Munster Plantation Research Articles

Overlords, underlords and landlords: negotiating land and lordship in plantation Munster

AbstractThis article explores the legal strategies of negotiation employed by Gaelic lords in early modern Munster through a case study of the O'Driscoll lordship of Collymore, County Cork. The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced an environment of intense legal contestation, as indigenous legal practices and hierarchies were methodically attacked by the colonial administration. But, as English administrators attempted to eradicate Irish legal precedent (and with it the legitimacy of the Gaelic aristocracy), Gaelic lords responded with new and often innovative legal strategies. The territory of Collymore presents a microcosm of the legal tensions produced by and under the Munster plantation, subject to competing claims by rival O'Driscoll heirs, MacCarthy Reagh overlords, ‘Old English’ neighbours and incoming planters. This article offers a reconstruction and analysis of the complex legal disputes surrounding Collymore. It argues that through otherwise routine legal interactions like inheritance disputes and chancery suits, Irish lords reframed their authority in the vocabulary of English law, trading tanistry for primogeniture and the language of overlordship for that of landlordship. Through these rhetorical and theoretical shifts, they attempted to redefine the very basis and nature of their authority.

Cow Trials, Climate Change, and the Causes of Violence

Abstract In 1641, according to the vicar Thomas Johnson, Irish rebels in Mayo, in “meere hatred and derision of the English,” tried a group of English cattle for unspecified charges. They were convicted and executed. Many historians have pointed to this striking event as an example of the deep hatred underlying popular violence in the rebellion. The trials, however, were merely the most spectacular iteration of long-standing conflicts over transformations in animal husbandry between the Munster Plantation in the 1580s and the rebellion of the 1640s. The new pastoralism that emerged during these decades threatened traditional practices and landscapes while creating new vulnerabilities to poor weather and economic downturns. The combination of economic crises and harsh weather associated with the Little Ice Age exposed these vulnerabilities. The cow trials show that environmental forces shaped the 1641 Rebellion but demonstrate that historians assessing the impacts of climate and weather must attend to the social and economic contexts that produce vulnerability.

A New World Man in an Old World Town: The Identification of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Residence in Late Sixteenth-Century Youghal, Co. Cork, Ireland

Sir Walter Raleigh, one of the great figures of Elizabethan-era trans-Atlantic history, was granted a substantial estate in Ireland during the Munster plantation of the late sixteenth century. Although he was appointed its mayor in 1589–90, he spent relatively little time in the port-town of Youghal, the principal urban settlement in his grant and the gateway to his inland estate. The free-standing house known as Myrtle Grove, which is still occupied, is popularly identified as having been his residence in Youghal. However, an evaluation of the documentary and cartographic evidence for properties in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century town indicates that he could not have lived in it, although he probably lived very briefly near it. The reinterpretation of the buildings and topography of the corner of Youghal where Myrtle Grove is located illuminates how, at the start of the period of England’s Atlantic colonialism, the ancient town metaphorically straddled two worlds, the “old” and the “new,” and two periods, the medieval and the modern.

Bitter Memories: Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland

Bitter Memories:Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland Christopher Ivic (bio) Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort. ernest renan, "what is a nation?" (1882) Eavan Boland's poem "Becoming the Hand of John Speed" opens with the question "How do you make a nation?" to which the speaker responds, "I have no answer. I was born in a nation/I had no part in making" (48). John Speed was an English historian and mapmaker whose cartographic images and chorographical descriptions of Ireland graced his 1611–12 atlas The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine. Speed "made" Ireland by representing it in the form of a map (figure 1) rendering that island visible to seventeenth-century English men and women in a way that it had never been before. Published in the wake of the Flight of the Earls, Speed's Irish maps can be read as celebratory of Stuart Britain's incorporation of Ireland and, in particular, the plantation of Ulster. Edmund Spenser, too, played a part in "making" Ireland. He worked in and wrote of Ireland during a time of intense violence; his Irish experience was bracketed by the Desmond rebellion (1579–83) and the Nine Years' War (1594–1603). Just as Spenser's Irish work gives voice to fears that Elizabethan England's grip on its neighboring kingdom/colony was loosening, it revisits and uses the past to instill a sense of English belonging and to incite reclamation in the face of Irish resistance. If Spenser "bequeathed a complex, diverse, and, above all, dominant legacy of subsequent notions of literature and national/ethnic identity in the British Isles for the whole of the seventeenth century and beyond" (Hadfield 12), then he did so in part by drawing upon the constitutive power of memory, especially collective memories etched as grievances. Spenser arrived in Ireland in 1580 as a secretary to Arthur Grey, [End Page 9] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. John Speed, "The Kingdome of Irland," from The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London, 1611–12). The Bodleian Library Map Res 74, between 137–38. Black and white image reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. [End Page 11] Baron Grey of Wilton, who, as lord deputy, was sent over to confront Old English lords, such as Gerald fitz James Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond, and James Eustace, third Viscount Baltinglass. As early as 1582 Dublin-based Spenser secured a lease on one of the former estates of Viscount Baltinglass; a few years later, he took possession of the 3,028 acres of Kilcolman Castle in the north of County Cork, a castle formerly held by Desmond. This settlement placed him within the project known as the Munster plantation, to which Spenser as a colonial administrator contributed significantly.1 His eighteen-year residence in Ireland enabled his social and economic advancement, and by no means did it disable his authorial self-fashioning. Within this volatile and often violent context Spenser wrote, among other texts, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), and Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595). Another product of Spenser's lengthy residence in Ireland is the document that we now know as A View of the Present State of Ireland, which was completed ca. 1596 at the height of the overthrow of the Munster plantation by Sir Hugh Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh. This lengthy prose tract, almost 70,000 words in dialogue form, is dedicated to redressing what was increasingly seen from both within and without Whitehall, especially by English colonial and military officers in Ireland, as a failing, if not failed, (re)conquest and (re)colonization of Ireland. Its two speakers, Irenius and Eudoxus, are Englishmen: Eudoxus is less familiar with Ireland than Irenius, who shares Spenser's knowledge of Irish history, politics, and society. The View traditionally has been read as a blueprint for the Anglicization of Ireland, and Irenius is often regarded as Spenser's mouthpiece. Recently, literary historians have come to regard the View as a (if not the...

