Trinity Historians Reconstruct Thousands of Medieval Documents Bombed in the Four Courts in the Civil War

Posted on: 11 May 2012

Massive New Publicly Accessible Internet Resource of Irish Medieval Documents launched

Trinity College Dublin historians have reconstructed invaluable medieval documents destroyed during the bombardment of the Four Courts in 1922. The Four Courts was the home of the Public Record Office, which was catastrophically destroyed when it was bombed in the conflict between pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty forces at the start of the Irish Civil War. It was previously thought that the entire medieval archive had been destroyed, but forty years’ work by a team of researchers at Trinity has led to the reconstruction of more than 20,000 hugely important government documents produced by the medieval chancery of Ireland. From today, the Irish chancery letters are available again in a new publicly accessible and free internet resource known as CIRCLE: A Calendar of Irish Chancery Letters, c.1244-1509.

http://youtu.be/hb805fUQo6I

Commenting on the significance of the project, TCD Provost, Dr Patrick Prendergast, said: “This digitisation resource involving four decades of research by Trinity historians is a triumph of historical detective work that will revolutionise our understanding of Irish medieval history. The CIRCLE resource will stimulate important new research on late medieval Irish politics, society and the economy. The material will also prove invaluable for Irish families nationally and internationally interested in tracing their roots back to the Middle Ages.”

When the Four Courts was bombed on June 30th, 1922, it was a tragedy for Ireland because it began the country’s slide into bloody Civil War. But it was also a tragedy for the wider world because the explosion totally destroyed the Public Record Office. Among the most important records destroyed in the explosion at the Four Courts were the rolls of the medieval Irish chancery. This was the secretariat of the government of Ireland, established shortly after the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169. The chancery was responsible for issuing letters in the king’s name under the great seal of Ireland. Copies of many of these outgoing letters were transcribed by the medieval chancery clerks on to long rolls of parchment known as ‘chancery rolls’. All the original Irish chancery rolls were destroyed in the Four Courts blaze.

Forty years ago, a team of historians based in Trinity College began a massive project to try and reconstruct this historical treasure-trove which many feared had been lost forever. Their research has led to the creation of CIRCLE. “It is by far the largest collection of new records to do with medieval Ireland to be made available in a generation,” said Professor of Medieval Irish History, Seán Duffy, at Trinity’s Department of History.

CIRCLE: A Calendar of Irish Chancery Letters, c.1244-1509 is a reconstruction of these lost chancery rolls based on substitute sources located in various repositories in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, England and the USA.

Many of these substitute sources are found in England because the Dublin administration in the late Middle Ages was closely supervised by its ‘mother’ administration at Westminster. Documents constantly criss-crossed the Irish Sea as the king issued instructions to his ministers at Dublin, who in turn transmitted reports to Westminster for the king’s inspection, or presented copies of chancery letters to back up the audit of the accounts of the Irish treasurer. As a result of this bureaucratic to-ing and froing, copies of Irish chancery letters survive in abundance in the National Archives of the United Kingdom (Kew). Equally important are transcripts and calendars made by Irish antiquarians such as Sir James Ware (d. 1666) or his continuator Sir Walter Harris (d.1761), who were indefatigable in their pursuit of record sources for medieval Irish history. The CIRCLE website translates all these sources into English from their originals in Latin.

“The letters are extraordinarily rich and varied in their contents”, said Dr Peter Crooks, Principal Editor of CIRCLE: “These letters should become a staple for historical researchers of all kinds: political historians, historians of society, economy, settlement and gender, as well as genealogists, historical geographers and archaeologists.”

The CIRCLE website includes appointments to high office, grants of lands and charters to towns. The letters enable us to trace the descent of landed estates and the lineages of families. They document armies on the march, prisoners being ransomed, castles being razed. They reveal the interactions between the Dublin government and Gaelic chiefs-including an order to the treasurer to pay £100 to the lord of Tethmoy as a reward for presenting the government with the severed heads of over 16 Gaelic lords from the O’Connor Family dynasty. Merchants seek licences to trade with Prussia, Portugal, Brittany, Gascony and Spain. Men and women of Gaelic origin-normally excluded from the benefits of English law-purchase letters granting them liberty from their ‘Irish servitude’. Individual letters offer micro-histories in themselves. We find the Countess of Kildare complaining to the king that reports of her death are greatly exaggerated. Even the great seal of Ireland has its adventures: after it went missing in 1442 it turned up in the possession of a friar who claimed it had been handed in during confession (*see samples below).

