known Land War of the latter part of the nineteenth century. This article analyses the hitherto unacknowledged interplay between agrarian violence and constitutional politics in south Armagh and surrounding districts. In so doing, it emphasises the years in the immediate wake of the Great Famine as being critical in the long-term development of more politicised forms of collective action. Such methods, in turn, would ultimately be deployed to the detriment of the landed ascendancy in subsequent decades.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article argues that the career and writings of the Ulster unionist propagandist and man of letters Hugh Shearman (1915–99) were influenced by his commitment to theosophy, which he saw as a logical extension of Protestant belief in private judgement. His work as a publicist echoed theosophist preoccupation with illusion and the perceptions accessible to initiates. Many of his writings displayed theosophist in-jokes, esoteric references and mental reservations. His apologias reflected theosophist belief in the breaking down of personality compartmentalisation in order to merge with the world-soul. Shearman saw the Irish republic as the ‘Pakistan of the West’, represented by him as embodying self-destructive insularity shaped by Catholic authoritarianism. In response to the 1940s anti-partition campaign, Shearman developed an apologia for the Stormont government as an essentially progressive technocracy, which he saw as culminating in the regime of Terence O'Neill. This article uses previously unexplored writings to track Shearman's life and career into the 1990s, when he is shown to have combined a view of the Irish question formed in the 1940s with a semi-conspiratorial unionist narrative of British betrayal.

In 1969 R.T.É.'s 7 Days dealt with the issue of illegal moneylending, claiming that Dublin was ‘a city of fear’ where 500 unlicensed moneylenders used violence as a tool to collect debts. The Fianna Fáil government rejected the suggestion that loan sharking was widespread and that Gardaí responses to it were ineffectual; a tribunal of inquiry was established to investigate 7 Days. Previous analyses situated these events within the context of government concerns over the influence of television journalism. This article takes a different approach, analysing moneylending ― rather than 7 Days ― within the context of the rediscovery of poverty during the 1960s. It examines how social and economic changes, including the growth of consumer credit and the re-housing of large numbers of Dubliners, combined to make illegal moneylending more visible. Historical accounts of Ireland in the 1960s have had a top down focus on economic policy and growth. Here, the focus is shifted to personal rather state finances to offer a more nuanced portrayal of a decade often understood as a boom one. Moreover, analysing the nature and conclusions of the tribunal lays bare the contemporary resistance to those attempting to reframe the problem of poverty.

This article explores the legal strategies of negotiation employed by Gaelic lords in early modern Munster through a case study of the O'Driscoll lordship of Collymore, County Cork. The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced an environment of intense legal contestation, as indigenous legal practices and hierarchies were methodically attacked by the colonial administration. But, as English administrators attempted to eradicate Irish legal precedent (and with it the legitimacy of the Gaelic aristocracy), Gaelic lords responded with new and often innovative legal strategies. The territory of Collymore presents a microcosm of the legal tensions produced by and under the Munster plantation, subject to competing claims by rival O'Driscoll heirs, MacCarthy Reagh overlords, ‘Old English’ neighbours and incoming planters. This article offers a reconstruction and analysis of the complex legal disputes surrounding Collymore. It argues that through otherwise routine legal interactions like inheritance disputes and chancery suits, Irish lords reframed their authority in the vocabulary of English law, trading tanistry for primogeniture and the language of overlordship for that of landlordship. Through these rhetorical and theoretical shifts, they attempted to redefine the very basis and nature of their authority.

In 1903 the governor of South Africa, Lord Alfred Milner, agreed to proposals from the owners of the Transvaal gold mines to alleviate the labour shortage caused by the recent war by recruiting workers from China. The Conservative government of Arthur Balfour gave its approval in May 1904, and had overall responsibility for the scheme until it yielded power to the Liberals in December 1905. The so-called ‘coolies’ were to be indentured on a three-year contract, paid less than the blacks, and quarantined from the local population. Well before the first shipment arrived on the Witwatersrand in June 1904, British trade unionists were alarmed that a precedent was being set for the importation of cheap labour closer to home, and Britain’s ‘Non-conformist conscience’ was disturbed at the spectre of ‘nameless practices’ developing in compounds of young men separated from their families. Events seemed to bear out the apprehensions.