The history of the Church of Ireland between 1641 and 1690 has not excited much interest among historians over the past thirty years. It was not always so, and earlier generations of writers found more to describe or investigate in a period which saw effective disestablishment in the 1650s, restoration in the 1660s, and crisis in the later 1680s. Phillips devoted almost one hundred pages to these years: the 1640s and 1650s in the authoritative hands of St John D. Seymour, and the 1660s to 1680s (and beyond) covered by R. H. Murray. Mant’s History, published almost a century before Phillips, still provides a useful narrative and valuable quotations from primary sources. The much shorter treatment of J. T. Ball, first published in 1886, gave only 33 pages out of 305 to the period, but contained some perceptive comments. In other histories of the Church of Ireland the period receives more cursory treatment.