¹ This observation echoes Keith Wrightson's comments in ‘The enclosure of English social history’, in A. Wilson, ed., Rethinking social history: English society 1570–1920 and its interpretation (Manchester, 1993), p. 62.

² Shagan, E., Popular politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003)Google Scholar; Duffy, E., The stripping of the altars: traditional religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1500 (New Haven, CT, 1992)Google Scholar; idem, The voices of Morebath: reformation and rebellion in an English village (New Haven, CT, 2001); Keith Thomas, ‘Putting the people back into history’, Times Literary Supplement, 14 Oct. 1994, pp. 7–8.

³ See McQuillan, P., Native and natural: aspects of the concepts of ‘right’ and ‘freedom’ in Irish (Cork, 2004)Google Scholar; Kane, B., The politics and culture of honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541–1641 (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar; and Caball, M., Poets and politics: reaction and continuity in Irish poetry, 1558–1625 (Cork, 1998)Google Scholar. The contributions of both Brendan Bradshaw and the late lamented Breandán Ó Buachalla in opening up this field have been immense. I have attempted to investigate the trans-national and trans-cultural commitments of English martial men and the ways in which these commitments both facilitated and limited integration into Irish politics in Rapple, R., Martial power and Elizabethan political culture: military men in England and Ireland, 1558–1594 (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁴ B. Bradshaw, ‘The Tudor Reformation and Revolution in Wales and Ireland: the origins of the British problem’, in B. Bradshaw and J. Morrill, eds., The British problem, c. 1534–1707, state formation in the Atlantic archipelago (London, 1996) pp. 39–66; B. Bradshaw, ‘The English Reformation and identity formation in Ireland and Wales’, in B. Bradshaw and P. Roberts, eds., British consciousness and identity, the making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 43–111; C. Brady, ‘New English ideology in Ireland and the two Sir William Herberts’, in A. Piesse, ed., Sixteenth-century identities (Manchester, 2000), pp. 75–112; C. Brady, ‘Comparable histories?: Tudor reform in Wales and Ireland’, in S. Ellis and S. Barber, eds., Conquest and union: fashioning a British state, 1485–1725 (London, 1995), pp. 64–86. For more sustained treatments of Welsh history during the period see inter alia, P. R. Roberts, ‘Wales and England after the Tudor “Union”: crown, principality and parliament, 1543–1624’, in C. Cross et al., eds., Law and government under the Tudors: essays presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton on his retirement (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 111–38, and Jones, J. Gwynfor, Early modern Wales: c. 1525–1640 (London, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Among many examples, see Brown, K., Bloodfeud in Scotland, 1573–1625 (Edinburgh, 1986)Google Scholar, and Noble society in Scotland: wealth, family and culture from the Reformation to the Revolutions (Edinburgh, 2000); Cathcart, A., Kinship and clientage in Highland clanship, 1451–1609 (Leiden, 2006)Google Scholar; and Dawson, J., The politics of religion in the age of Mary, queen of Scots: the earl of Argyll and the struggle for Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ On revisionism, see P. Lake, ‘Retrospective: Wentworth's political world in revisionist and post-revisionist perspective’, in J. F. Merritt, ed., The political world of Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, 1621–1641 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 252–83.

⁷ Wood, A., The politics of social conflict: the Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The 1549 rebellions and the making of early modern England (Cambridge, 2007).

⁸ See MacCulloch, D., ‘Kett's rebellion in context’, Past and Present, 84 (1979), pp. 36–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Shagan, E., ‘Protector Somerset and the 1549 rebellions: new sources and new perspectives’, English Historical Review, 114 (1999), pp. 34–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘“Popularity” and the 1549 rebellions revisited’, English Historical Review, 115 (2000), pp. 121–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Wood, The 1549 rebellions, pp. 9, 16–17, 172–4.

¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 16–17.

¹¹ Wood, A., ‘Beyond post-revisionism?: the Civil War allegiances of the miners of the Derbyshire “Peak Country”’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 23–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Wood's many case-studies of 1549 are fascinating and are found throughout the book: see, for instance, his scrutiny of contrasting reactions to the ‘commotion’, Wood, The 1549 rebellions, pp. 210–16.

¹³ Ibid., pp. 21–6, 67, 178–84.

¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 216–27.

