Rediscovering Medieval Ireland

well good evening ladies and gentlemen my name is David Dutchman I'm the director of the medieval history Research Center here at Trinity and I'm delighted to welcome all of you so many of you to this evening's lecture by Professor Robin frame a lecture which is intended to mark the launch of circle the calendar of Irish transgenic Chancery Letters well it's almost almost 30 years since I first heard Robin frame lecture that was in Edinburgh there were seven people present in the audience so it's very pleasing that Dublin can do much much better than Edinburgh can but the size of the audience this evening I think also reflects the fact that Robin frame has done so much to transform the study of medieval Ireland in the last 30 years Robin frame was born in Belfast in 1943 he studied history here at Trinity College Dublin both as an undergraduate and as a postgraduate between 1962 and 1966 he was a foundation scholar he graduated with first-class honours and in 1966 he began his doctoral research under the supervision of James lighting that led to a thesis entitled the Dublin government and Gaelic Ireland 1272 to 1307 the making of war and the making of peace and then in 1969 we have a left Trinity to take up a lecturer ship at the University of Durham and is from Durham since 1992 as professor frame that Robin has helped to transform our understanding of Ireland in the Middle Ages and indeed the wider insular world in the Middle Ages his research on nations on the identities of the insular world is indeed internationally acclaimed now the key characteristics I think of Robins work are our breadth of vision a mastery of the sources and that often overlooked but what really vital quality of beautifully sculpted not hugely engaging crews as well and professor fairness major publications would include English lordship in Ireland 13:18 261 published in 1982 and the political development of the British Isles 1100 to 1400 published in 1990 both published by Oxford University Press and that second book perhaps in particular proved enormously influential The Times Literary Supplement what of it that cannot be many historians who could so skillfully bring the British Isles together in the focus of one single lens originality learning and above all empathy characterised this deceptively modest book professor frames our textbook colonial island first published in 1981 that has just been republished by forecourts Press in a new edition which is on sale outside this lecture theatre but in that volume I think Robin frame was very much ahead of the trend in treating the angry Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century as an episode of European history part of the expansion of Latin Christendom which scattered Normans and anglia Normans and deposited them in locations as widely separated as as Dublin as Durham as Dunfermline and indeed all the way to the Dead Sea in Jerusalem in the preface to the new edition of colonial island professor frame notes that vastly more has been published on the subject of medieval Ireland between 1981 and 2012 than appeared in the previous hundred years yes I think much too modest colonial Ireland anticipated colonial island often inspired that scholarship of the next three decades and that is why its interpretation remains so fresh and central in 2012 well from 2008 until 2011 Robin frame on the international advisory and editorial board of the Irish Chancery Project his return to Trinity College Dublin this evening to deliver this lecture is especially appropriate because he received his early training in medieval history in the lecture halls of this College there's nobody I think better placed to explain to us the institutional the historiographical context in which the Irish transcript project came into being or to explain the significance of the material that has been made accessible as a result of the publication of circle a calendar of Irish Chancery letters the title of Robyn frames lecture this evening as you can see is rediscovering medieval Ireland thank you David if only a small part of it were true and it is an enormous honor to be invited to give this lecture because as you all know it marks the public launching of a major historical enterprise the recovery and reassembling as far as is possible of the last records of the medieval Irish Chancery and there is the circle webpage which I hope will become very familiar to the middle ative users over the next months and years the lectures rather grandiose title is not a sign of megalomania on my part it's the project that is rediscovering medieval Ireland not me personally and certainly not in the next 50 minutes or so lest such enterprises this one has taken a very long time but there is a silver lining it was conceived in the 1970s and the era of the card-index it's being born in the full light of digital day and this is a point to which I'll return at the end you may also by the end think that you came along in all innocence to a public lecture and instead got trapped in a document seminar but it did seem to me appropriate especially for those of you who are not medievalists and indeed may not even be historians that you've got a sense of the material involved in some of the things that might be done with it indeed with all the fuss is about so that's why I have inflicted that hand out on you don't worry it doesn't become relevant to somewhat later but I'd like to begin with two anniversaries the first is totally trivial except to me it's already been mentioned a couple of months ago I visited my old history teacher he's a great holder and while I was with him he went into his front room and he unearthed two of the papers I sat for the entrance poll to Trinity and there printed in black and white was the date or the dates early May 1962 so here I am marking the golden jubilee of my association with and it seems an appropriate occasion to acknowledge that this association has been one of the most important and indeed one of the happiest threads running through my life the other anniversary is perhaps more familiar and it's far more significant that's also infinitely less happy ninety years ago almost next month's ninety years ago the public record office of Ireland and the four courts was destroyed during the the conflict that followed the sizing of the anglo-irish treaty there the four count courts on fire a very familiar image I'm sure and here is the record Treasury now when I first saw that and when everybody who has seen it with me as first looked at it they thought it was a prison sort of shared architecture or something of the sort but in fact the record treasury the storage was state-of-the-art it was just that nobody foresaw could have foreseen