Professor T W Moody, whose scholarly career was linked so closely to the history and fortunes of this journal, died in Dublin on 11 February 1984, in his seventy-seventh year. One of his former students, now a contributor to the New History of Ireland, remembers a conversation with him only a few days before, and tells of Theo’s lively consideration of plans and projects, of his mind, crystal clear as ever.

Grieved and shocked as his family, friends and colleagues are at his sudden going, they will surely find solace in this memory of full activity and vitality so close to the end. Theo was spared the suffering of long illness, inactivity, and the dependence that these entail, which would have been a hard trial for his active spirit. Indeed, affirmation is a word that comes to mind in remembering his life as a man and a scholar It is reflected in his devotion to his family, in his concern for the work and careers of his students, in his care and never-ceasing responsibility for the projects he had been involved in founding or originating, the two most notable examples being Irish Historical Studies and A New History of Ireland, and in his assistance and kindness to foreign scholars who came to work in Dublin.

Of course the past is dead. But it is kept alive by thinking and talking about it, and, above all, bv making it relevant to the present. The past is invoked variously, be it on a popular or on the academic level. In many areas, the popular view of the past is far removed from, and apparently uninfluenced by. the academic view, and, within limits, there is nothing wrong with that. Not every layman is expected to share the academic's understanding of the past. The matter becomes rather more serious when the reverse holds: that the view of the professional concurs with that of the lay people. If this is so, then indeed can it be said that those aspects of the past to which this applies are dead.

It is an axiom that each generation has to write history anew, partly, it seems, because understanding of the problems of the past becomes more refined, and partly because important aspects of the past may well appear in a different light to a new generation.

The modification of the Cromwellian land settlement in Ireland which followed the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 was regulated by two acts of parliament, one familiarly known as the act of settlement of 1662, the other as the act of explanation of 1665. They became the principal legal instruments upon which land ownership in the country was to rest for two centuries.

The act of settlement was the statutory version, with the major addition of a preamble, of the so-called ‘Gracious declaration’ of 30 November 1660, a royal proclamation which enunciated the broad principles upon which the settlement was to be based. In its statutory form these principles were: the vesting in the king, as trustee for the purposes of the act, of all land confiscated since 23 October 1641 as a consequence of the rebellion, with the general exception of the land held on that date by the church and Trinity College, Dublin; the general confirmation to the adventurers and Cromwellian soldiers of the land they held on 7 May 1659; and the restoration of various classes of dispossessed proprietors, chiefly those catholics who could prove, before the commissioners appointed to execute the terms of the act, that they were innocent of having participated in the rebellion. Those found innocent were to be restored to their estates immediately without having to wait until the Cromwellian planters had first been ‘reprised’ (i.e. compensated) with land of equal value.

At first sight the choice of the Augustinian priory of Kells in Ossory as the subject of a case study may seem a trifle arbitrary. True, its imposing ruins provide a feast for the archaeologist, but the loss of the original register — in place of which we have to settle for a few pages of tantalising excerpts — leaves the historian with a mere snack. Moreover, the priory falls well short of being a member of the big monastic league: at the Dissolution its income was barely quarter that of the great Augustinian abbey of St Thomas, Dublin. How can one justify choosing a subject which is both poorly documented and undistinguished? The short answer is that it is precisely this lack of distinctiveness which makes it representative of a large proportion of Augustinian houses founded in the wake of the Norman conquest.

The 1560s and 1570s saw the development of a new technique to meet the problem of governing Ireland: the establishment of provincial presidencies in Connacht and Munster, with composition agreements to finance these presidencies. This article re-examines the evidence for, and the nature of, the Connacht composition agreements, with particular reference to the lordships of Clanricard and Thomond, and analyses native reaction to the composition. It places the composition within the context of contemporary arguments about reform strategies for Ireland, and, finally, illustrates that the Composition of Connacht was essentially a form of taxation, and not, as historians have traditionally suggested, an agreement dealing with title to land.

English administrative policy in Elizabethan Ireland was influenced by the success of the provincial administrations of Wales and the north of England. This is most clearly reflected in the establishment of provincial presidencies in Connacht and Munster in 1569–70. The driving force behind English schemes for the administration of both provinces was Sir Henry Sidney, a former president of Wales, and lord deputy of Ireland, 1565–71 and 1575–78.

