State-sponsored plantations were an instrument in the anglicisation of Irish society from the late 1550s, and the plantation in 1620 of the Gaelic O’Rourke lordship in Leitrim represents a stage in the development of plantation policy. With the exception of a valuable overview by Victor Treadwell, focusing on the involvement of the first duke of Buckingham, historians have largely neglected the Leitrim plantation. This study seeks to explore the programme for the anglicisation of native society in the area, as illustrated in the plantation instructions. Aspirations will be compared with what can be gleaned of the actual implementation of the plantation, drawing largely on the official documentation and correspondence generated by the 1622 commission of inquiry, which was established because of unease with various aspects of state performance in Ireland, including the condition of the plantations. In the case of Leitrim, such concern was amply justified. A further theme is the impact of the plantation on the native population, and especially on the smaller freeholders who were dispossessed under the plantation. Through the natives’ complaints and other material, the 1622 documentation affords rare insights into the impact of the plantation on Gaelic society. Finally, to assess the success of the plantation, the development of the settler community to 1641 will be briefly outlined.

In 1252 Geoffrey de Geneville married Matilda de Lacy, the elder coheiress of Meath and Weobley, thereby becoming lord of Trim in Ireland and Ludlow in the Welsh March. By birth, however, this second son of Simon, lord of Joinville, was the lord of Vaucouleurs in Champagne and was thus an ‘exotic’ figure to find involved in late thirteenth-century Ireland. While Geoffrey was not alone in being a landowner in Ireland with continental origins, since he was part of what Robert Bartlett calls the ‘aristocratic diaspora’ — the movement of western European aristocrats from their homelands into new areas where they settled in order to augment their fortunes — he was exceptional in that he was the most successful figure to emerge in Ireland as a result of Henry III’s tendency to invest foreigners from the court circle with lands in outlying areas. This pattern has been described as a policy by H. W. Ridgeway, who saw an intention to secure potentially troublesome border regions as one reason behind Henry’s distribution of peripheral patronage to ‘aliens’; and, indeed, Geoffrey numbered himself among the upright men of different nationalities placed in Ireland by the descendants of Henry II in order to bring the island to the obedience of the English king and to conserve the peace. The success that Geoffrey made of his grant of Trim related to the ‘secure nature’ of that particular lordship. However, that cannot be the whole story. There is no firm evidence that either William de Valence or Geoffrey de Lusignan, Henry III’s half-brothers, or the Savoyard knight Otto de Grandison, members of the Poitevin and Savoyard entourages of Henry III and the Lord Edward and the recipients of grants in the securely held areas of Wexford, Louth and Tipperary respectively, ever visited the lordship of Ireland in spite of their receipt of valuable lands there.

In 1440, for the first and only time in the late middle ages, the Irish in England were treated as aliens for taxation purposes. At the Reading session of the parliament of 1439–40 the Commons had granted an alien subsidy. It was a poll tax, to be paid at the rate of 16d. per head by householders and at 6d. per head by non-householders, by all those either not born in England or Wales or who did not have letters of denization, that is, naturalisation. Men of religious obedience and children under the age of twelve were also exempted, as were alien women married to English or Welsh men. The grant was to last for three years, and the first assessments were to be made around Easter 1440 for a tax to be collected in two parts, at Easter and the following Michaelmas. Caught in the tax net were Gascons and Normans, Bretons and Flemings, Scots and Channel Islanders, French and Italians, Spanish and Portuguese, the occasional Icelander, Swede and Finn — and the Irish. Like all new taxes, it met with resistance, and pressure groups such as the Genoese and Hanseatic merchants were soon able to claim exemption by virtue of their charters. There were also protests from Ireland. The earl of Ormond, as head of the Dublin administration, pointed out to the king that this was something new and asked Henry VI that Englishmen born in Ireland should have the same rights and freedom as Englishmen born in England.

This article examines a hitherto unexplored source for the history of the Irish clergy in England — English episcopal ordination lists — to see what they can reveal about Irish clergy in medieval England: their geographic origins, their numbers and, less tangibly, their motivation both for coming to England and for remaining there.