that an inferno might occur actually within the comparatively fire-resistant inner sanctum itself and then here is the search room not the sacrum survived and indeed to some of the more senior members of the audience to put it politely it may be very familiar is very familiar to me it looked very like that in the 1960s and if I remember correctly it's a comfortable room for thorough readers six could be squeezed in if it was really necessary but across the middle of the search room table where we sat there was a thick brass bar or rail and somebody told me that that had been designed to support the parchment rolls while you were using them and I'm not quite sure but it may even be in use here was perhaps just a chat reading a newspaper I'm not entirely sure but it seemed to me a very melancholy survival the only matter medieval Rose that survived there only about three or four out of many hundreds and none of them were actually Chancery rolls the only ones that survived with that had been recently in usin which were in the search room rather than in the record Treasury the rare well as two others that had been liberated at some point in the past from official custody in which I think were brought back from a London sale room in the later 1960s but anyway amongst medical records destroyed were the Chancery rolls to describe them in modern terms I suppose you might say something like in high score piece of the documents that were issued under the Great Seal of Ireland and here is a rather splendid impression of the Great Seal from the reign of Richard ii you can see the king in majesty on the obverse and the Royal Arms on the reverse and that's a bad day when you don't learn something I had sort of expected to see an equestrian figure the king is a knight on the reverse but seemingly that was only on the great scene of England the de PUE tada deformed seals had to make do with a coat of arms only the Chancellor who kept the seal was second only to the governor of Ireland who was known in this period as the Justitia of the Kings lieutenant in the Dublin administrative hierarchy and the Chancellor was the mainspring of written government and had kept two main sets of annual records the patent and the closed rolls letters patent were issued open which is what a patent means with a wax impression of the seal attached to the parchment by pawns there is a surviving example from the Pennbrook deeds unfortunately the the seal has suffered over the centuries that's what letters patent looked like letters patent recalled that they were publicly address they would let a patent we begin the king to old whom these present letters may come typically they contained official appointments grants and notifications of one sort or another letters close were issued close that is rolled out put with the impression of the seals sealing them in a literal sense that was not because they were in a sense confidential but it was because they were addressed to individuals or to group sort of communities typically they might include instructions reprimands exultation of one sort or another many of them were to the crimes local offices such as the sheriffs of the counties or to other branches of central government but it's important to keep in mind that the material on the rolls didn't merely reflect and reflect what one might call the impulses of officialdom strange concept that I've written to you impulses of officialdom many documents were responses to petitions others appear because people wish to have their property transactions formally recorded so in short the rolls contain a vast amount of varied historical information now the catastrophe of 1922 was not the first to strike Irish records for instance that window that a file in 1304 had already destroyed many earlier Chancery records and that mishap was actually recorded on a closed roll and the membrane where it's accorded closer ólafur is to edward ii something like that it was actually reproduced in Gilbert's facilities of the National manuscripts of Ireland so that is a word limps of what a membrane of a closed room actually looked like in 1922 the earliest surviving roll dated from 30 no 2 to 3 the latest which will Cass is medieval from 1505 6 and reckoning at 2 rows per year over those 200 and a bit years the survival rate in 1922 was around 25% now that's optimistic for quite a few of the rolls that survived then were incomplete but coverage was not even if we narrow the boundary say to 1350 5 to 14 35 survival rises to about 40% I mentioned this because I'd like to suggest that these survival rates are actually quite high medievalists in many North European countries would give their eyeteeth for government archives on that scale and we mustn't keep measuring ourselves against the quite remarkable continuity of state record-keeping and survival in England so what I'm saying is despite the high attrition rate before 1922 the losses in that year really we're calamitous but they're not wholly irreparable and that's where of course the project comes in more than essentially before they destruction the surviving medieval records were surveyed and cataloged under the auspices of the ardèche record Commission and the Commission which was established by Act of Parliament necessarily since it was after 1800 the British Parliament the Commission worked spasmodically from 1810 to 1830 and the commissioners go some priority to the Chancery rolls we know that the publication was ordered in a meeting at the office of chief secretary fiedel no less in 1816 by many nineteenth-century record publications were superb and they tended to progress at a rate at which we can only marvel sadly this was not true of the calendar that means abbreviated edition of the artists chance of e rolls it finally appeared in 1828 under the final editorship or under the name of the last editor Edwards Tresham I suppose it must have appeared in the under the only prime minister who was the son of a professor of this university in other words the Duke of Wellington whether the Duke of Wellington was in the least interested in his Wellesley ancestors and their role in coderre government in the 14th century I somehow died but that was the point at which the volume appeared now there's no disguising the weaknesses of that work femorals or parts of roles were Mis dated or otherwise misidentified the calendar infrequently went too far chopping out not just repetitious formal verbiage but key parts of the text like to give you an example of that this is Trish Holmes version of a particular document here number 7 you will see a point I'm going to make in a moment already that it's not just in Latin it's in abbreviated Latin here is the circle version of that document so you're going