Memories of violence and New English identities in early modern Ireland

This article explores the violence surrounding the collapse of the Munster plantation in 1598. It situates this event in the wider context of violence in early modern Ireland, and highlights both similarities and differences in the behaviour seen there, and in other, better-explored Irish episodes of violence. It also argues that while the memory of those earlier settlers was apparently forgotten or silenced, violence in 1598 played a significant part in how later violent incidents in Ireland were narrated, particularly the 1641 rebellion, and that consequently Munster played an important role in New English identity-building in the early modern period.

Pirate Ports and Harbours of West Cork in the Early Seventeenth Century

In the early part of the seventeenth century in Ireland select harbours along the southwest coast of Munster acted as the North Atlantic headquarters for pirates, primarily made up of English mariners. The places picked by the pirates as their bases were spatially strategic and three harbours in particular dominated this West Cork landscape—Baltimore, Leamcon and Crookhaven. Complicit English officers facilitated this activity and pirates and their families settled on the estates of the local officials while others used this pirate landscape as a staging point for plundering adventures further afield. As a consequence, piracy in Irish waters at that time had a profound influence on local economies, social activities and, in some cases, political events. Indeed the tolerance shown to it in the early seventeenth century in the southwest may be explained by the fact that it facilitated the colonial effort ongoing under the Munster Plantation and thus, inadvertently, suited the purposes of official government.

Cultures in conflict in late sixteenth-century Kerry: the parallel worlds of a Tudor intellectual and Gaelic poets

Demarcated to the north by the Shannon and its estuary and to the south by the Kenmare river and the Caha mountains, the south-western territories of Kerry and Desmond provide a microcosm of the tensions and interactions characteristic of early modern Ireland. Although historically divided into roughly two corresponding halves representing the outcome of thirteenth-century Gaelic/Anglo-Norman conflict, the area approximating to the modern administrative division of Kerry was defined by Gaelic cultural ascendancy and by the similar (though differing in scale) seigneurial ambitions of successive Fitzgerald and MacCarthy magnates. Significantly, a territorial division configured along ethnic lines was not replicated at a cultural level, where a remarkable level of homogeneity prevailed in terms of the currency of Gaelic language and literature. However, the defeat and execution of the fourteenth earl of Desmond and the distribution of his lands among English settlers under the auspices of the government-sponsored Munster plantation inaugurated profound political, social and religious turmoil in the province. In Kerry, also, consolidation of the New English military, social and legal presence in the wake of the redistribution of the earl of Desmond’s lands precipitated levels of political and cultural dissonance unparalleled since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The Green and Golden World: Spenser's Rewriting of the Munster Plantation

Book six of Spenser's epic The Faerie Queene is often seen as a welcomed escape not only from book five's focus on the English campaign in Ireland but also from the demands of allegory itself, but the shift into pastoral that accompanies the onset of book six offers the poet a chance to refocus his allegory from matters of conquest to matters of settlement. In creating this pastoral vision, Spenser borrows from his experience as an Irish undertaker to represent his vision of a decidedly New-English Ireland, and the Munster plantation is rewritten as the golden world of pastoral.

