A chronicle of the Franciscan convent at Bridgewater, Somerset, in B.L., Cottonian MS Domitian A.ii, preserves a late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century record of the founding of a university in Dublin in 1358. The entry, on f. 5v, notes the founding of the university at Dublin as the second entry for the year 1358:

Since the main scribe of the chronicle — perhaps the astronomer John Somer, O.F.M. (fl. 1380-1409) — appears to have recorded his portion of the entries in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, this is one of the earliest extant recordings of this event. The founding in 1358 is confirmed by an entry in Rotulorum patentium et clausorum cancellariae Hiberniae calendarium recording, according to Fitzmaurice and Little, ‘the King[’s promise [of] special protection to scholars travelling thither’.

In June 1569 an English gentleman named Robert Mainwaring was seized on the borders of County Carlow by Irish rebels. They forced a noose around his neck, tightened it, and proceeded to drag him ‘up and down in a halter’, like a man condemned to be hanged. As with many terrorist acts, Mainwaring’s degradation was a carefully calculated publicity stunt, and it quickly achieved its objective. News of his predicament was relayed to London, where the identity of his captors aroused widespread alarm in government circles. He was persecuted on the orders of Sir Edmund Butler of Cloghgrenan, a leading Anglo-Irish lord who was the brother and principal heir of the then childless tenth earl of Ormond, Thomas Butler, and the recent recipient of some generous grants of land and office from the crown. Despite Sir Edmund’s position as deputy governor of the hitherto loyal Ormond lordship in Counties Kilkenny and Tipperary, it soon became clearthat his seizure of Mainwaring had signalled the outbreak of a general revolt by several branches of the Butler family.

In seventeenth-century Ireland the law increasingly defined and regulated relationships: between government and governed; between landlord and tenant; between master and servant; among the propertied; and even, by the end of the century, between Catholics and Protestants. This situation, similar to that throughout western Europe, signalled — at least superficially — England’s success in assimilating Ireland. The system of courts, centred on Dublin, and, through regular assizes and quarter sessions, borough, sheriffs’, church and manorial courts, reaching deep into the localities, was celebrated as a prime benefit, as well as the principal means, of anglicisation. The English policies which had progressively dismantled indigenous institutions, including the brehon law of Gaelic and gaelicised society, and replaced older Catholic with new Protestant élites, rested on statute, proclamation and judicial decree or process. Sincethe law was essential to England’s rule in Ireland, its opponents countered through the courts and legal argument: as a result, the functioning of the law, especially the quasi-judicial commissions which redistributed land, was politicised. Not only did the law accomplish, it also reflected these changes; for, bit by bit, Catholics were edged from the judicial bench and then disqualified from practising as barristers and attorneys. By the early eighteenth century the courts — publicly at least — were manned by and run for the burgeoning Protestant interest in Ireland.

The Irish land act of 1903, commonly known as the Wyndham act, was the most significant achievement of George Wyndham’s term as chief secretary for Ireland. From the time of his appointment in 1900 Wyndham made the formulation of such a bill a first priority for himself and for his principal advisers. His private correspondence, especially that with Arthur Balfour, reveals how determined he was that it should provide, not the stop-gap measure of earlier legislation, but an effective and final solution to the vexed problem of land occupancy in Ireland. In the end, however, the draft legislation owed less to the efforts of Wyndham and his advisers than to his shrewdness in allowing to a conference between landlord and tenant representatives the scope to evolve an agreed solution in line with guiding principles which he had previously enunciated. The resulting act provided the basis for tenant farmers to secure the ownership of their farms, so bringing to an end the land war that had raged in Ireland since the late 1870s.

With the Act of Union and the consequent disappearance of the College Green legislature, the Irish parliamentary tradition was subsumed into the broader Westminster framework. When the tradition re-emerged in an Irish context, it appeared as a curious combined product of the Westminster experience and of events which had little to do with any kind of parliament. In regard to its early political existence and experience, Dáil Éireann’s most obvious historical forerunner was the Jacobite parliament of 1689, which had its being in a state of open warfare with a rival political establishment and whose legitimacy and legality were largely of its own making. The critical difference between the two, from the historical viewpoint, was, of course, the apparent victory of the Dáil’s military supporters in December 1921. With victory came ultimate legitimacy, legality and some public credibility. From a purely administrative angle, this was also the moment when Dáil documents ceased to be merely propaganda material or, in more sensitive instances, evidence sought by Castle intelligence agents. Henceforth they would be important sources of the new state’s constitutional authority, and precedents for future legal and administrative practices.