to get more for your money from circle than you get from treshon and so it was published not just in Latin but in records type that was a special font as you probably saw designed to reproduce exactly the scribal of breviary of the originals so trician is weak he's also in this day and age not user-friendly and user-friendliness of course is everything that is at least a starting point while it's possible to improve impression alternative often folio texts can be harvested from other sources I three categories occurred to me one is of course published works which were researched before 1922 some of which published excerpts some of which perhaps at footnote extract from them then secondly there are other surviving record series of requisite series which survived and transcript often for the Chancellor was in the habit of filing earth instructions for instance to the Exchequer which then enrolled these and thirdly and perhaps most important we have transcripts and extracts made by historians antiquarian heralds and other genealogists between the 16th century and 1922 and we don't realize almost as much as we do now to the Mormons to the snobbery and acquisitiveness that drove earlier delving into records and behalf of people eager to find evidence of gentle birth or to establish trade and claims to property and it's also important that some of these early scholars had access to rolls that had actually disappeared before the record commissioners got to work in the eighteen tens so there is here a real opportunity to reconstruct in part at least a lost art I've now the proposal to do so originated with jessalyn or Twain women who total Trinity from the late 1930s until 1980 for the last 30 years as Leki professor of history here is mistletoe a livin courted a benign moment despite her formidable reputation she had many benign moments but never mind I mustn't go there and so mrs. Whaley livin unusually for the 1970s she went infected the modern Holy Grail full of surprises that is external funding now of course the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences which is made it possible at last to bring the project to fruition wasn't filter exist in the 1970s and he got funding that was not just external but it was outside the state itself wonderful the money came from the business academy it came from the lever human foundation and the altar can't help but call her the art the art already had the comment or the contents of Tresham on her trademark index cards and one of the signs of favor that I received was to be sent to burn and omens and demonstrate to buy index cards for the art real favor them some years later when I came back when she had become a Dean and had an administrative assistant I heard him being sent out to order her coal and to buy her cigarettes I couldn't match that but I got part of the way well not alas in the spring of 1981 six months or so after her retirement the software Riven was Curley incapacitated by successive strokes and it soon became clear that she could do no more and the project was saved from extinction in large measure by the enthusiasm of successor professor James Lydon here's Jim Lydon as many of you I'm sure will remember important characteristic mode I think and Jim unfortunately is not well enough to be here today but he knows what's going on he's delighted with what has been achieved and he sends his greetings to one and all and over the next 20 years many others hope to nudge the project forward and I'd like to mention just one there important figure and that's the late doctor Philomena Connolly of the National Archives fellow who died far too early in 2002 she was an advisor and a friend to many of us and she made typically clear and acute proposals for the project's future development and I know Peter croaks find these invaluable no Peter is going to escape for the next few lecture but he will come back at the end and I do warn them of that I'd like to move on my abruptly from the history and rationale of the project to the history of the later medieval period and I were to plunge you into a document first one on the handout and which comes from a patent troll and I'd like to use this document so kick off I hope some thoughts about records and their interpretation and this particular document has a great advantage because it shows that administrative records are not always deadly down they usually are you do have to go through the pain barrier but there are exceptions and this document is a memorandum enrolled on the patent Rome it takes us to court in January 13 82 and then the previous Stevens Day 26th of December 1381 Edmund Mortimer the Earl of March and I'll stir the government of Ireland had died unexpectedly and his entourage and this paid troops who were commanded by his half-brother Sir Thomas Mortimer left the scene and began to drift north towards the Mortimer lands and Leinster and move and these events left the ministers who had been traveling with Mortimer in a whole and there were John Colson the Chancellor because a Chancellor moved around with the governor and John kabak the chief justice of the King's Bench so they hastily summoned the notables of Twenties core cities and counties of Pope in Limerick headed by the Earl's of almond and Desmond to an emergency council meeting and government couldn't continue without governor to exercise authority in the King's name but immediately upon being asked the O's refused office claiming that they couldn't be spare from defending their own Borderlands and then up pops a car noxious Englishman the Bishop of Cloyne who was clearly acting as a spokesman for Thomas Mortimer and he says that anyway what's needed is not one of them but a vigorous Knight born in the kingdom of England and returned it everybody who was there agreed with this and the bishop Ben reveals that Thomas Mortimer's terms for taking office but by that time the treasurer had arrived and the treasurer reports as treasurer's do so the truck the cupboards bare and they looked a representative of poor caulk in Limerick they began to get uneasy at that point and they start squealing that they couldn't be expected to provide bridging funds so the debate shifts back to appointing a new governor again the heirs are asked again they refuse again and then the Chancellor and treasurer are targeted but they proceeded to outdo each other in pleading their ailments their inadequacies it was like when I was trying to find a successor as head of department my legs been bad for years you know this sort of thing and finally the Chancellor is from marched into office but he manages to get conditions written into the record notably that once Parliament met he should be allowed to give up the job so amusing little vignette