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Historical revisit: Edmund Curtis, A history of medieval Ireland (1923, 1938)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

James Lydon
James Lydon*
Affiliation:
Trinity College Dublin
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Extract

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These verses were written by the Irish poet to express his grief at the impact of the Williamite victory at the battle of the Boyne and all that followed for Ireland. They were chosen two hundred years later by the historian Edmund Curtis to make clear his attitude towards Ireland’s past. In 1923, just after home rule was secured for what was officially known as Saorstát Éireann (Irish Free State), he published his history of medieval Ireland, and where a dedication would normally be printed he inserted ‘The Absentee Lordship’ and followed it with these verses. In doing this, Curtis left no doubt that in his view medieval Ireland was a lordship wrongfully attached to the English crown and that it should rightfully have been a kingdom under its own native dynastic ruler. For this he was subsequently denounced as unhistorical, and to this day, especially in the view of the so-called revisionists, he is commonly regarded as not only out of date, but dangerous as well. It was argued that Curtis used the medieval past to justify the emergence of a self-governing state in Ireland. To quote just one example, Steven Ellis, the best of the medieval revisionists, wrote in 1987 that ‘historians like Edmund Curtis concentrated on such topics as friction between the Westminster and Dublin governments, the Gaelic revival, the Great Earl uncrowned king of Ireland, the blended race and the fifteenth-century home rule movement’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 124 , November 1999 , pp. 535 - 548
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1999

Footnotes

*

A history of medieval Ireland: from 1110 to 1513. By Edmund Curtis. Pp vi, 436, maps, illus. Dublin: Maunsell & Roberts. 1923.

A history of medieval Ireland : from 1086 to 1513. By Edmund Curtis. Second edition. Pp xxxv, 433, maps, illus. London: Methuen. 1938.

References

1 Curtis, Med. Ire., 1st ed. (1923). It was omitted in the second edition (1938). (Subsequent references are to the second edition unless otherwise stated.)

2 Ellis, Steven, ‘Nationalist historiography and the English and Gaelic worlds in the middle ages’ in Brady, Ciaran (ed.), Interpreting Irish history (Dublin, 1994), p. 162Google Scholar; he also included Green, A.S., The making of Ireland and its undoing, 1200–1600 (Dublin, 1908) and Eoin MacNeill, Phases of Irish history (Dublin, 1919)Google Scholar in his condemnation.

3 A much fairer assessment of Curtis in the general context of writings on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Ireland is Watt, J. A., ‘Approaches to the history of fourteenth-century Ireland’ in Cosgrove, Art (ed.), A new history of Ireland, ii: Medieval Ireland, 1169–1534 (Oxford, 1987), pp 303–13Google Scholar. In an interview published in 1993 Brendan Bradshaw, the eminent historian of early modern Ireland, included Curtis with MacNeill when he was questioned about historians he admired. Curtis he called ‘the great historian of medieval Ireland’, and said that both of them ‘tried to restore Irish historical experience in a way that was both sympathetic and highly scholarly’ (History Ireland, i, no. 1 (1993), pp 52-3Google Scholar). Earlier Bradshaw had written about ‘an emerging tradition of Irish historical scholarship which was thrust aside by the impatient young men of the 1930s’ and insisted that it was time ‘to recover the vision of its great luminaries Eoin MacNeill and Edmund Curtis’ (‘Nationalism and historical scholarship in modern Ireland’ in I.H.S., xxvi, no. 104 (Nov. 1989), p. 350)Google Scholar.

4 Warren, W. L., ‘King John and Ireland’ in Lydon, James (ed.), England and Ireland in the later middle ages (Dublin, 1981), pp 26–39Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., p.36.

6 Curtis, Med. Ire., 1st ed., p. 109.

7 Duffy, Seán, Ireland in the middle ages (Dublin & London, 1997), p. 173CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Another recent historian, Smith, Brendan, in his Colonisation and conquest in medieval Ireland: the English in Louth, 1170–1330 (Cambridge, 1999)Google Scholar, does list both editions in his bibliography, but again has only one reference to Curtis in the text (p. 100).