¹⁵ For reference to tendentious posthumous portraits of Irish threats to the Tudor regime, see McCorristine, L.The revolt of Silken Thomas: a challenge to Henry VIII (Dublin, 1987), pp. 13–15Google Scholar, and Brady, C., ‘The killing of Shane O'Neill: some new evidence’, Irish Sword, 15 (1982–3), pp. 116–23Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Wood, The 1549 rebellions, pp. 93–5.

¹⁷ Kesselring, K., Mercy and authority in the Tudor state (Cambridge, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The Northern Rebellion of 1569: faith, politics, and protest in Elizabethan England (London, 2007).

¹⁸ Ibid., pp. 144–79.

¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 41–3, 101.

²⁰ James Fitzmaurice of Desmond to the Major and Corporation of Cork, The National Archives, SP63/29/8.

²¹ McCall, H. B., ‘The rising in the north: a new light upon one aspect of it’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 18 (1905), pp. 74–87Google Scholar.

²² Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion, pp. 122–9, 141–3.

²³ Ibid., pp. 38–44. It is surprising, nonetheless, that the author did not attempt a more sustained assessment of the comparative work that Steven Ellis has done comparing English-Irish magnates and those of the north of England, for example, Tudor frontiers and noble power: the making of the British state (Oxford, 1995).

²⁴ Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion, pp. 153–78.

²⁵ See Edwards, D., Lenihan, P., and Tait, C., eds., Age of atrocity: violence and political conflict in early modern Ireland (Dublin, 2007)Google Scholar (henceforth A of A), containing inter alia C. Tait, ‘“The just vengeance of God”: reporting the violent deaths of persecutors in early modern Ireland’, pp. 130–54; J. McGurk, ‘The pacification of Ulster, 1600–1603’, pp. 119–30; V. Carey, ‘Atrocity and history: Grey, Spenser and the slaughter at Smerwick (1580)’, pp. 79–95. John Morrill's essay ‘The Drogheda massacre in Cromwellian context’, pp. 242–65, is an excellent contribution.

²⁶ A of A, p. 6.

²⁷ See C. Brady, ‘Offering offence: James Anthony Froude (1818–1894), moral obligation, and the uses of Irish history’, in Taking sides: colonial and confessional ‘mentalités’ in early modern Ireland (Dublin, 2003), pp. 288–9.

²⁸ Lecky, W. E. H., A history of England in the eighteenth century (London, 1888)Google Scholar, ii, p. 105. See also Froude, J. A., History of England, Reign of Elizabeth I (5 vols., London, 1911)Google Scholar, iv, p. 24, and History of England, Edward VI (London, 1909), p. 116. Lecky's view is particularly interesting given that he descended from a captain associated with the 1578 massacre of Mullaghmast visited upon many of the O'More sept in the Irish midlands.

²⁹ Bradshaw, B., ‘Nationalism and historical scholarship in modern Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 25, 104 (1989), pp. 329–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Ellis, S. G., ‘Nationalist historiography and the English and Gaelic worlds in the late middle ages’, Irish Historical Studies, 25, 97 (1986), pp. 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Bradshaw's criticisms of Ellis's argument can be found in Bradshaw, ‘Nationalism and historical scholarship’, pp. 329–36.

³⁰ A of A, pp. 17–19.

³¹ For the cumulative death toll anatomized, see McKittrick, D., Kelters, S., Feeney, B., and Thornton, C., Lost lives: the stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of Northern Ireland troubles (Edinburgh, 2001)Google Scholar.

³² Many prominent members of the Workers’ Party converted to a social-democratic political programme in the 1990s. For a perceptive treatment of this tendency, influential in some intellectual and media-circles in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s, see Hanley, B. and Millar, S., The lost revolution: the story of the official IRA and the Workers’ Party (Dublin, 2009)Google Scholar.

³³ For an example of the weary pragmatism referred to, see the journalism and writings of Breandán Ó hEithir, especially The begrudger's guide to Irish politics (Dublin, 1986) and the columns and pieces collected in his An chaint sa tsráidbhaile (Dublin, 1991).

³⁴ The Provisional movement's political rhetoric could embrace an anti-colonial logic akin to Frantz Fanon's, a blood and soil type rationale, or a political-theological justification that looked to the Second Dáil as its fons et origo. For a counter-intuitive, but deliberate, Provisional republican attempt to desentimentalize received beliefs about the Anglo-Irish war of 1919–21 see the Sinn Féin Publicity Bureau's publication The good old IRA: Tan war operations (Dublin, 1985).