the the Chantry rules aren't often amusing so it'll be to make the very less well first lumps for some very peculiar features here in the 15th century control of the Dublin government was something the the Earl's wanted even competed for was a state of Ireland so bad in 1382 that nobody was willing to take it on and then why this general agreement on the superiority of an English bowl and a pointy muscle since the 1340s who have been recurrent grumbles about government by the English born in England who were accused of dissing the locals as some would say and not really understanding very familiar one there that doesn't require very deep insight to see that this whole pantomime has some tests probably a several but I'm going to constrict just on one big simple one and that is money government in Ireland for the previous 20 years had been heavily subsidized by the English taxpayer while Edmund Mortimer income and 1379 he had had a good financial package so those present at the court meeting knew very well as a local emergency governor would have no access to English funds and he's likely to be out of pocket the other point that comes to quite strongly in the document I think is the presence of constitutional ideas and assumptions maybe simple ones but very important ones particularly to do with representation and consent and their potency is apparent in the way they are used almost automatically in arguments and excuses the knights and Burgesses of copán wouldn't limit it all aware that they might be required to agree to taxation so they feel that this would be a mass would be a matter for the whole of the land assembled at the same time which is cold for a parliament and clinton also sees Parliament as the definitive occasion because it was in Parliament that alternative arrangements might be made for funding and government and he could lay his burden dine now English medievalists have long since pinpointed the late 14th and early 15th centuries as a golden age of parliamentary politics they've taken a good deal of delight in showing that some supposed novelties of the early 17th century were not so novel after all in other words the history of Parliament doesn't go like that it goes like that there are strong indications that political ideas in Ireland at this period were quite advanced as well if it advanced as the right word that's not really surprising and I can't get into this but just think for instance of the experienced wide connections and talent on short Court in 1382 there's a moment in Desmond where by this stage senior yes they had between them being governors for seven of the previous 22 years Thurmond was a great-grandson of Edward the first something tends to be forgotten it served Edward the third in Scotland and France Chancellor Colton was Dean of cincotrix he is also a university man throne the head of a Cambridge whole he was about to become Archbishop of our tomorrow Vaughn now so Thomas Mortimer has recently been described as the head of the consortium that ran the enormous complex of Mortimer estates in England Wales and Ireland during his nephews twelve year minority and he exemplifies a type prominent in Irish history from the late 12th century to the 17th but not thought about in a joined-up way because of academic demarcation lines that of soldier administrator entrepreneur oh that's bigger topic that needs a local another local I think cries out for fresh treatment in a long perspective is the history of the Irish parliament itself and if we rewrite it please will we not regard the highly creative medieval phase of that Parliament a somehow prehistory well now why have I inflicted all this on you well if it's to make a very simple point my discussion of this document is hardly sophisticated analysis but it does I think make the point that government records demand just as careful handling as other sorts of written evidence late medieval records are bulky they're unglamorous we tend to take them for granted but in fact they deserve the same critical attention to firms to phrases that tends to be reserved for sources that are regarded as literally or for early charters I like to mention quickly just one aspect of this if you remember at the beginning I said that Chancery documents often have their origin in petitions and petitions asked for the royal favor gratia or grace which was the lubricant of the entire political system and recent like on parliamentary petitions in England has shown that they were carefully and did professionally crafted and they were crafted to fit the expectations and idioms of the royal government which they were addressed to they're full of standardised motifs and stereotyped phrases exactly the same tactics applied when you're addressing the papal Curia you're well advised to know you a bit of canon law and to know the formula of the papal Chancery in both cases if the petition was successful the resulting grant would play back its wording but it crudely you put in what you hoped to get out now none of this should come as a surprise to modern academics at least in Britain I still tend to assume that Ireland's the serpent hasn't yet entered the garden so to speak but chunks of university budgets are spent on the salaries of mandarins who second-guess the next the next lurch in government policy and they train departments and spread that's wrong showcasing that's the word showcasing the research to best advantage that's what we're trying to do today of course and this approach scholars who once instinctively reached for the biblical or the classical lexicon they've descended to using business Leonard books and articles are measurable experts if I wasn't being recorded I might suggest that actually medical speak but never mind well all this has obvious relevance to something that overhangs late medieval Irish history what might we might call the condition of Ireland question the country rose like so many other records are full of doom and gloom and when you begin to analyze them they often are singing from a very limited hymn sheet the choruses or widths become very familiar and when pointed one standard motif in 1382 when the Earl's excused themselves from government service because of the need to defend their own areas other standards the rules include I couldn't come whether to Parliament or the Exchequer because of the dangers of the way I need a rebate of my rent because of my crops have been burnt or my livestock has been rustled by the Irish I deserve Rimmer and because I lost a horse or six silver vessels or even perhaps my brother in the skirmish or in an ambush now don't misunderstand me I'm not suggesting for a moment that they dismiss all this that plenty of other sources to confirm that things were indeed