8 Connolly, S. J. (ed.), The Oxford companion to Irish history (Oxford, 1998), p. 131Google Scholar. Frame does acknowledge that the history ‘had the unusual merit of tackling both Gaelic and colonial society’ and that Curtis did make much original material available in his many editions of original documents.

9 Brady (ed.), Interpreting Irish history, p. 39.

10 Curtis, Med. Ire., p. 206 (virtually unchanged from 1st ed., p. 257).

11 Ibid., p. 224 (1st ed., pp 275–6).

12 Ibid., pp 309–36. (It is chapter 13 in 1st ed., pp 356–83).

13 Ibid., p. 325. In 1st ed., p. 370, he had expressed it rather differently: ‘The first Yorkist king owed a family debt to Ireland, and so had perforce to leave the Home Rule lords in power.’

14 Ibid., p. 339. In 1st ed., p. 381, he calls him ‘vice-king’.

15 Bryan, Donough, Gerald Fitzgerald, the Great Earl of Kildare, 1456–1513 (Dublin, 1933).Google Scholar

16 Ibid., Preface, p. ix.

17 Sayles, G. O., ‘The rebellious first earl of Desmond’ in Watt, J. A., Morrall, J.B. and Martin, F. X. (eds), Medieval studies presented to Aubrey Gwynn, S.J. (Dublin, 1961), p. 226Google Scholar.

18 For the best account of this ‘revolution’ see Ciaran Brady, ‘ “Constructive and instrumental”: the dilemma of Ireland’s first “new historians” ’ in idem (ed.), Interpreting Irish history, pp 3–31.

19 Sayles, G. O., ‘The legal proceedings against the first earl of Desmond’ in Anal. Hib., no. 23 (1966), pp 203-29Google Scholar.

20 MacNeill, Eoin, Phases of Irish history (Dublin, 1919)Google Scholar, Foreword.

21 The best short account is still Moody, T. W., ‘Edmund Curtis’ in Hermathena, no. 63 (1944), pp 69–78Google Scholar; see also idem, ‘The writings of Edmund Curtis’ in I.H.S., xii, no. 12 (Sept. 1943), pp 393–400.

22 Curtis, Edmund, Roger of Sicily, and the Normans in lower Italy, 1016–1154 (London, 1912).Google Scholar

23 Curtis, Edmund, ‘The English and Ostmen in Ireland’ in E.H.R., xxiii (1908), pp 209-19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Curtis, Edmund, ‘The clan system among English settlers in Ireland’ in E.H.R., xxv (1910), pp 116-20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This used a transcript of an important chancery writ preserved in the Harris collection (N.L.I.) and shows Curtis’s acquaintance with an important source largely neglected by contemporary Irish historians.

25 See in particular Curtis, Edmund, ‘The wars of Turlogh: an historical documentary’ in Irish Review, ii (1913), pp 577-86,644-7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; iii (1913), pp 34–41.

26 Curtis, Edmund, ‘Irish history and its popular versions’ in Irish Rosary, xxxix, no. 5 (May 1925), p. 321Google Scholar.

27 Stat. Ire., Hen. VI, p. 645.

28 The best general account of the argument and the historical context is still Cosgrove, Art, ‘Parliament and the Anglo-Irish community: the declaration of 1460’ in Cosgrove, Art and McGuire, J. I. (eds), Parliament and community (Belfast, 1983), pp 25–41Google Scholar. See also Lydon, James, ‘Ireland and the English crown, 1171–1541’ in I.H.S., xxix, no. 115 (May 1995), pp 281-94Google Scholar.

29 For Molyneux see Simms, J. G., William Molyneux of Dublin (Dublin, 1982)Google Scholar. Molyneux’s, The case of Ireland stated, with an introduction by Simms, J. G., was reprinted in facsimile in 1997 (Dublin)Google Scholar.