The I.H.S. Monogram as a Symbol of Catholic Resistance in Seventeenth-Century Ireland

It has been suggested that the presence of religious images and scenes in secular buildings of sixteenth-century date can be viewed as an expression of resistance by the native Irish to English colonial activity in the aftermath of the Munster Plantation (J. A. Delle, 1999, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 3: 11–35). Such images, however, may merely represent a continuation into the early modern period of a Medieval tradition of adorning secular houses with devotional images. If a religious symbol of native Catholic resistance to English colonization and Protestantism in Munster is to be sought then perhaps a more appropriate image would be the I.H.S. monogram—a symbol associated with the Counter Reformation and the Jesuits. The paper presents an example of the monogram located within a tower house at Gortnetubbrid in County Limerick, Ireland.

The social and economic consequences of the Desmond rebellion of 1579–83

The Desmond rebellion was one of the most brutal military conflicts to have taken place in Ireland in the sixteenth century. Initiated by James FitzMaurice Fitzgerald, cousin of Gerald, fifteenth earl of Desmond, in July 1579 in order to restore the Catholic faith in Ireland, the rebellion quickly developed from the landing of a small expeditionary force of approximately sixty men into a bloody contest which engulfed Munster for four and a half years. The rebellion was ultimately unsuccessful, but such was the ferocity of the conflict that it had a profound and devastating impact on Munster. The social and economic consequences were immense, for it exacted a huge economic cost on the province, both in terms of physical destruction and lost economic activity, and produced a very substantial depopulation of the province. The result was the overthrow and destruction of the traditional social order in Munster, an act that paved the way for the subsequent Munster plantation.

Standish James O'Grady: Between Imperial Romance and Irish Revival

STANDISH JAMES O'GRADY is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures of late-nineteenth-century Irish cultural history. He praised aristocratic values and denounced the aristocracy; Lady Gregory called him a Fenian Unionist, and Pearse acknowledged his influence. There have been two recent substantial studies; (1) both emphasize his use of saga material. This article analyzes some previously unknown journalism, and relates O'Grady's social criticism and work on Elizabethan Ireland to his attempt to reconcile unionism and nationalism through nineteenth-century British Romantic social criticism and the eighteenth-century Patriot tradition. Standish James O'Grady was born in Castletownbere, Co. Cork, on 18 September 1846, a younger son of Thomas O'Grady, Church of Ireland Rector of Castletown Berehaven and his wife Susanna (nee Dowe). The O'Gradys were Waterford small gentry. Attorney-General Standish O'Grady, uncle of O'Grady's father, prosecuted Robert Emmet in 1803; he became a judge and was created first Lord Guillamore. Standish James's uncles General Standish O'Grady and Admiral Hayes O'Grady distinguished themselves in the Napoleonic Wars; the Admiral fathered the Celtic scholar Standish Hayes O'Grady, and the General features in Lever's novel Jack Hinton.(2) This contributed to O'Grady's lifelong admiration for the military ethos. The Dowes arrived during the Munster Plantation and intermarried with McCarthys; Susanna inherited a small estate at Three Castle Head in West Cork. O'Grady's parents are affectionately portrayed in his boy's stories The Chain of Gold and Lost on Du-Corrig, whose heroes are modeled on his elder brothers. (O'Grady appears as the telepathic youngest son, Charlie. (3)) Susanna inspired the heroine of O'Grady's historical novel Ulrick the Ready, whose blending of Planter and Gael through intermarriage reflects O'Grady's pride of ancestry. The boy's stories draw on childhood memories of sea-fishing, bird-shooting, exploring cliffs and caves. Standish played with local children, went to the village school, and visited every cottage on the estate: This contributed to his later sense of brotherhood with the common people and idealization of aristocratic paternalism. Indeed, this was a selective vision. During the Famine Rev. Thomas O'Grady and his friend William Allen Fisher, Rector of Kilmoe (whose parish included Three Castle Head) refused to work with Catholic priests on famine relief and were accused of souperism. (5) In 1856 O'Grady became a boarder at Tipperary Grammar School. He distinguished himself as both a scholar and an athlete but found separation from home traumatic. Like many other boarding-school survivors, he idealizes boyhood as a lost paradise: In 1864 O'Grady won an Exhibitionership to Trinity College, Dublin. There he won a classical scholarship and medals for debating, ethics and philosophy, graduating with a B.A. degree in 1868. O'Grady was a successful college athlete and debater, a member of the hockey [hurling] team. College friends thought he could have had a brilliant legal career but for his eccentricities. (7) Trinity further separated O'Grady from boyhood. O'Grady's parents were staunch Evangelicals; in 1900, he still thought the evangelical clerics that his parents admired the finest men in the Ireland of his youth. (8) In 1911 O'Grady compared William Allen Fisher to a saint of the early Irish Church because he dedicated life and fortune to a remote West Cork headland, refusing preferments that would have removed him from the duties God had assigned him. (9) O'Grady entered Trinity to study divinity but lost his faith at college, later compiling a selection of Shelley's anti-Christian arguments, Scintilla Shelleiana. (10) He might then have moved toward the rationalist and elitist liberalism of a Lecky (another former clerical student), but was unwilling to dismiss the beliefs of his family and childhood, even if he no longer shared them. …