³⁵ See Bob Quinn, ‘A Gaeilgeoir solution to a Gaeltacht problem’, Irish Times, 6 July 1991, A5.

³⁶ For a sustained scrutiny of the myths of coherence adhered to by liberal humanitarianism see Geuss, R., History and illusion in politics (Cambridge, 2001)Google Scholar, especially his treatment of human rights discourse, pp. 143–6.

³⁷ See also Ó Gráda's account of the labyrinthine prelude to the publication of The great famine: studies in Irish history, a state-sponsored history of the Irish famine, in ‘Making history in Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s: the saga of The Great Famine’, in C. Brady, ed., Interpreting Irish history: the debate on historical revisionism (Dublin, 1994).

³⁸ Ellis's feature-length formulation of this view is Tudor frontiers and noble power. The most influential English-language work on ‘borderlands’ has been Bartlett, R. and MacKay, A., eds., Medieval frontier societies (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar.

³⁹ Canny's thesis was first advanced in ‘The ideology of English colonization from Ireland to America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 30, 4 (Oct. 1973), pp. 575–98; it both informed and was developed further in The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland: a pattern established, 1565–1576 (Hassocks, 1976), The upstart earl: a study of the social and mental world of Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork (Cambridge, 1982), and Kingdom and colony: Ireland in the Atlantic world, 1560–1800 (Baltimore, MD, 1987). Canny has remained a persistent historiographical champion of the model in ‘Writing Atlantic history; or, reconfiguring the history of colonial British America', Journal of American History, 86 (1999), pp. 1093–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ‘Atlantic history; what and why?', European Review, 9 (2001), pp. 399–411Google Scholar, ‘Writing early modern history: Ireland, Britain and the wider world’, The Historical Journal, 46 (2003), pp. 723–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. His definitive historical statement on early modern Ireland is Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001). For some criticisms of the whole project and the thinking informing it see Morgan, H., ‘Mid-Atlantic’, Irish Review, 11 (1991/2), pp. 50–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Bradshaw's review of Making Ireland British in English Historical Review, 117 (2002), pp. 910–13.

⁴⁰ For an expression of frustration with this phenomenon see Ellis, Tudor frontiers, p. 253.

⁴¹ Hutton, R., Debates in Stuart history (London, 2004), p. 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² Bradshaw argues that this oasis of reform was later replaced by a view of greater severity which invoked a pessimistic anthropological view of the Irish, consonant with Calvinist theological tendencies, see ‘Sword, word and strategy in the reformation of Ireland’, The Historical Journal, 21 (1978), pp. 475–502CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Bradshaw, B., The Irish constitutional revolution of the sixteenth century (Cambridge, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Brady, C.The chief governors: the rise and fall of reform government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1588 (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ It has been central to two leading surveys of the period, Lennon's, C.Sixteenth-century Ireland: the incomplete conquest (Dublin, 1994)Google Scholar, and Connolly's, S. J.Contested island: Ireland, 1460–1630 (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ A of A, p. 11. For the drawing of a distinction between ‘empirical narrative’ and ‘the newer theoretical frameworks that have given historians new questions to ask old sources and expanded understandings of the worldviews of past peoples elsewhere’, see A of A, p. 17.

⁴⁶ For a classic statement on the necessity for scholarship to have a claim on an audience, see C. Wright Mills's pragmatic meditation on accessible writing in his ‘On intellectual craftsmanship’, an appendix to The sociological imagination (Oxford, 1959) pp. 217–22, see also pp. 25–49.

⁴⁷ H. Morgan, ‘“Slán Dé fút go hoíche”: Hugh O'Neill's murders’, in A of A, pp. 95–119.

⁴⁸ D. Edwards, ‘The escalation of violence in sixteenth-century Ireland’, in A of A, pp. 34–78.