The CIRCLE website also provides access to an unparalleled collection of digital images of original Irish chancery letters. The image collection is made of original letters-that is the actual letters that were issued by the chancery as opposed to the ‘enrolment’ which is the copy of the same letter on the chancery roll. These originals were not destroyed in 1922 because they were held in other archives, for instance in the collection of Ormond deeds now housed in the National Library of Ireland, the Pembroke Estate Papers held by the National Archives of Ireland, and the charter collection of the city of Dublin held by Dublin City Archives.

This digital collection of manuscript sources is intended to become a standard teaching aid for students of palaeography (old handwriting) and sigillography (the study of the wax seals used to authenticate documents), and this, in turn, should stimulate further archival work on late medieval Irish sources.

CIRCLE represents the culmination of nearly four decades of work at TCD on reconstructing what was lost in the 1922 disaster. The Irish Chancery Project was originally founded in the mid-1970s by the late Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven, Lecky professor of History at Trinity (1951-1980). The current phase of the project began in 2008 with funding of €285,000 from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences when Dr Peter Crooks and Dr Katharine Simms of Trinity’s Department of History collaborated to produce this newly launched internet-based resource CIRCLE: A Calendar of Irish Chancery Letters, c.1244-1509.

The CIRCLE database of chancery letters was designed by Eneclann Ltd, and the final website was built by Annertech Ltd and the Trinity College Research Computing unit, led by Senior Computer Scientist Dr Darach Golden.

In addition to the online CIRCLE resource, a three-volume print edition will be published by the Irish Manuscripts Commission.

Notes to Editors:

Images appear courtesy of the RTÉ Cashman Collection; the Irish Times; the National Archives of Ireland; and the Manuscripts and Archives Research Library of Trinity College Dublin.

Samples of the letters

1. Water charges in thirteenth-century Dublin (1244)?

This early chancery letter from the reign of Henry III (1215-72) shows that the sheriff of Dublin was ordered to summon a jury of twelve men to decide how best to bring water to the king’s city of Dublin. The citizens of the city had to foot the bill!

Letter dated at Dublin, 29 April 1244

Maurice FitzGerald, chief governor of Ireland, to the sheriff of Dublin.

ORDER, without delay, diligently to take an inquisition by twelve free and law-worthy men of co. Dublin, by the counsel of the mayor and citizens of Dublin, concerning where water can be best and most conveniently taken from its course and conducted to the K.’s city of Dublin, for the improvement of the city and at the cost of the citizens … Any who oppose are to be suppressed by force … and those who resist are to be arrested and held until further order.

See more at http://chancery.tcd.ie/document/other/henry-iii/1

2. Reward granted for the heads of Gaelic chiefs in 1305

In 1305 Piers Bermingham of Tethmoy (d. 1308) invited the midlands Gaelic chief O’Connor Faly to his castle and acted as godfather to the latter’s child. Bermingham then killed his guests ‘by means of treachery and deceit’, and the Gaelic annals tell us that the unfortunate child was thrown over the battlements of the castle and died. The annals report that the heads of the slain Gaelic lords ‘were brought to Dublin and much wealth was obtained for them’. This chancery letter confirms the story that, after the slaughter, Peter Bermingham decapitated the Gaelic chiefs and sent 18 heads to Dublin as proof so that he might claim his reward of £100.

Letter dated at Dublin, 2 July 1305

To the Treasurer of Ireland.

ORDER to pay Peter Bermingham £100 granted to him to subdue Irish felons of Offaly of the kindred of the O’Connors and to decapitate the chiefs of that lineage. Peter has now sent to Dublin the heads of Murtough and Maelmora O’Connor, chieftains of those lineages, and also 16 heads of other members of the same lineages and their accomplices.

3. More Irish than the Irish themselves? An order of 1360 forbids the English of Ireland from speaking to each other in the Irish language (1360).