There were two main concerns of Tudor and Stuart governments in relation to the sea surrounding the coast of Ireland. First, and most important, there was the need to defend it from hostile ships belonging to England's enemies. This involved the security of England as much as Ireland and, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was usually controlled by the admiralty establishment in London. The setting out and supervision of ships to defend the Irish and English coasts was rarely delegated to an Irish authority. The second concern was the administration of the law maritime in Ireland. The law maritime included within its jurisdiction all crimes committed at sea or on the coast such as the seizure and robbing of ships by pirates and other sea-rovers, as well as cases involving death aboard ship, seamen's wages, salvage, wreck, damage by collision at sea, and other disputes involving the sea or the men who earned their living from it. In the medieval period such matters were often dealt with in the courts of chancery and exchequer, but in the later middle ages a separate admiralty court emerged in England where the civil maritime law was practised. The existence of the court, however, remained shadowy until it was enlarged and established on a permanent basis in the 1530s. At the same time, procedure in the court was simplified by the passing of an act which allowed for the prosecution of crimes at sea by special commissions according to common law.

To find authentic expressions of political feeling amongst the dispossessed élite in Ireland in the generation after the defeat of 1691 is no easy task. Between the treaty of Limerick and the early writings of John Curry and Charles O’Conor in the mid-eighteenth century Irish catholic laymen seemingly avoided committing their political views to paper, for reasons which are not difficult either to understand or to sympathise with. Only amongst the clergy do we find comment of a political nature, but even this on the whole was restricted to reaction to penal laws and persecution and was concerned with the position of the church rather than the laity. Occasionally glimpses of a broader picture emerge tantalisingly from the Continent where correspondents were beyond the range of British control, as in Ambassador da Cunha’s report on Irish conditions in 1710 or in Internuncio Spinelli’s account of 1723, both of which blamed the depressed state of the laity unequivocally on the violation of the treaty.

Professor Desmond Bowen has stressed the importance of the religious question in determining the development of the nation in nineteenth century Ireland:

religion was of paramount importance in the lives of the two peoples or ‘nations’ of Ireland. Their leaders ‘speaking in the name of religion’ could exercise tremendous power because they spoke to the hearts of men in a way that no secular political movement could ever do. It was ‘religion’ in a broad sense that divided the people shaped their different cultures and persuaded them to breed separately and to work separately in a rapidly changing society.

The Society of United Irishmen, formed in the autumn of 1791 as a middle-class club dedicated to achieving parliamentary reform and catholic emancipation, was eventually transformed into a mass-based, secret revolutionary organisation determined to establish a non-sectarian republic in Ireland. Approaching near extinction in 1794, the United Irishmen recovered within the next two years to become a formidable revolutionary threat. With amazing rapidity the United Irishmen managed to harness a politically-discontented middle class, radical artisans and tradesmen, economically and socially vexed peasants, amfa loose association of catholic agrarian rebels commonly known as Defenders into a more or less coherent force. The swiftness with which this” alliance was formed, burdened as it was with tensions along class and sectarian lines, was matched only by the quickness with which it collapsed under the strain of internal dissension and vigorous government repression.

Historians of any pre-industrial society, such as early seventeenth-century Ireland, must devote the bulk of their energies to the study of the rural world. Rural society, however, cannot be studied in isolation without a serious distortion of the reality of the social structure, since the urban element, although subsidiary, was nevertheless an important feature of pre-industrial society. There are, however, considerable problems in studying urban history in early modern Ulster since the sources can only be described as meagre. The basic sources used by many English early modern urban historians, the corporation records, are missing for all but a few Ulster towns. Only Belfast and Carrickfergus have corporation books for the pre-1641 period. The dearth of other important sources, such as freemen's rolls, means that areas of human activity such as the occupational structure of Ulster towns cannot be demonstrated with the accuracy that English early modern historians have been able to attain. Nor will it be possible to chart the detail of the day-to-day administrative or political structures of towns. Topics such as local elections, the minutiae of poor relief, and law and order must remain relatively shadowy This is not to argue that the history of the Ulster town cannot be written. The work of R. J. Hunter has demonstrated that it is possible by using fragments of central government and local records not only to reconstruct the administrative context of the establishment of towns but also to discover the social, economic, and political structures of individual towns. Ulster towns are among the better documented principal towns in Ireland for the early modern period. The interest of central government in the development of the plantation produced a number of surveys which shed considerable light on urban development. Indeed two of the principal towns in Ulster, Coleraine and Derry, are well documented because of the disputes which surrounded the activities of their developers, the Irish Society, and a rival planter, Sir Thomas Phillips. Ulster also provides an important case study in urbanisation since it contained an older pre-seventeenth-century urban network which was expanded and developed as part of both the informal colonisation and the more formal plantation scheme in Ulster. It is the aim of this paper to examine the development of this new urban network.