⁴⁹ County histories published over the last fifteen or so years have been particularly impressive, see, for example, C. Tait, ‘Broken heads and trampled hats: rioting in Limerick in 1599’, and C. Lennon, ‘Religion and social change in early-modern Limerick; the testimony of the Sexton family papers’, in Limerick: history and society (Dublin, 2009), pp. 91–112, 113–28; B. Cunningham, ‘From warlords to landlords: political and social change in Galway, 1540–1640’, in Galway: history and society (Dublin, 1996), pp. 97–130; V. Carey, ‘The end of the old Gaelic political order: the O'More lordship of Laois, 1536–1603’, and D. Edwards, ‘The Mac Giolla Padraigs (Fitzpatricks) of Upper Ossory, 1532–1641’, in Laois: history and society (Dublin, 1999), pp. 213–56, 327–76; and T. Venning, ‘The O'Carrolls of Offaly: their relations with the Dublin authorities in the sixteenth century’, and F. Fitzsimons, ‘The lordship of O'Connor Faly, 1520–1570’, in Offaly: history and society (Dublin, 1998), pp. 181–206, 207–42. These complement excellent works on English-Irish lordships, for example Edwards, David, The Ormond lordship in County Kilkenny: 1525–1642 (Dublin, 2003)Google Scholar, and Carey, Vincent, Surviving the Tudors: the ‘wizard’ earl of Kildare and English rule in Ireland, 1537–1586 (Dublin, 2002)Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ A of A, pp. 48–53.

⁵¹ Brady, Chief governors, pp. 1–18.

⁵² The Palesmen's blueprint for western expansion was invariably inspired by Giraldus Cambrensis's account of Hugh de Lacy's conquest, subsequent administration and settlement of Mide, and his accommodation with the Irish, see G. Cambrensis (A. B. Scott and F. X. Marti, eds., and trans.), Expugnatio Hibernica: the conquest of Ireland (Royal Irish Academy, 1978), pp. 190–5. For an Ormondist plan for the ‘reduction of Leinster’ from the 1540s see State papers published under the authority of his majesty's commission, King Henry VIII (London, 1834), iii, p. 272. The extent to which these indigenous Irish colonial ambitions were ever abandoned is arguable.

⁵³ A of A, pp. 44–6. Edwards also asserts that ‘It was largely among the higher ranks of society, not the lower that violent death was concentrated’, using the ‘Annals of the Four Masters’ as his source. The high-political Annals are though unlikely to be a good source for details of the deaths of labourers.

⁵⁴ See Lenman, B., England's colonial wars, 1550–1688: conflicts, empire and national identity (London, 2001), pp. 1–16Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ A of A, p. 66.

⁵⁶ For instance see Brady's preface to Chief governors especially p. xv which attests to the brutality of Tudor rule in Ireland in no uncertain terms.

⁵⁷ Edwards does refer to the political focus of those he calls ‘reform-centred’ historians, at first ascribing to them the production of an account where ‘military conquest and the putting down of rebellions was not nearly as central as once it had been’, A of A, p. 35, but within two pages this recalibration is treated as coterminous with the practice of ‘marginalizing episodes of killing and atrocity’ and refusing to ‘place them in their correct chronological and cultural contexts’, A of A, p. 38. Are they really both the same thing?

⁵⁸ For a recent look at the centrality of ‘surrender and regrant’ to Tudor Irish history see Maginn, C., ‘“Surrender and regrant” in the historiography of sixteenth-century Ireland’, Sixteenth Century Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies, 37/4 (2007), pp. 955–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. While largely agreeing with Maginn, he paints, perhaps, too stark a distinction between the deals arrived at by the crown and Gaelic-Irish figures in the Henrician and Elizabethan periods.

⁵⁹ Kiernan, B., Blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT, 2009)Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 606.

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 21.

⁶² Ibid., pp. 9–20.

⁶³ Ibid., pp. 23–33.

⁶⁴ Ibid., pp. 49–64.

⁶⁵ For example, see Kerrigan, J., Archipelagic English: literature, history, and politics, 1603–1707 (Oxford, 2008)Google Scholar; McCabe, R., Spenser's monstrous regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the poetics of difference (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar; Rankin, D., Between Spenser and Swift: English writing in seventeenth-century Ireland (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Canny, The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, pp. 66, 126 and especially 133–4. See also idem, ‘The ideology of English colonisation: from Ireland to America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 30 (1973), pp. 575–98. For more about these tendencies and a clear refutation of Canny's thesis, see Brady, ‘New English ideology in Ireland and the two Sir William Herberts’.

⁶⁷ Kiernan, Blood and soil, pp. 171, 186–7.

⁶⁸ Ibid., pp. 173–5.

⁶⁹ Recent efforts to produce histories of this kind include Rapple, Martial power and the case-studies to be found in Cunningham, B. and Gillespie, R., Stories from Gaelic Ireland: microhistories from the sixteenth-century Irish annals (Dublin, 2003)Google Scholar.