Having expanded dramatically in the thirteenth century, the English colony in Ireland suffered a series of calamities in the first half of the fourteenth century, notably the arrival of the Black Death in 1348 which devastated the coastal towns populated by English settlers more severely than the rural Gaelic areas Ireland. As a result, the population of the colony was depleted and the Dublin government developed a siege mentality. A particular concern was that the ‘faithful English people’ of the king might turn native by adopting Irish habits of clothing, speech and so on. In 1366 the famous Statute of Kilkenny was passed forbidding marriage between the English and Irish populations and instructing the English to speak English, dress in the English fashion and ride their horses in the English manner (i.e. to use saddles and stirrups).

This chancery letter was issued in February 1360, some six years earlier than the more famous Statutes of Kilkenny. It is translated into English from Latin for the first time in CIRCLE. The letter shows that the issue of language was already causing concern. The letter claims that the ‘persons of the English race’ in Ireland were sending their children to be fostered among the Irish so that they would be raised speaking the Irish language, and it states that as a result those of English race have become Irish. Consequently, the colonists were ordered not to foster their children with the Irish. The Irish language was not banned altogether, but the English were instructed only to speak to each other in English and any settlers of English descent who were ignorant of English were to learn the language.

Letter dated at Dublin, 3 February 1360

To the sheriff of Dublin.

Many persons of English birth have now become of the condition of the Irish, unwilling to obey the king’s laws … And persons of the English race in Ireland are taught and converse in the Irish manner of speaking and their children are sent away to be nursed among the Irish and suckled so that they might use the Irish language. As a result, the English have become for the greater part Irish. ORDER to proclaim that no Englishman is to converse with other Englishmen in the Irish manner of speaking, and each Englishman is to learn the English language. And they are not to send their children to be fostered among the Irish. Read more at http://chancery.tcd.ie/document/close/34-edward-iii/1

4. Gaelic minstrels and poets arrested in 1435

This letter from 1435 shows that the English government suspected that Gaelic musicians, bards and other entertainers were acting as spies and so an order was issued for their arrest. As with many letters from 15th Century Ireland, the evidence must be read in two ways. On the one hand, the letter offers incontrovertible evidence of hostility towards Gaelic culture on the part of the English ruling class. On the other hand, it is clear that the Anglo-Irish settlers were fully versed in Gaelic culture and enjoyed Gaelic music and poetry. Clearly, late medieval Ireland was a multi-ethnic melting pot.

Letter dated at Dublin, 1 April 1435.

The king has learned that Irish entertainers such as harpers, timpán players, fiddlers, gamblers, rhymers, story-tellers and bards and others come among the English of Ireland, practising their minstrelsy and crafts and spying secret fortifications and roads; and afterwards they go back to the king’s Irish enemies and become and incite them to rebel against the king of England contrary to the provisions of the Statutes of Kilkenny 1366. ORDER to arrest all such entertainers with the instruments of their minstrelsy.

5. A challenge to the Tudors: the coronation of a king of England in Dublin in 1487

This short letter dates from 1487, two years after Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth and so brought an end to the Wars of the Roses in England. The letter is short, but it is pregnant with significance. Although the king of England in 1487 was Henry VII (1485-1509), this Irish chancery letter is written in the name of ‘Edward, by the grace of God, king of England, France and Ireland’. This is because the Tudors had difficulty establishing themselves in Ireland. In 1487 an imposter by the name of Lambert Simnel was crowned in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, as ‘King Edward VI’. Lambert was pretending to be Edward, Earl of Warwick, the nephew of Richard III and the last surviving male of the Plantagenet dynasty. This coronation was a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the Tudors.

The letter is also interesting because of an innovation in the royal style. Throughout the Middle Ages, the kings of England had styled themselves as ‘lords of Ireland’. However, when the pretender Lambert Simnel was crowned king of England at Dublin in 1487, he was given the style ‘king of Ireland’ rather than ‘Lord of Ireland’. This is an indication of how the English in late medieval Ireland had become to think of themselves as a distinct community from the English of England.

In a subsequent invasion of England Lambert was taken prisoner by King Henry VII (1485-1509) and sent to work in the royal kitchens. But the episode demonstrated the potential threat posed by Ireland as a ‘backdoor to England’.

Letter dated at Dublin, 13 August 1487

Letter from Edward [=Lambert Simnel], by the grace of God, King of England, France and Ireland, who sends greetings to all persons.

The king has granted to Peter Butler gentleman, otherwise called Peter Butler, son of James Butler gentleman, of the office of sheriff of the K.’s county of Kilkenny. The letter issued at Dublin in the first year of Edward’s reign.