Episcopal ordination lists survive, with gaps, for most English dioceses from the later thirteenth century onwards and are the formal records of the diocesan ordination ceremonies held quarterly by bishops or their suffragans, at which men wishing to be ordained to the priesthood were ordained successively to the orders of acolyte, subdeacon, deacon and priest. The ordination lists can add substantially to our knowledge of the vast mass of the medieval clergy, especially the unbeneficed, who frequently remain almost hidden from the historian. Episcopal ordination lists detail information such as the date and place of ordination, the ordinand’s diocese of origin, and occasionally a more precise place of origin and educational qualifications. If the candidate for ordination belonged to a religious order, usually this order and the actual house to which he was attached are listed. Thus these lists can provide a substantial corpus of information, particularly since every member of the clergy ought to be included in the ordination lists as they climbed the ranks of the clerical hierarchy; the same information should be available for everybody, whether they later became an archbishop or found themselves scratching out a living as an underpaid vicar or an unbeneficed mass priest. Over the last few years the computerisation of this material has produced a database of English medieval clergy drawn from the contents of surviving English episcopal ordination lists.

In dedicating his Specimen of the critical history of the Celtic religion and learning to Robert, Lord Molesworth, John Toland carefully outlined his attitude to historical writing: the ‘fundamental law of a historian is, daring to say whatever is true, and not daring to write any falsehood; neither being swayed by love nor hatred, nor gain’d by favour or interest: so he ought of course to be as a man of no time or country, of no sect or party: which I hope the several nations, concern’d in this present enquiry, will find to be particularly true of me’. These words, it will be contended, ought to be the starting-point for treating Toland, in the precision of his own words, ‘as a man of no time or country’. Recently there has been a renaissance of historical interest in the significance of the life and thought of Toland; particular attention has been paid to the question of his religious, cultural and national identity. Variously described as the ‘first Irish philosopher’, an adventurer in scholarship, ‘crazy John’, a ‘traditional Irish trickster’, a postmodernist and even a post-nationalist, Toland’s reputation as an elusive and ambiguous figure has replaced an older historiography that was confident in identifying him as a radical deist, or perhaps a ‘pantheist’ on the margins of the Enlightenment canon of philosophers of reason.

The Regency Crisis that proceeded from the apparent insanity of George III in October 1788 has a twofold importance in Irish political history. In an Anglo-Irish context, it can be argued that this episode crucially accelerated the hardening of British opinion in support of a political union with Ireland, and therefore marked a stage in the long ‘prelude to union’. But the Regency Crisis was also significant in purely domestic terms. Its consequences for the development of Irish parliamentary politics form the central concern of this article, the primary object of which is to analyse the course of events in Ireland and especially the evolving motives of the key individuals and factions in opposition between November 1788 and March 1789. The process not only made for intrinsically thrilling political drama; the ‘opposition’ response to the machinations of government on this issue paved the way for the advent of an Irish Whig party that was to transform the balance of power in the Irish parliament during the course of its final decade.

Most studies of Anglo-Irish relations in the middle ages understandably concentrate on the activity of the English in Ireland, and unintentionally but inevitably this can leave the impression that the movement of people was all one way. But this was not so, and one group who travelled in the opposite direction were some of the merchants and seamen involved in the Anglo-Irish trade of the period. Irish merchants and seamen travelled widely and could be found in Iceland, Lisbon, Bordeaux, Brittany and Flanders, but probably their most regular trade remained with their closest neighbour and political overlord: England. They visited most western and southern English ports, but inevitably were found most frequently in the west, especially at Chester and Bristol. The majority of them stayed for a few days or weeks, as long as their business demanded. Others settled permanently in England, or, perhaps more accurately, re-settled in England, for those who came to England both as settlers and visitors were mainly the Anglo-Irish of the English towns in Ireland and not the Gaelic Irish. This makes it difficult to estimate accurately the numbers of both visitors and settlers, because the status of the Anglo-Irish was legally that of denizen, and record-keepers normally had no reason to identify them separately. They may, therefore, be hard to distinguish from native Englishmen of similar name outside the short periods when governments (central or urban) temporarily sought to restrict their activities. However, the general context within which they worked is quite clear, and this article considers three main aspects of that context: first, the pattern of the trade which attracted Irish merchants to England; second, the role of the Irish merchants and seamen in the trade; and third, examples of individual careers of merchants and seamen who settled in England.

In April 1421 the Irish parliament, meeting at Dublin, chose the archbishop of Armagh and Sir Christopher Preston as its messengers to convey to the king in England a long list of complaints. Among these was the following:

This was, of course, something of an exaggeration. The Inns of Court certainly did not exist at the time of the English ‘conquest’ of Ireland; indeed, it is now fairly certain that the inns only came into existence around 1340. It is also clear, however, that some kind of organised legal education was taking place in London before the inns were created, certainly as early as the 1270s and quite possibly as early as 1260, though definitely not in the twelfth century. We also know that as early as 1287 Irishmen (or at least one specific Irishman, Robert de St Michael) were crossing the channel ‘causa addiscendi in Banco regis apud Westm’’, that is, specifically for the purpose of legal education at Westminster through attendance at the king’s court there.