The Spanish Armada, Ireland, and Spenser's The Faerie Queene

When word first came that a large group of damaged ships scattered from the defeated Spanish Armada had crashed along Ireland's northern and western coasts in the fall of 1588, Edmund Spenser's thoughts may have turned to the spoil at hand. He would also have worried greatly about Spanish survivors, those healthy enough to aid Irish rebels and cause him and his friends problems. He would also have dreaded the spread of the Counter Reformation at the expense of Protestantism. Though raised and educated in London and Cambridge, Spenser had moved to Ireland in 1580. There he served as secretary and clerk in successive colonial administrations. As a property owner, he acted ambitiously, having first leased land in Counties Dublin, Kildare, and Wexford, before moving on to war-torn County Cork in the latter part of the decade. Thanks to his enviable position there, he acquired, and by spring of 1589, occupied more than 3,000 acres at Kilcolman, near Doneraile. His estate, "Hap Hazard," was part of the Munster Plantation, a vast colonial project established in the wake of the Desmond rebellion of 1579-83. Spenser lived as a landed gentleman until 1598, when he was burned out of his home as a result of the southern spread of the Nine-Years War (1594-1603), aided by the Spanish and led by the native Irish lord Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone. Spenser fled Ireland and died in London in 1599, never having finished his great epic, The Faerie Queene. 1

The New New Irish History - Natives and Newcomers: The Makings of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641. Edited by Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986. - The Upstart Earl: A Study of the Social and Mental World of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, 1566–1643. By Nicholas Canny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. - Reform and Revival:

The New New Irish History - Natives and Newcomers: The Makings of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641. Edited by Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986. - The Upstart Earl: A Study of the Social and Mental World of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, 1566–1643. By Nicholas Canny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. - Reform and Revival: English Government in Ireland, 1470–1534. By Steven G. Ellis. Studies in History, no. 47. London: Royal Historical Society, 1986. - Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603. By Steven G. Ellis. London and New York: Longman, 1985. - Colonial Ulster: The Settlement of East Ulster, 1600–1641. By Raymond Gillespie. Cork: Cork University Press for the Irish Committee of Historical Sciences, 1985. - The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583–1641. By Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. - Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: A Study in Legal Imperialism. By Hans S. Pawlisch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. - The Plantation of Ulster: British Settlement in an Irish Landscape, 1600–1670. By Philip S. Robinson. Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 1984. - Volume 27 Issue 1

The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583-1641

The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583-1641

Ancient and Medieval: Crown, Household and Parliament in Fifteenth‐Century England. By A.R. Myers

Ancient and Medieval: <b><i>Crown, Household and Parliament in Fifteenth‐Century England</i>. By A.R. Myers</b>

Official reaction to native land claims in the plantation of Munster

The historiography of the Munster plantation has not been extensive; in the ninety-five years since Robert Dunlop published the first proper study of the greatest of all the Tudor settlements in Ireland, only D. B. Quinn has treated the subject in any detail. In the absence therefore, of any full-scale study of the plantation, it is fair to say that it has usually been characterised as the process of driving the native Irish off their lands and settling them with English colonists. In this scenario, the administrations, both in England and Ireland, are seen as backing the settlers judicially and extra-judicially, and the natives come off distinctly the worst; as Quinn puts it, the native population greatly resented the ‘presence and domination of the planters who were felt to twist the law in favour of a minority’. Yet, a study of the extant evidence does not support this simple stereotyping; rather, both the privy council (to which many of the native land claims were directed) and the government commission of 1592 were quite willing to consider cases against the undertakers and their tenants and to rule in favour of the native claimant. For instance, Hugh Cuffe, who had originally been granted a seignory of 12,000 acres in Cork, lost most of it to appeals by Ellen Fitzedmund Gibbon and James MacShane to the privy council in 1591, and had to make do with a new grant of a mere 1,953 acres in the same area.

Sir Warham St Leger: 'Organizer-in-Chief' of the Munster Plantation Scheme of 1568-69. Evidence from the Hand-Writing Analysis of Selected Documents in the PRO, London

Sir Warham St Leger: 'Organizer-in-Chief' of the Munster Plantation Scheme of 1568-69. Evidence from the Hand-Writing Analysis of Selected Documents in the PRO, London