1641 Depositions Published In Volume Editions
Posted on: 12 September 2014
The first three volumes of the 1641 Depositions, witness testimonies of the violent massacres of the 1641 Irish Rebellion, were launched this week [September 9th] at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. They have been published by the Irish Manuscripts Commission. A further nine volumes are in preparation.
The testimonies mainly by Protestants, but also by some Catholics, from all social backgrounds, document the loss of goods, military activity, and the alleged crimes committed by the Irish insurgents.
The body of this material is unparalleled anywhere in early modern Europe. It provides a unique source of information for the causes and events surrounding the 1641 rebellion and for the social, economic, cultural, religious, and political history of seventeenth-century Ireland, England and Scotland.
A total of 19,010 manuscript pages in 31 volumes held at Trinity College Dublin were transcribed and digitised as part of a three year research project involving Trinity, the University of Aberdeen and the University of Cambridge and made available online at www.1641.tcd.ie. This material has now been arranged for publication in 12 volumes. The principal editor of the series is Aidan Clarke, Emeritus Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History at Trinity College.
Minister Carál Ní Chuilín at the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure said: “I congratulate the Irish Manuscripts Commission on this important and prestigious publication and I welcome the Commission to the Public Record Office in Belfast. By promoting primary sources such as these, the Commission makes a significant contribution to our understanding of our history and heritage. The Director of the Public Record Office is an invited member of the Commission and I see this as an important linkage in the context of our work with the Department of the Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.”
Chairman of the Irish Manuscripts Commission, James McGuire speaking on their publication commented: “In the 1930s, the Irish Manuscripts Commission’s plans to publish a scholarly edition of the 1641 Depositions were thwarted by official caution and world war. Now at last, 70 years on and thanks to the magnificent 1641 Depositions research project based at Trinity College Dublin, the Irish Manuscripts Commission is proud to publish this print edition of a crucial source for both historians of seventeenth-century Ireland and genealogists.”
“The publication of these magnificent volumes sees the culmination of a number of years of research. Making this material accessible to a wide audience will help all traditions both North and South of the border reach a better understanding of and come to terms with their own history,” said Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History, Jane Ohlmeyer at Trinity College and one of the Principal Investigators for the Depositions Project.
The volumes were launched on the occasion of a joint seminar organised by the Irish Manuscripts Commission and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
Notes to Editor
About the three volumes that cover the Ulster counties:
Volume I: Armagh, Louth & Monaghan
ISBN 978-1-906865-25-2, xxxvi + 356pp, €50/£40, 2014
The distinctive feature of this first volume of depositions is the richness and clarity with which it illustrates the contrasting experiences of the outbreak of rebellion in the systematically settled plantation county of Armagh, the informally colonised county of Monaghan and the predominantly Old English community of Louth. Between them, these witnesses provide some of the best known and many of the least known reports of the rebellion.
Volume II: Cavan and Fermanagh
ISBN 978-1-906865-26-9, xxxii + 591pp, €50/£40, 2014
These were the counties from which refugees first arrived in Dublin after the outbreak of rebellion and their accounts of what befell them, both in their homes and in their flight, capture their experiences with vivid immediacy. Unwittingly too, they give abundant evidence of the make-up and way of life of settler society on the eve of rebellion and of their relations with the native community.
Volume III: Antrim, Derry, Donegal, Down & Tyrone
ISBN 978-1-906865-27-6, xxxiv + 605pp, €50/£40, 2014
Settlers in the five counties represented in this volume found it easier to escape to Scotland than Dublin after the outbreak of rebellion, but hundreds of examinations taken in the early 1650s provide first-hand evidence of what took place, particularly in the north-east. The testimony of many witnesses throws light on a confused local struggle, in which Scots appeared on both sides, and reconstructs in detail its most controversial episode, the killings on Island Magee.