Traditional accounts of the establishment of the 36th (Ulster) Division in October 1914 suggest that this unit was formed purely from the pre-war U.V.F. Writing in 1922, Cyril Falls (himself an officer in both the U.V.F. and the 36th Division) declared:

Modern historians have echoed this view. Tom Johnstone, for example, has noted that ‘the battalions of the (36th) Division, based on the Ulster Volunteer Force (U.V.F.) order of battle, had been in existence since before the war’. Meanwhile Philip Orr has even suggested that the 36th Division was a ‘covenanting army’, all its members supposedly having signed the Ulster Covenant opposing home rule. In this article the validity of these claims will be considered, particularly with regard to the continuity in personnel and equipment between the U.V.F. and the 36th Division and the military efficiency that the formation had achieved by the time it arrived on the Western Front.

In the second half of the twentieth century few subjects have excited more extensive historical debate in the western world than black slavery. American investigation has centred upon the actual operation of the institution. An impressively wide range of historical techniques, cliometrics, comparative history, cultural studies, the imagination of the novelist, have all been employed in a vigorous attempt to recover and evaluate the slave past. In Britain, the first great power to abolish the Atlantic trade and emancipate her slaves, the emphasis has been on the development of the anti-slavery movement, described by W. E. H. Lecky in 1869 as ‘a crusade’ to be rated ‘amongst the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations’, and therefore an obvious candidate for twentieth-century revision. Any discussion of black slavery in the New World immediately involves the historian in economic matters. Here the nineteenth-century orthodoxy launched by Adam Smith and developed by J. S. Mill and his friend J. E. Cairnes, author of The slave power (1862) and professor of political economy and jurisprudence in Queen’s College, Galway, saw slavery as both morally wrong and economically unsound, an anachronism in the modern world. Since the 1970s this view has been challenged head-on by American historians arguing that, however morally repugnant, slavery was a dynamic system, an engine of economic progress in the U.S.A. Such a thesis inevitably revives some of the arguments used by the nineteenth-century defenders of slavery and has equally inevitably attracted bitter anti-revisionist denunciation.

In early August 1910 readers of Reynolds’s Newspaper, a radical weekly journal noted as much for its detailed coverage of divorce court proceedings as for its political radicalism (and in 1911 one of the ‘immoral’ English Sunday papers targeted by Irish ‘vigilance committees’), may have perused the weekly political column written by T.P. O’Connor. ‘T.P.’, the M.P. for Liverpool Scotland, was anything but a disinterested columnist, and with John Redmond, John Dillon and Joseph Devlin formed the inner leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party and Ireland’s nationalist movement.

Throughout the political crisis of early 1910 O’Connor had been the main London-based conduit for communications between the Irish Party and Asquith’s cabinet, and in particular Lloyd George and the Liberal chief whip, the Master of Elibank. The outcome of the January 1910 general election, which had given the balance of power in the House of Commons to the Irish nationalists, and John Redmond’s use of that power to force Asquith to act to end the veto powers of the House of Lords over parliamentary legislation, had enhanced both Redmond’s status in Ireland and the importance of home rule as an issue that had to be resolved.

The enforced union of England and Scotland under the Cromwellian Protectorate has been extensively studied, not least because it stands half-way between the union of the crowns in 1603 and the Act of Union of 1707. Without this historical imperative, however, the way in which Ireland was incorporated into the English state remains largely neglected. When dealing with the theory and practice of union in the 1650s, historians have usually dismissed Ireland in a few lines before turning to Scotland — an approach which creates the impression that the English state had absorbed Ireland almost unconsciously. According to David Stevenson, ‘Ireland presented few problems as to her status once conquered ... When the English Parliament had abolished monarchy in England and established the republic, it had done the same in Ireland: the new Commonwealth was that of England and Ireland.’ Others have agreed. Ivan Roots has described the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland as creating ‘a de facto union’, while the Instrument of Government of 1653 (which provided the constitutional basis for protectoral government in England) ‘assumed a union’ between the two nations. By the end of 1653, as John Morrill asserts, Ireland was ‘presumed’ to have been ‘incorporated into an enhanced English state’. Thus, either by the mere fact of conquest, or by implication through the 1653 constitution, union had been achieved without any complications.