30 Gilbert, J.T., History of the viceroys of Ireland (Dublin, 1865), p. 587Google Scholar. In his text he did write that ‘parliament publicly enunciated the independence of the legislature in Ireland’ (p. 369).

31 Curtis,Med. Ire., 1st ed., p. 369 (2nd ed., p. 322).

32 In the second edition Curtis was more cautious, inserting a footnote that ‘Irish nationalism in the modern sense cannot be looked for in the acts or words of this Parliament’. But he did retain his view that in it Ireland did ‘assert a complete separateness from England except for the personal link of the Crown’ (p. 322).

33 The only two who have written on the subject have concentrated on the economic and monetary aspects: J. Moore McDowell, ‘The devaluation of 1460 and the origins of the Irish pound’ in I.H.S., xxv, no. 97 (May 1986), pp 19–28; S. G. Ellis, ‘The struggle for control of the Irish mint, 1460-c. 1506’ in R.I.A. Proc., lxxviii (1978), sect. C, pp 17–36.

34 Curtis, ‘Irish history and its popular versions’, pp 321, 323.

35 Binchy, D. A., ‘Secular institutions’ in Dillon, Myles (ed.), Early Irish society (Dublin, 1954), p. 62Google Scholar.

36 Bryan, Great Earl ofKildare, Foreword, p. vii.

37 For example, when dealing with the conquest of Leinster and referring to its reputation as a source of gold, he remarks that two hundred years later it was still called ‘a land of gold’ by a Gaelic poet. In support of this he refers to an inauguration ode of c. 1376, contained in two R.I.A. manuscripts (Curtis, Med. Ire., 1st ed., p.51n.1).

38 Moody, ‘The writings of Edmund Curtis’, p. 393.

39 Curtis, Med. Ire., 1st ed., p. 36.

40 Richardson, H. G., ‘English institutions in medieval Ireland’ in I.H.S., i, no. 4 (Sept. 1939), p. 382Google Scholar.

41 Moody, ‘Edmund Curtis’, p. 76.

42 See, for example, Curtis, Med. Ire., 1st ed., pp 256, 258, 273, 275, 282.

43 ‘Few, if any, books on Irish history in recent years can have achieved the distinction accorded to the first volume of Ormond deeds, namely a leader in The Times (27 March 1933) and a front page article in The Times Literary Supplement (“Strongbow’s Ireland”, 21 September 1933)’ (Quinn, D. B., review in I.H.S., i, no. 1 (Mar. 1938), p. 81Google Scholar).

44 Curtis, Edmund, Richard II in Ireland, 1394–5, and submissions of the Irish chiefs (Oxford, 1927)Google Scholar; see also idem, ‘Unpublished letters from Richard II in Ireland, 1394–5’ in R.I.A. Proc, xxxvii (1927), sect. C, pp 276–303.

45 Curtis, Edmund, ‘Sheriffs’ accounts of the honor of Dungarvan, of Tweskard in Ulster, and of County Waterford’ in R .I.A. Proc., xxxix (1929), sect. C, pp 1–17Google Scholar; idem, ‘Sheriffs’ accounts for County Tipperary, 1275–6’ in R.I.A. Proc, xlii (1934), sect C, pp 65–95; idem, ‘Two unpublished charters of John de Courcy, Princeps Ulidiae’ in Belfast Natur. Hist. Soc. Proc, sess. 1928–9 (1930), pp 2–10; Conway, Agnes, Henry VII’s relations with Scotland and Ireland, 1485–98 (Cambridge, 1932), pp 118-13Google Scholar.

46 As Richardson said in his long review, ‘the book will remain an indisputable guide to all who are interested in medieval Ireland’ (‘English institutions in medieval Ireland’, p. 392).

47 Despite this, and Curtis’s known love of and use of the Irish language, an Irish translation of his history did not appear in print until 1956: Stair na hÉireann sa mheánaois, trans. Tomás de Bhial (Dublin, 1956).