believed but I do think we need a better understanding of the conventions or at least the codes perhaps that operate within our texts if they are to evaluate what they tell us and just one final point on lesson it's a bit of an obsession of mine I'm afraid the surviving records are formulaic they're legalistic the voices that we just do so in a very restricted range of registers with no chatty letters no records of table talk to help us interpret what they say but we mustn't therefore fall into the trap of patronizing people of this period by assuming that they were somehow more rigid or simpler or more deines than later generations who appear to reveal more of themselves in writing well I'm not going to come down from the sermonizing to earth and to ask the simple question we've got this new richness of material not this nearly easily accessible richness of material how can we use it what sort of questions might had open up and helped to answer and the problem is of course there are legion and amongst Esther ago I was desperately searching for a way of organizing my thoughts and suddenly the solution stared me in the face it was the acronym of the project itself circle the term suggest all but sewers of action and interaction whether geographical political or cultural I'd like to just glance at three of those with the help of the handout and found in the handout a few texts from circle and I've monkey debate with them I'm afraid and not exactly as they appear in the circle but I've arranged some documents according to my themes and I've highlighted a few key phrases and I would discuss that most of these documents are chosen not because they're interesting or unusual but because they're actually humdrum but they show what what's in there there are a few exceptions to that well my first circle is the wider geopolitical sphere to which Ireland like it or not did belong and by the period of our Chancery records the Angevin Empire of Henry the second time was of course long gone insert the keys of England still ruled over large and shifting assemblage of territories not so long ago we might have labeled these the Plantagenet dominions recently the term English Empire has come in to fashion but however we choose to describe it this polity had numerous subordinate administrative centres Dublin was one of the oldest of those alongside it we can place Bordeaux together with it various periods Carnarvon they look upon tweed for the administration of southern Scotland when it was held Calais and for time in the early 15th century rule the capital of Henry the fifths recaptured Normandy and there are many ways in which Ireland's membership of this wider political structure can be illustrated I thought of talking about about chance to be officials but there wasn't room you'll be glad to hear but there were a couple of Chancellor's in the 14th century who served at Bordeaux and then in Ireland and then in one case back in Bordeaux again the thing that I chose in the end was to say something about the Chancery roads themselves and the bureaucratic habits that produced them I was no image of the Chancery and that's not surprising because the Chancery was essentially a small household that mostly travelled the country with or closed near close by the governor wasn't it wasn't a sort of office fixed at one place that's what we do have is an early 15th search during of the exchequer was destroyed in 1922 but it'll be nicely copied before that this is medieval bureaucracy red in tooth and claw well as you can see on the checkered cloth that the exchange for reckoning there is a sort of satchel let's focus in on it not a very good image but the satchel says on it Baghdad Karachi leash like either always scared of medieval latin it's simple that means a bag with roles in it so here we have an example of rolls rolled up on the exchanges are scrolls we're of course an ancient manuscript form and certainly not peculiar to England but the persistence in keeping records in the form of rolls was characteristic of England of English conservatism if you like indeed the English platen trolls will not discontinued and for what we in the north were told was going to be at the second Elizabethan age they went discontinued to 1952 already in the late medieval period most contemporary administration's kept the records not as rolls but it as registers that is in books which were much more easily circ acceptable and the multi-centered character of the realm this wider realm contributed to a great amassing of roles as the emerging administrative capital at Westminster kept in touch with on the one hand the mobile royal court and on the other with the various form of my court devolved administrative centres and the result was a veritable mountain of accumulated records for instance and thank God they did copies of the artists checks tech records ended up at Westminster for auditing purposes that sort of added to the great suit of documentation but whether all this information facilitated or obstructed role is a moot point we today are all too familiar with governments and other organizations juiced by the ease of modern communications which drive everything to the center and then are quite incapable of managing it the later medieval soup English super state is a sort of slow motion example of the same thing so our love stylish roles may be seen as products of a sort of parchment Empire and Empire which its own rhythms its own logic and they deserve those rhythms and logic deserves to be taken seriously by historians examining any component parts of this structure well let me turn from that quickly to the content of the rules because they're full of information about every aspect of relations with the itis scene whether political administrative land holding please ya Stickle commercial down to something as mundane as the comings and goings of individuals between Ireland and England and numbers 2 to 4 just very short totally routine documents you can see an official messenger an ecclesiastic furthering his education at oxford and they'll understand it-- crossing the sea full of information of that sort and the nature and speed of communications and the whole business of networking and decision making would repay for the study winds and tides may have made travel unpredictable but it was not necessarily slow indeed in some ways it may have been easier to get from waterford a you'll to Bristol and from there and Windsor or Westminster than to make the journey to the court and to the exchange of a structural collect connection with the English Empire if you forgive me is the presence of the Irish Chancery rolls of documents which are not under the Irish seal but which were issued under the Great Seal of England or