On 7 August 1837, the first day of voting in an election for two county seats, there was an altercation on the steps of the courthouse in Carlow town. This was not a typical Irish election riot, however, although large numbers of excited supporters of the rival candidates were milling around in the streets adjacent to the building. The altercation, which involved shouted abuse and a physical struggle, took place between two men only: one was the town’s sub-inspector of constabulary, and the other was its resident magistrate (R.M.) — in other words, Carlow’s two principal government-appointed upholders of law and order. The resulting scandal was to have significant implications. It led to a great deal of heated correspondence with Dublin Castle, more than one constabulary inquiry, several court cases, and many questions before a subsequent select committee, to say nothing of numerous petitions, newspaper articles and pamphlets; but, most important, it ultimately precipitated the resignation of Colonel James Shaw Kennedy, the first inspector-general of the Irish Constabulary. This article will attempt to explain why an apparently minor scuffle in Carlow town created a crisis in Irish policing in the late 1830s.

The Irish Race Conference met in Paris at the end of January 1922 to initiate a new world organisation that would link the people of Ireland with their cousins around the globe. The gathering of delegates attracted comment wherever the Irish had settled, and even the Belfast Telegraph noted its opening ceremonies. The South African Irish newspaper, The Republic, heralded the conference as a ‘family reunion on a world wide scale’, but, like many family gatherings, disagreement was to follow in its wake. The idea of a conference was first mooted in February 1921 by the Irish Republican Association of South Africa (I.R.A.S.A.), to support the efforts then being made to win international recognition for an independent Irish republic. However, the I.R.A.S.A. did not see its work stopping there, envisaging the creation of a worldwide organisation that would link the Irish overseas with their compatriots at home. Over the following months the idea was developed into plans for an Irish International that would pursue a programme of social, cultural and economic objectives in Ireland and abroad. As The Republic explained,

Just how such wide-ranging aims were to be realised would prove a matter of dissent among delegates when they assembled twelve months later in Paris. But in February 1921 the proposal inspired only enthusiasm and hope for the future.

The idea of the conference was a product of the belief prevalent at the time that the Irish had ‘yet to give to the world the best which is in them’. The official programme for the new race organisation captured this sentiment, declaring the organisers’ belief that ‘Ireland has much to give to the world’. It was widely expected that this potential would be realised once the Irish were free to govern themselves. It is thus ironic that it was ultimately over the relationship between the new Irish government and the overseas Irish that the conference, and all its worthy ambitions, would founder.

On Wednesday 24 March 1847 a national day of fast and humiliation was observed throughout the United Kingdom, imploring, in the words of the royal proclamation, ‘the removal of those heavy judgments which our manifold sins and provocations have most justly deserved’. The fast-day was marked by a general stoppage of work and the opening of places of worship for special services. Substantial collections for the relief of famine distress in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands were made at church and chapel doors as the congregations retired. The effect was, as one Hampshire clergyman observed, dramatic: ‘The whole nation has this day lamented their sins and prayed for pardon; imagination can scarcely picture a more affecting scene than that of millions of people, assembled at the same moment in the presence of the Almighty, imploring his forgiveness, praying for grace to amend their lives, and deprecating the continuance of his displeasure.’

What was the meaning of this seemingly archaic reaction to the Irish Famine? Considered through the filter of late twentieth-century religious scepticism, it might appear at best a marginal distraction from the catastrophic drama of the Famine, at worst a cynical attempt by the political establishment to lay a moral smokescreen around the question of responsibility for famine relief by reviving pre-modern conceptions of divine agency. To understand the significance of the fast-day and its repercussions, however, it is necessary to recognise the extent to which a Christian — and more particularly a Protestant evangelical — world-view permeated early Victorian British society.

The character of modern Ireland after partition has long been the subject of debate, by columnists, poets, novelists and historians. John Whyte’s outstanding study of the process by which what he called the ‘Catholic moral code’ became enshrined in the ‘law of the state’ summarised the ‘remarkable consensus’ achieved in the years 1923-37, a time when there was ‘overwhelming agreement that traditional Catholic values should be maintained, if necessary by legislation’. Based on personal reminiscences and published documents, Whyte’s contribution is of enduring value to those seeking to understand the culture of modern Ireland. His account is even more impressive when read against the background of materials which have more recently become available in the National Archives. These enable some of the detail to be filled in, but they also provoke some new questions about the state of the country and the means by which a peaceable Ireland was to be constructed in the aftermath of a war of independence and a civil war.

