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V. Magna Carta Hiberniae

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

H. G. Richardson
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Extract

For long there has been accepted as genuine a charter, purporting to be issued by Henry III, which follows the text of his first reissue of the Great Charter in favour of his English subjects but which has been to some extent modified to adapt it to Irish conditions. This document, to which the title Magna Carta Hiberniae has been applied, has received an official cachet by its inclusion, with no mark of suspicion, in the first volume of the Early statutes of Ireland, edited by H. F. Berry. In undertaking a careful enquiry into the transmission of the text and its historical background, Dr. Dudley Edwards has performed a valuable service and, as a result, the authenticity of the supposed charter is, at least, very much open to question. He might, indeed, have gone further than he has done and have stated as a positive conclusion his tentative conjecture ‘ that Magna Carta Hiberniae is an adaptation of Henry's first charter, compiled in Ireland ’.

Type
Historical Revisions
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 3 , Issue 9 , March 1942 , pp. 31 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1942

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References

page 31 note 1 Early stat. Ire., John to Hen. V, pp. 5-19.

page 31 note 2 Féil-sgribinn Eóin Mhic Néill, pp. 307-18. Two minor corrections should be made, but these in no way affect the argument. On p. 309, ‘ twelfth century enactments ’ should, of course, read ‘ thirteenth ’ : and the Liber Horn is a London, not an exchequer, record (pp. 310, 316).

page 32 note 1 A full collation of the two texts will be found in Stat. of realm, i, Charters of liberties, pp. 14-6.

page 32 note 2 Cf. McKechnie, , Magna Carta (1914), pp. 245-6, 345.Google Scholar

page 32 note 3 Late in the fourteenth century there was some selection (Early stat. Ire. John-Hen. V, pp. 492-8), and the position in the fifteenth century cannot be briefly summarised.

page 33 note 1 Ibid., pp. 282, 506.

page 33 note 2 The language of the letter (for text see Cal. fat. rolls, 1216-25, p. 31) seems plainly to bear only one construction, that the charter of 12 November 1216 was sent unaltered. It is the liberties granted to England that are reduced to writing and sealed : they are extended to Ireland by the king's grace and gift.

page 33 note 3 Early stat. Ire., John-Hen. V, p. 280.

page 33 note 4 The account of this ‘ statute ’ in Richardson and Sayles, The early statutes, pp. 4, 18-9, 23, is supplemented in Law Quar. Rev., liv. 391-2.

page 33 note 5 Delisle, L., Recueil des actes de Henri II, introduction, pp. 312-6.Google Scholar Cf.Haskins, C. H., Norman institutions, p. 190.Google Scholar