Gowran castle. Photo credit: Lord Belmont in Northern Ireland Gowran, Co. Kilkenny 1190-1610: Custom and conflict in a baronial town
by Adrian Empey
The middle class of Callan, Co Kilkenny 1825-45
by Pierce A. Grace
Crime in the city: Kilkenny in 1845
by Fergal Donoghue
(Maynooth Studies in Local History / Four Courts Press, €9.95 each)
J. Anthony Gaughan
These excellent monographs are the products of the local history department of St Patrick’s College, Maynooth.
Dr Adrian Empey surveys the establishment and development of the lordship of Gowran, founded by Theobald FitzWalter between 1185 and 1190. In so doing he consulted its foundational documents such as its charter and its legal and financial records. He describes in detail the castle at Gowran which was not simply an instrument of war but also a manor house with a complex of farm buildings. He illustrates how the castle was the seed from which the medieval town grew.
In analysing the records of a long drawn-out conflict between the townsmen of Gowran and the Earl of Ormond at the beginning of the 17th Century Empey is able to set out the written and unwritten customs which governed the relationship between the lord of the manor and his burgesses, namely the citizens of Gowran who had full municipal rights.
Changes
In concluding Empey states that, despite the fundamental changes which occurred between 1190 and 1610, the claims of lordship remained unchanged and hence the age-old customs continued to be observed. But he adds their days were already numbered with the first signs of a shift in the balance of power between central government and the lords who had governed Ireland in its name for much of the preceding four centuries.
On reading Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin’s diary, Pierce A. Grace was prompted to publish his study of the middle class of Callan in the period from 1825 to 1845.
Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin was born near Killarney in 1780. With his father he taught in a hedge school near Callan from the 1790s onwards. Following his father’s death he moved the school into Callan, where he also established another school. Later he also established a successful business in the town. His associates and friends were members of the business community, the local doctor and the parish priest. Thus his description of life in Callan is from a middle-class perspective.
Using meticulously garnered statistical information Pierce Grace describes every aspect of the lives of the middle class featured in Amhlaoibh’s diary.
He also describes the town’s poor. They resided in overcrowded dwellings situated in the lanes on the periphery of the town. Five to six people lived in one-roomed, mud-walled cabins with an earthen floor and no windows, “mere hovels with nothing in them excepting a little straw and one or two broken stools”.
Grace also describes the religious divide in the community. Protestants numbered just 3% yet controlled all the levers of local power. By 1845, however, the increasingly educated Catholic middle class were beginning to have a say in the new local government institutions such as the town commissioners and the poor law guardians.
Despite the paucity at national level of records concerning local crime and disorder, Fergal Donoghue mainly from newspaper reports provides a comprehensive account of crime in Kilkenny in 1845. His book investigates crime and sentencing at petty sessions, quarter sessions and assizes in Kilkenny city in 1845. The justice system at the time and the role and development of the courts are examined.
A thorough account of crime and sentencing is presented with possible reasons for particular types of crime given. This reveals that recidivism, the act of repeat offending, was harshly punished as was the theft of personal property, which resulted in four persons sentenced to transportation in 1845. Vagrancy, petty crime and drunkenness were rife but overall the city was in a very peaceable condition immediately prior to the Famine.
Whoever chose the very small print for these three valuable studies did a grave disservice to the authors, but to get these essential little books into print this may well be demanded by the economics of modern publishing.