Throughout the course of the nineteenth century North America and Australasia were profoundly affected by the large-scale emigration of Irish men and women. However, by the eve of the First World War that great torrent of nineteenth-century emigration had slowed. The returns of the registrar general, though deeply and systematically flawed, suggest that in the period 1901–10 the level of decennial emigration from Ireland fell below half a million for only the second time since 1840. According to these figures, the United States continued to be the preferred destination for the new century’s Irish emigrants — 86 per cent of those who left between 1901 and 1910 journeyed to America. In contrast, Australia now attracted few Irish-born, with only 2 per cent of emigrants in this decade choosing to settle in Australasia. As the number of Irish emigrants declined from the peaks of the mid-nineteenth century, so the proportion of Irish-born in the populations of the United States and Australia also fell. By 1910 less than 1.5 per cent of the United States population were of Irish birth; in Australia in 1911 only 3 per cent of the nation’s population were Irish-born men or women. But, although the influence of the Irish-born was diminished, there remained in both societies large numbers of native-born men and women of Irish descent, New World citizens who retained strong bonds of affection for Ireland and maintained a keen level of interest in its affairs.

Concern with Irish affairs reached new levels of intensity in the United States and Australia between 1914 and 1921. In particular, from the Easter Rising of 1916 until the signing of the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 Irish immigrants and their descendants in both New World societies observed Ireland’s moves towards self-rule with keen anticipation. They publicly asserted the need for an immediate and just resolution to Ireland’s grievances and sought to obtain the support of their own governments for the attainment of that goal. However, this vocal support for Ireland was not without its own cost.

In the proclamation that was issued on Easter Monday 1916 the provisional government of the Irish Republic undertook to grant ‘equal rights and opportunities to all its citizens’ and to ‘cherish all the children of the nation equally’. It also emphasised that the Republic was ‘oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from a majority in the past’ and referred to the support given to the Republic ‘by her exiled children in America’. The belief that the Irish nation included all inhabitants of the island was a central tenet of Irish nationalism both before and after 1922, and the numerous visits that nationalist leaders have paid to the United States from the time of Parnell and Davitt to the present testify to the importance that has been attached to the Irish overseas. In November 1948, while introducing the second reading of the Republic of Ireland Bill, the Taoiseach, John A. Costello, noted that ‘The Irish at home are only one section of a great race which has spread itself throughout the world, particularly in the great countries of North America and the Pacific.’

On 7 September 1948 the newly appointed Taoiseach, John A. Costello, the leader of a coalition government in which his party Fine Gael was the senior partner, announced in Ottawa that he intended to repeal Eire’s External Relations Act, and thus sever its final tenuous link with the crown. The External Relations Act ‘empowered the Executive Council of the Irish Free State to authorise the use of the king’s signature on the letters of credence to be presented to heads of foreign states by Irish diplomatic representatives’. Eamon de Valera, Costello’s predecessor, had introduced the External Relations Act in 1936, and had regarded it as a device that might help to end partition. The measure magnified Ireland’s constitutional ambiguity, but with its repeal the twenty-six counties would assuredly become a republic outside the Commonwealth.

Most Irish people, when asked what they know of the life and death of Kevin Barry, will pause for a moment while they recall the words of a famously maudlin ballad. A few points will emerge: ‘a lad of eighteen summers’ … ‘British soldiers tortured Barry’ … ‘refused to turn informer’ … ‘hanged him like a dog’ … ‘another martyr for old Ireland, another murder for the crown’. That they know anything at all about Kevin Barry is testimony, among other things, to the power of popular music for the making of political propaganda. Along with Father Murphy, Seán South and Fergal O’Hanlon, Kevin Barry figures in the pantheon of nationalist Ireland’s popular historical heroes, largely because somebody happened to write a good song about him. In many ways this is unfortunate, for Barry and the rest were once living people, and the process of iconographifying them in popular balladry, like all forms of political propaganda, serves not to clarify their roles in the historical events in which they played a part, but rather to obscure and distort them. So it is worth reconsidering the story of Kevin Barry, for a number of reasons. To begin with, his short life reached its climax at a vital moment in the long struggle for Irish self-government, a moment when the violence unleashed in 1916 burst forth again with renewed savagery on both British and Irish sides, involving in the Barry case the deaths of four young men aged between fifteen and twenty.