the Kings Privy seal and I've chosen three of those not quite at random five six and seven and the first to take us back once again to the dramatic days at Cork in the aftermath of Edmund Mortimer's death remember that occurred 26th of December 1381 number five shows the first reaction of the authorities in England within less than a month in the middle of winter the news has been received absorbed and has produced action the appointment of Edmunds seven will aid sound as a lieutenant in his place now you may think that's ridiculous but I think it shows not madness but method because little legislate mother Philippa conscious of March and Ulster was a granddaughter of Edward the third and Queen Philippa so that Rogers semi royal status signaled the Crown's commitment to Ireland while the understanding was that Sir Thomas Mortimer his uncle would in fact just act as governor and number six two months later she was metropolitan awareness of what was going on in this to them overseas territory and the intention to steer it in some detail it's a set of instructions given under the Privy seal to summon a parliament in Ireland the fact that the Parliament is to grant taxation is made clear as is the link with wider world policy in the reference to financial burdens and the French Wars sorry we've no money we're doing these more important things so you'll have to ask for taxation and then at the end does an instruction to report back through publicly accredited messengers and that sort of institutionalized communication which I noticed some historians of the early 17th century remarking upon absolutely normal two hundred and fifty years earlier the final text in that section number seven is less routine but again it's not exceptional I've included to illustrate the underlying constitutional assumption that whatever the practical political complications they were manifold crowing Authority existed undiluted in Ireland just as it did in England and statutes in this period are the ultimate manifestation of regal power and here is Henry the fourth I was going to say with a stroke of the pen I went to that too with a splurge of a Sea transmitting 50 years worth of English legislation on crying papal relations to Ireland and English law the common law the legal system is perhaps the single most obvious thread of continuity connecting modern Ireland modern island books north and south back to the later medieval period and towards the end I shall and I suggest that we're still alarmingly under informed about legal developments in late medieval English Ireland well now I'm going to distinguish the circle sorry this awful metaphors and think for a moment about government within Ireland and the rows when combined with other record sources of course open up important questions about its range and its character and also particularly exciting possibilities I think during the phase from the Chancellery material is at its richest if you remember that was 13 50s - 14 30s were hard to imagine a more critical period you begin with the aftermath of the Black Death you have the promulgation of the statutes of Kilkenny you have Richard the seconds visit to Ireland and everything that follows on from that now this we know the story I think we know the story it's one of decomposition during this rule in Ireland both geographically and culturally to the point where the settler establishment was fond of predicting its total collapse which of course never came now that image may be broadly accurate but there's just so much we don't know about the rich and forms of crying authority how these changed how that Authority interacted with regional and local societies but well enough are we going to start well one way it occurred to me might be through a distinction of famous nigh distinction made by the late great Rhys Tabas between colony and lordship this is a formulation that has been put to fruitful use by others by colony Davis meant something very subtle but tough I'm cruder fellow altogether let's take it in a superficial geographical sense he was thinking in terms of a geographical core which had seen considerable settlement from Britain in the past roughly the four counties around Dublin plus the southern times with their hinterlands weather along the coast or in the river valleys of South Leinster and east monster that to him was commonly and their English lowered institutions had a measure of depth pran government was possible along to the English recognizable lines by lordship Davis meant a much wider area or crown influence was felt though it might be mediated in various ways most obviously the higher nobility so what he was pointing us towards might be described as tighter and looser forms of political organization so loose indeed you may think as to amount to disconnection but I think it's important to take the lucia forms the lordship side seriously and not to regard them simply as symptoms of a failure to reduce the whole of Ireland to the condition of colony or core now this distinction to me is hopeful as a starting point but like all helpful idea especially of a binary sort it oversimplifies colony and lordship blur of the air at the edges the boundaries between them shift over time and it might be better to think in terms of more complex and endlessly changing modulations of authority whatever that may be supposed to me that's where my second group of circle texts come in number 8 as you will see whether only 1358 and it brings us to Kilkenny nice cook any colony and lordship well some of Kilkenny is colony other parts of Kuakini or lordship probably but it shows that document in operation in kilkenny in the 13 50s what some historians in England would dub the fiscal state and our Chancery roads are absolutely crammed with examples not brought together not properly analyzed of grants of Taxation at a local level and such levies are sometimes because it being presented negatively almost in the context of discussions of the slowness of parliamentary taxation to emerge in Ireland as though centralization is a precondition of political and institutional maturity that's not an unduly English do in France for example fiscal arrangements were much more about the engagement of the monarchy with regional estates reflecting reflecting the size the composite past of the kingdom I think in Ireland on a smaller scale local levies for localized military emergencies made entire sense and just three quick observations about that text first there's an emphasis on local consent at county level and that may simply be lip service being paid by the authorities but nonetheless the idea is there of their spontaneous well it says then again was the fact that collection is through local were these operating within the