The general outlines of the Norman settlement of Leinster were laid downin the time of Strongbow. At the time of the Norman invasion that part of Leinster which was to become Kildare was divided into four main tribal territories, described as cantreds under the Normans: Offelan in the north; Offaly to the north-west and centre; Omurethy in the south; and Leix to the south-west.

Offelan is now represented by the baronies of North and South Salt, Ikeathy and Oughterany, and Clane (formerly Otymy), which were granted to Adam de Hereford, who shared his grant with his brothers John and Richard; and North and South Naas, which were granted to Maurice Fitz Gerald, whose son, William, also divided his grant with his brother Gerald, the ancestor of the earls of Kildare.

In the general descriptions of Ireland written in Elizabethan and early Stuart times there are constant, although casual, references to the woodlands, Moryson, Perrott, Bagenal, Speede and Boate all allude to areas which were wooded or carried woody scrub on bog. Their descriptions are too general to be of use in assessing the probable extent of the woodland that remained at the end of the sixteenth-century, but they are pointers to the distribution. The same is true of contemporary maps although they are rather more helpful in that, in spite of their distortion of distance and configuration, they may indicate the position of a wood relative to physical features such as hills, rivers or bays.

Historians of eighteenth-century Ireland agree in stating that catholics succeeded in amassing considerable wealth in trade, in spite of, or even because of, the popery laws, but little effort has been made to examine this question in detail.

What percentage of the principal merchants and traders of Ireland belonged to the catholic faith, or what percentage of the trade of Ireland was in their hands during the century? It is doubtful whether these questions will ever be answered completely. Contemporary travel books, and even contemporary local histories such as those of Charles Smith, scarcely mention trade, and contribute not at all to solving our particular problem. Local histories of more modern date concentrate on political rather than on economic history; and although it is to be hoped that local historians and genealogists will fill in some of the gaps, from family papers, from local newspapers and other available sources, the general historian investigating the problem has at present no regional or local studies to assist him in his researches. He must therefore try to piece together such scraps of information as are available and endeavour to arrive at some general conclusions.

Since the publication of Rev. Professor Aubrey Gwynn’s study of the later history of the Book of Kells the name of the donor of the book to Trinity College has come to light. He was Henry Jones (1605-82), eldest son of Lewis Jones, bishop of Killaloe, and was successively bishop of Clogher (1645), scoutmaster general to Cromwell’s army, and bishop of Meath (1661). In 1646 he was appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Dublin, a position he seems to have continued to hold under the commonwealth. He was already known as a benefactor of Trinity College Library. The two handsome oak staircases from the old library which now lead to the Long Room gallery were traditionally associated with him. He was remembered as the donor of the Book of Durrow but it was strangely forgotten that he had also given Trinity the Book of Kells, which is in our eyes so much more striking a volume because so much more lavishly illuminated. Perhaps it was the silver shrine in which Durrow was still preserved that touched the imagination of his contemporaries.

In May 1870 a number of gentlemen met in a Dublin hotel to consider the possibility of reviving the demand for a separate Irish legislature. Out ofthis meeting grew the Home Government Association, and ultimately the Home Rule League of Isaac Butt. A number of political developments had made it possible to revive an agitation which had lain dormant for twenty years; to one of these in particular has been ascribed much of the responsibility forthe founding of the new movement. ‘It may be doubted that there everwas a time since 1800 when Irish protestants as a body belieyed that Irish affairs could be better understood and cared for in a London legislature than in an Irish parliament’, wrote A. M. Sullivan in 1877; concern for their rights, privileges, and possessions as a minority in the midst of adangerous catholic majority, was the real reason why they supported the union system’. It was the contention of Sullivan and other writers on the period that the disestablishment of their church and the invasion of their position on the land by the reforming measures of the liberal administration of 1868 destroyed the compact of mutual self-interest between Irish protestantism and the British legislature, and that the movement which Butt founded in 1870 owed much of its strength to a recrudescence of Irish protestant nationalism. It is the purpose of this paper to subject this contention to a somewhat closer examination than it has hitherto undergone.

One of the criticisms most frequently made of O’Connell’s conduct of his agitation for repeal of the union has always been that he failed to build up a parliamentary party that would be a credit to his cause. The accusation comes in its harshest form, naturally enough, from his political opponents at the time. A whig journalist, for instance, writing in 1843, described O’Connell’s followers in these terms:

Cringed to his face, consulted, and revered
His oracles—detested him—and feared.

And it was either a whig or a tory journalist who invented for O’Connell’s party the wounding nickname of ‘O’Connell’s tail’, with its implication that the members of the party were without wills of their own, completely subservient to their leader’s commands. But it was not from whigs and tories alone that criticism came: earnest repealers themselves complained that their party was damaging the cause they had at heart.

Connacht in the eighteenth century was regarded as the most remote and the most catholic part of Ireland. These two qualities gave the region a very individual character, and the few travellers who ventured to cross the Shannon had the sensation of entering another world. This did not apply to two of the five counties—Leitrim and Sligo, which had been allotted tothe soldiers of the parliamentary army in the Cromwellian settlement and for this reason were not typical of the province. The essential Connacht lay beyond the Shannon in the counties of Galway, Mayo and Roscommon, the greater part of which had been reserved for catholic landowners in the Cromwellian settlement. The result of this arrangement was to leave the catholic gentry in a much stronger position in Connacht than in the rest of Ireland. This position remained largely unshaken by the Jacobite war, as the treaty of Limerick, the terms of the surrender of Galway, and their own solidarity protected most of the Connacht landholders from confiscation at the end of the war.

When the eighteenth century began, several hundred catholic landholders were in occupation of a substantial part of Galway and Mayo and, to a lesser degree, of Roscommon. This situation was a constant source of anxiety to the authorities, who from time to time were alarmed about the prospect of a French landing in the west supported by catholic landlords and catholic peasants. It was said that catholics in Connacht outnumbered protestants by fifty to one and that in some counties there were so few protestant freeholders to serve on juries that the region could scarcely be held to acknowledge the authority of the government.

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 1765 a major decision was taken in London which amounted to the formulation of a new English policy towards Ireland: viceroys in future were to reside constantly in Dublin and the old system of undertakers was to be overthrown. But it was not until 1767 that British government found in Viscount Townsend a nobleman prepared to carry out the new policy. By May of 1768 Townsend had reached the crisis point in his relations with the undertakers. They had just behaved in an utterly intolerable manner in the viceroy’s eyes by using their influence as the principal servants of the crown to secure the rejection in the house of commons of the crown’s scheme to increase the number of troops on the Irish establishment, on which the king’s ministers in London had set very great store. The augmentation was the principal issue over which the fierce struggle between the viceroy and the undertakers was fought, but the true question to be settled, as Townsend insisted over and over again with characteristic vehemence, was of deeper significance. Was the undertaker system, which had allowed a considerable measure of autonomy to a small oligarchy in Ireland, to be allowed to continue? Or was a bold policy to be pursued of re-establishing once and for all the power of the king’s representative in Ireland, especially in the control of patronage, thus administering a serious check to the self-governing aspirations of the Anglo-Irish gentry, and emphasising Ireland’s subordination to England?