The Irish land act of 1881, it is generally agreed, was a victory for the Land League and Parnell, and nationalist policy with regard to the act and the attitude of southern tenants towards it have been many times subjected to detailed examination by historians of this period. In these analyses of the events of 1880–81, however, little reference is normally made to the part played by the different parties and interests in the north of the country. It is often assumed, for example, that the Ulster tenants held aloof from the campaign for reform, lending no more than occasional vocal support to the agitational efforts of tenants in the south and west. Indeed, they were later excoriated by William O'Brien, Michael Davitt and others not only for giving no support to the land movement but also for sabotaging Parnell's policy of testing the 1881 act by precipitately rushing into the land courts to take advantage of the new legislation: ‘that hard-fisted body of men, having done nothing themselves to win the act, thought of nothing but turning it to their own immediate use, and repudiating any solidarity with the southern and western rebels to whom they really owed it’. If, however, northern tenants were harshly judged by nationalist politicians in the years after 1881, the part played by the northern political parties in the history of the land bill has been either ignored or misunderstood by historians since that time. The Ulster liberals, for example, are rarely mentioned, the implication being that they made no contribution to the act even though it implemented almost exactly the programme on which they had been campaigning for much of the previous decade. The northern conservatives, on the other hand, are commonly seen as leading opponents of the bill, more intransigent than their party colleagues in the south, ‘quick to denounce any weakening of the opposition’ to reform, and ‘determined to keep the tory party up to the mark in defending the landlord interest’

One indication of Ireland's divided political culture is that there is no general agreement between most catholics and most protestants on a single set of national symbols. To take the case of a national festival, in the Republic of Ireland, where ninety-four per cent of the population is catholic, St Patrick's day (17 March) is celebrated at the popular level, the state level, and is a bank holiday. In Northern Ireland too St Patrick's day is celebrated, but chiefly by catholics (thirty-one per cent of the population), while the festival associated with the majority protestant population is Orangemen's day (12 July) when William III's victory at the battle of the Boyne(l July 1690 O.S.) is commemorated. Both these festivals are kept as bank holidays in Northern Ireland (though not in the rest of the United Kingdom); the Republic of Ireland, however, extends no recognition to 12 July.

It has long been recognised that the French revolution of 1848 had a profound effect on the rest of Europe. The overthrow of the Orleans monarchy and the establishment of the second republic were seen as heralding the dawn of a new age. Established governments, most of which had recognised that the Continent was approaching a period of crisis, anxiously expected the spread of the revolutionary contagion and the outbreak of a major European war, whilst the discontented elements found encouragement and inspiration from the events in Paris. In Great Britain the reaction to the events across the English Channel reflected this trend. This is the beginning', noted one member of the cabinet, recalling 1792; who will live to see the end?' The Chartists were jubilant, declaring that the time was now ripe to achieve their demands.

During the late nineteenth century Michael Davitt was a persistent advocate of a solid Irish-British working-class alliance to realise the political and social aspirations of the working people of both countries. Though he took it all rather more personally, the Irish Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor often made the same point. But the dynamic movement of Englishmen and Irishmen to challenge the establishment that governed both countries and to effect the restructuring of its economic and social bases did not develop during the century spanned by the lives of O’Connor and Davitt despite a brief period of mutually-perceived Anglo-Irish working-class common interest and some active collaboration. The functional life of this ’alliance’ between the English and Irish leaderships during the revolutionary year 1848 was of short duration. But in Lancashire, English Chartists and members of the Irish Confederation combined for several months of agitation before the fledgling fraternisation was smashed by arrests and flagging interest.

As a proportion of their total population in Ireland, the number of protestants who became committed to the home-rule cause was undoubtedly small; and that being so, their role in nationalist politics in this period has usually been either overlooked, minimised, or misrepresented. Indeed one I recent writer has claimed that in Ulster ‘almost nobody — except my grandfather’ was prepared to support Gladstone's first home-rule bill.

The purpose of this paper, though, is not only to describe the extent of protestant support for home rule, but to attempt an assessment of the influence in home-rule politics of the Irish Protestant Home Rule Association (hereafter I.P.H.R.A.). As a protestant organisation it both exercised an influence on British liberal thinking on home rule and provided a perspective on Irish nationalism that was, in some very important respects, different from that of the overwhelmingly catholic National League.