count roads now the countries were for successors of pre 1170 units which the English rebranded and harnessed for their own purposes and finally you may notice that while the troops paid for by the grant were to serve with the governor of Ireland they would affirm part of the contingent led by the Earl of Ireland who is the most important regional noble so we're looking at a fiscal system or organization that reflects local traditions and conditions and one in which the participation of local elites was vital why should we think that the tradition of local taxation isn't anywhere odds with the story of the emergence of taxation in Parliament's it's not the opposite likely to have been the case that long experience of processes of consent assessment collection at local level may help to explain why when governors did try to squeeze money out of Parliament's in the 13 seventies in such skilled such indeed sophisticated opposition and there's a really big subject they're just awaiting full investigation the other two short texts are examples of types of interaction interesting and many others between central government and the localities that might be brought under the lordship heading number nine it's the complexity of such interactions in the middle distance shall we say grew geographically speaking and if a million feature of late medieval Ireland was the growth of extended lineages or plans among the aristocrats families of and of Norman origin yes thanks to Kenneth Nichols and the new prose or powers of County Waterford and elsewhere were one of those and here in this document we have the government favoring a leading member of the family Nicholas power of kill Medan was a general pardon our pardons were part of the regular currency of royal patronage it might be thought that the growth of these clans was antithetical to crying Authority but if you look at the terms the pardon is justified on the grounds that Nicholas was head of his lineage has delivered offending members up to the crown courts I'm sure as people London for it and this is an intriguing example just possibly a mutually supportive link between systems of state justice and the patriarchal authority of heads of lineages and this is - that the partners issued at the request of the city of Waterford are those are for elfin figures and the records is deeply hostile to the pause and this is just an example they're all absolutely crammed with examples of relations between local societies and crying Authority each one of these needs to be set in context and given careful thought and way I'm clearly not doing here a name number 10 causes later in time and much further afield will in 1434 and here is well to the chief of the Bucks of a loyal clan being appointed as collector of the customs at bole way I wrote was gala sized Lord presumably his day-to-day actions lay far beyond the area of crime control so is this appointment merely symbolic even cosmetic regularizing profits may be that he might have siphoned off in any case possibly but does my mother which said cuts me let me catch myself home I used the phrase merely symbolic what about earth am I saying here let's imagine us for ourselves from what with historians of the early medieval period poring over much scanty evidence to assess the influence say of an anglo-saxon king or a Carolingian ruler on a note of part of the earlier he claimed to rule we'd be seizing upon evidence of that sort seeing it as highly significant colleges on the outer rim of crime authority hero royal lordship might be expressed an occasional act of patronage it might indeed to our eyes resemble something much closer to a form of diplomacy rather than government as we understand it but isn't that typical of our extensive policies by the medieval later even contemporary where styles and degrees of authority were markedly uneven there is surely room here not just the world search but even for some recup degree conceptualizing of what English lordship meant in later medieval Ireland and that begins brings me to my final circle which is not so much geographical as cultural a matter of the interplay between the two cultures of medieval Ireland in a sense we're there already and if you're not familiar with the Chancery rules you may be surprised to hear that they're absolutely jam-packed with references to Gaelic Irishmen and women both within the colony on the fringes of the colony and those who belong to the aristocratic world far beyond it and since these are English government records earthen have a sort of paradoxical quality they're illustrate at one at the same time the existence of social and badias but also at the same time the degree to which these are being crossed number eleven is a formal grant of English legal status and just again to give you an example of the difference between freshen up here and settle down here not just as in the circle is easier to manage it actually contains some quite crucial clauses which Tresham simply leaves art but is it ranked making 1350 up to three Irish brothers and one of the best-known features of the medieval lordship of Ireland of course is the way in which the legal system did draw a sharp distinction between those who were regarded as English and who had access to the Kings ports and those who redeemed Irish who did not but from at least as early as 1215 that's the earliest known grant Irish people with money or influential patrons could petition the crime for a formal grant of English status so it's typical of one of those and many such grants are scattered across the Chancery rolls many more can be added from other records in England and also in Ireland and one of the older gaps in the literature is our failure to gather these grants together and to subject them to methodical scrutiny there is there a strong rumor that they the editor of circle may have this in hand which is very good news but look at the questions we should be asking what were the geographical and social backgrounds of the successful petitioners can we identify their motives did these change over time where most petitioners like Robert of Bray an Irishman who became mayor of Dublin in the 12 90s already upwardly inwardly mobile just needing a final lick of legal polish now that famous barrier or National barrier was well established as old established number 12 exposes a more recent set of barriers or hurdles as you can see it's a license given in 1375 to the widow of David Roche firmly in effect to take into her household her little grandson Cormac MacCarthy who had been born to her daughter Catherine and Dermot McCarthy our 13th century legislation notably this Jack any statute of 1366 sought to create a political cultural cordon forbidding those classified as English