Of course the past is dead. But it is kept alive by thinking and talking about it, and, above all, bv making it relevant to the present. The past is invoked variously, be it on a popular or on the academic level. In many areas, the popular view of the past is far removed from, and apparently uninfluenced by. the academic view, and, within limits, there is nothing wrong with that. Not every layman is expected to share the academic's understanding of the past. The matter becomes rather more serious when the reverse holds: that the view of the professional concurs with that of the lay people. If this is so, then indeed can it be said that those aspects of the past to which this applies are dead.

It is an axiom that each generation has to write history anew, partly, it seems, because understanding of the problems of the past becomes more refined, and partly because important aspects of the past may well appear in a different light to a new generation.

There were two main concerns of Tudor and Stuart governments in relation to the sea surrounding the coast of Ireland. First, and most important, there was the need to defend it from hostile ships belonging to England's enemies. This involved the security of England as much as Ireland and, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was usually controlled by the admiralty establishment in London. The setting out and supervision of ships to defend the Irish and English coasts was rarely delegated to an Irish authority. The second concern was the administration of the law maritime in Ireland. The law maritime included within its jurisdiction all crimes committed at sea or on the coast such as the seizure and robbing of ships by pirates and other sea-rovers, as well as cases involving death aboard ship, seamen's wages, salvage, wreck, damage by collision at sea, and other disputes involving the sea or the men who earned their living from it. In the medieval period such matters were often dealt with in the courts of chancery and exchequer, but in the later middle ages a separate admiralty court emerged in England where the civil maritime law was practised. The existence of the court, however, remained shadowy until it was enlarged and established on a permanent basis in the 1530s. At the same time, procedure in the court was simplified by the passing of an act which allowed for the prosecution of crimes at sea by special commissions according to common law.

The Irish land act of 1881, it is generally agreed, was a victory for the Land League and Parnell, and nationalist policy with regard to the act and the attitude of southern tenants towards it have been many times subjected to detailed examination by historians of this period. In these analyses of the events of 1880–81, however, little reference is normally made to the part played by the different parties and interests in the north of the country. It is often assumed, for example, that the Ulster tenants held aloof from the campaign for reform, lending no more than occasional vocal support to the agitational efforts of tenants in the south and west. Indeed, they were later excoriated by William O'Brien, Michael Davitt and others not only for giving no support to the land movement but also for sabotaging Parnell's policy of testing the 1881 act by precipitately rushing into the land courts to take advantage of the new legislation: ‘that hard-fisted body of men, having done nothing themselves to win the act, thought of nothing but turning it to their own immediate use, and repudiating any solidarity with the southern and western rebels to whom they really owed it’. If, however, northern tenants were harshly judged by nationalist politicians in the years after 1881, the part played by the northern political parties in the history of the land bill has been either ignored or misunderstood by historians since that time. The Ulster liberals, for example, are rarely mentioned, the implication being that they made no contribution to the act even though it implemented almost exactly the programme on which they had been campaigning for much of the previous decade. The northern conservatives, on the other hand, are commonly seen as leading opponents of the bill, more intransigent than their party colleagues in the south, ‘quick to denounce any weakening of the opposition’ to reform, and ‘determined to keep the tory party up to the mark in defending the landlord interest’

As a proportion of their total population in Ireland, the number of protestants who became committed to the home-rule cause was undoubtedly small; and that being so, their role in nationalist politics in this period has usually been either overlooked, minimised, or misrepresented. Indeed one I recent writer has claimed that in Ulster ‘almost nobody — except my grandfather’ was prepared to support Gladstone's first home-rule bill.

The purpose of this paper, though, is not only to describe the extent of protestant support for home rule, but to attempt an assessment of the influence in home-rule politics of the Irish Protestant Home Rule Association (hereafter I.P.H.R.A.). As a protestant organisation it both exercised an influence on British liberal thinking on home rule and provided a perspective on Irish nationalism that was, in some very important respects, different from that of the overwhelmingly catholic National League.

The document printed below has been preserved, somewhat unexpectedly among the series of Ministers’ Accounts in the Public Record Office, London. It is the account (or, more strictly. a record belonging to the process of auditing the account) of John Patrickschurch, clerk of wages on the expedition that Edmund Butler, the justiciar of Ireland, led in Munister between February and April 1317 against Robert and Edward Bruce and their Scottish army. The broad course of events during that critical period is well known. The Scots came south during February, approached Dublin, but, lacking the capacity to take it, continued south and west, ravaging the famine-stricken countryside. They eventually arrived at Castleconnell, by the Shannon just north of Limerick, apparently in the hope of benefiting from an alliance with the O'Briens of Thomond, one faction among whom had been in touch with them in Ulster The justiciar had moved south before the Bruces reached Dublin. He raised an army in Munster and proceeded to follow the Scots closely as they progressed through Tipperary. The royal army eventually encamped at Ludden, just south of Limerick. For some days the two forces confronted each other. Then Robert and Edward retreated. Their expectations of the O'Briens had proved vain; they were desperately short of supplies; and they may well have heard of the arrival of Roger Mortimer, the king's lieutenant, who had landed at Youghal, from where he set out on 11 April to join Butler and the army The document is of some interest for the light it can shed on military organisation and on the accounting procedures of the Irish exchequer But it is worth printing in full above all for the detailed information it contains about one of the darkest yet most decisive episodes of the Bruce invasion.

Secret societies in Ireland in the period 1760 to 1845 have recently been the subject of an extraordinary amount (by Irish standards) of scholarly interest. The Whiteboys, Hearts of Oak, Steelboys, Rightboys, United Irishmen, Caravats, Rockites and Ribbonmen have all had their historians and various interpretations have been put forward to explain the rise of these societies and the nature of the violence they perpetrated. However, the Defenders, the secret society that dominated the 1790s and the immediate post-union period, have been relatively neglected. Admittedly some important contributions have been made recently to their history: Mr J.G.O. Kerrane has made a study of the Defenders in County Meath; Professor David Miller has investigated the origins of the society in County Armagh; Dr Marianne Elliott has explored the implications for future Irish republicanism of the 1796 alliance between the non-sectarian United Irishmen and the avowedly catholic Defenders; and Dr Tom Garvin has traced the lines of continuity between Defenderism and the later Ribbonism. Nonetheless, it remains true that there is as yet no comprehensive account of the movement and much about it remains obscure. The documents published below shed light on the organisation, aims and activities of the Defenders on the eve of their alliance with the United Irishmen. They also illustrate the complex web of archaic and modern forces that comprised ‘Defenderism’