The document printed below has been preserved, somewhat unexpectedly among the series of Ministers’ Accounts in the Public Record Office, London. It is the account (or, more strictly. a record belonging to the process of auditing the account) of John Patrickschurch, clerk of wages on the expedition that Edmund Butler, the justiciar of Ireland, led in Munister between February and April 1317 against Robert and Edward Bruce and their Scottish army. The broad course of events during that critical period is well known. The Scots came south during February, approached Dublin, but, lacking the capacity to take it, continued south and west, ravaging the famine-stricken countryside. They eventually arrived at Castleconnell, by the Shannon just north of Limerick, apparently in the hope of benefiting from an alliance with the O'Briens of Thomond, one faction among whom had been in touch with them in Ulster The justiciar had moved south before the Bruces reached Dublin. He raised an army in Munster and proceeded to follow the Scots closely as they progressed through Tipperary. The royal army eventually encamped at Ludden, just south of Limerick. For some days the two forces confronted each other. Then Robert and Edward retreated. Their expectations of the O'Briens had proved vain; they were desperately short of supplies; and they may well have heard of the arrival of Roger Mortimer, the king's lieutenant, who had landed at Youghal, from where he set out on 11 April to join Butler and the army The document is of some interest for the light it can shed on military organisation and on the accounting procedures of the Irish exchequer But it is worth printing in full above all for the detailed information it contains about one of the darkest yet most decisive episodes of the Bruce invasion.

The relationship of Ireland to the Commonwealth during the period of its membership was a tortuous one. Forced to accept dominion status under threat of the renewal of Anglo-Irish hostilities, Ireland was not an enthusiastic member of the club as were the older dominions. The Constitutional Amendment (No. 27) Bill, enacted on 11 December 1936, removed all references to the crown and governor general from the constitution while the Executive Authority (External Relations) Bill, enacted the next day, recognised the crown only for purposes of diplomatic representation and international agreements. These two measures, commonly referred to as the External Relations Act, left Ireland a more or less undeclared republic with ambiguous links to the Commonwealth. Wartime neutrality differentiated Ireland even further from the other dominions, aroused British anger and brought the question of Ireland's constitutional status into even greater prominence. Ireland was, the Canadian high commissioner in Dublin considered in 1944, a more or less unknown quantity' The Canadian government, though it would have preferred a different choice, respected Ireland's neutrality and resented British actions, taken without prior consultation, that might have contrived to drive Ireland from the Commonwealth. The end of the war removed a major cause of grievance but left Ireland's nosition unresolved.

It is not surprising that Raymond Williams should cite Lady Morgan’s comment in 1818 that Ireland had for long been governed by a ‘bureaucratie or office tyranny’ as an early example of the use of the term. Dublin Castle, ‘the architectural emblem of England’s rule over Ireland’, with its extensive coercive and financial powers, appeared to many as a ‘congested district of impervious officialdom’ This unique apparatus of state was characterised by The Times as a ‘narrow bureaucracy saturated with bad traditions of race and creed’ The term ‘bureaucracy’ formed part of mid-Victorian political rhetoric. It cannot be seen as a sociological distortion of administrative history resulting from a rigid application of Max Weber’s ‘ideal type’, an analytical concept central to his writings on bureaucracy Dublin Castle represented a pure bureaucracy of a type the English press feared and assumed to be a continental aberration. To the nationalists, the Irish form of rule was seen as a ‘nominal parliamentary government really ruled by a bureaucracy’ The political structure within which the bureaucracy operated rendered it unrepresentative and unaccountable to parliament, and a constitutional enigma in growing debates on ministerial and civil service power.

Gerald Balfour's appointment as chief secretary for Ireland on 4 July 1895 was as unexpected as it was intriguing. Recording the event in his diary Sir Edward Hamilton, Gladstone's former private secretary and now assistant financial secretary to the Treasury, described it as ‘quite a surprise and a considerable experiment’, and the Carlton Club, noted more for its relentless suspicion of Irish chief secretaries than its welcoming of surprises and experiments, grumbled ominously. After all Gerald Balfour had led an uneventful academic life at Cambridge followed by a back-bench career in the house of commons that had proved neither prominent nor promising, and he clearly owed his new position to the support of his illustrious brother, Arthur, and the unbridled nepotism of his uncle, Lord Salisbury, the prime minister. Like his avuncular patron, he soon developed a weakness for ‘blazing indiscretion’ and in his first major policy speech to his Leeds constituents after his election he spoke of ‘killing home rule with kindness’ This rather glib phrase provoked a furore among the Irish nationalists and aroused the scepticism of many Irish unionists, though, as Gerald Balfour subsequently protested, he was merely echoing the strategy his brother had pursued with full unionist support in the 1880s.