to enter into marriages or other alliances with the Irish or to engage in what we might label cross-cultural fostering of children unless you had official sanction now I may be behind in my reading so forgive me if I'm offending somebody but I don't think we have yet systematically assembled the evidence some of which lies in the Chancery roles for the enforcement of this legislation did it descend from the prides of theoretical aspiration to the teller firma of actual social relations this example doesn't really help all that much because you can spirit all sorts of ways at one level it suggests that even in County Cork a family of note might find it advisable to seek a bit dispensation but then you will notice that the governor was actually in port at the time and the wife is at the my grandmother has been given other privileges so clearly it was a moment when it was advisable or advantageous to seek a license when it don't reflect a set of cross-cultural relationships that already existed and indeed describing them as cross-cultural may itself beg questions and then number 13 is less routine and I've included that only much trans truncated for him for three reasons I was going to say it was a find but then I realized I would have to redefine find as something that was loaned to Kenneth Nichols 30 years ago but not to anybody else it's a find in that sense but I've included it because it's an example of a text that comes from a room that had vanished before the time of the record Commission before the time of Tresham seven-day on the face of it and the example of acculturation in the opposite direction to the one with which we are for more familiar and thirdly it points to the under-exploited evidence contained in these records for the history not just a families in the plenty of history history of families to be shortened in circle if you're interested but the history of family structures here we have donor McCarthy more in the presence of Lionel of Antwerp a son of Edward the third and 1365 Edward the third was the most powerful sovereign in Europe and here's McCarthy employing one of the most popular devices of late medieval English property law to em tale his Lordships upon an ordered sequence of male relatives beginning with his sons and the Chancery whales like other records from the 14th and 15th centuries are absolutely full of examples of land settlements usually of course among those who meet classes English and land holders made them as DOMA does here by fictional grant of the land to trusted clergy who then grant it back on a different terms and also in England we're almost always I think in Ireland those terms were designed to ensure continuity in the male line by circumventing the common law custom by which in the absence of sons daughters would divide the inheritance and cut out more distant male kin and in England and indeed in Scotland the land law of the later Middle Ages is a very familiar subject amongst historians and each historians of Scotland prized their n tales but they call them tail II as if I'm pronouncing it correctly it has I think being too little studied in Ireland and these are not mere technicalities family structures among the upper classes in a sense where political structures they had profound implications for the stability or otherwise of local and indeed regional lordship so perhaps in this matter to circle may stimulate what that is needed well that's the end of the hand the end of the heavy matter I hope and it worries me don't vomit at this point it brings before circled back to the reason for our presence here which is to celebrate the availability of this marvelous new resource how marvelous it is I discovered when preparing the lecture very stick-in-the-mud my first to act was to vent on my agent copy of treasure my prized precious copy of treasure from my shelves with its aroma though leather old paper and printers ink of my aleene's tobacco habit gone long gone and with its maddeningly inadequate index i gave that up and i began to rummage in my dusty shoeboxes which was full of faded index cards which i had heaped up when working through Chancery material 40 or more years ago that experience was utterly depressing said last up he gets from one chair and over to another to the computer unto the instantaneous link except yesterday the instantaneous link to circle which proved juris ly navigable and it enabled me to boys as I have never obliged before and Beauty cooks will modestly wish to point to his predecessors and to everybody who has helped to in the production of circle but the truth is that he has performed wonders and assembling all this material translating it often critically comparing several versions of the same text would using everything to a consistent format and entering it into a database now he want me to add a proxy wouldn't that he were welcome collections and suggestions and these can be submitted electronically but myth yes to have the whole thing up and running within less than four years as a magnificent achievement which fully justifies IRC HSS as investment in the project and the best reward would be to see the resource used and for it to stimulate the work that needs to be done on one of the least explored sometimes I think least valued and certainly most fascinating phases of Irish history thank you very much Robin before handing over to Professor Brian the getting the head of the school of histories and humanities Corriveau - thanks I wonder if I might have your attention just for a couple of minutes more and the medieval history Research Center here in Trinity intends to follow up this evening's lecture by organizing a biannual conference on medieval Ireland and the first of these follow-up conferences will be held in September of 2013 on the theme of the Geraldine's and their myths and remarque the 500th anniversary of the death of Gerald Moore Fitzgerald the great oral of Kildare in 1513 the keynote lecture on that occasion will be delivered by somebody who's in the audience tonight Stephen Ellis from nui galway and it goes without saying that you are all very welcome to attend that event we'll be in touch with you about it in due course with

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Published: Tue May 29 2012

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Rediscovering Medieval Ireland.

A public lecture delivered by Professor Robin Frame (University of Durham) Hon. M.R.I.A. at Thomas Davis Lecture Theatre, Trinity College Dublin, on Thursday 10 May 2012, to mark the launch of CIRCLE: A Calendar of Irish Chancery Letters, c.1244-1509 (www.tcd.ie/chancery).

The event was organized by Dr Peter Crooks funded by the Irish Research Council of the Humanities and Social Sciences.