In the harvest of 1845 a disease, hitherto unknown in Ireland, phytophthora infestans, attacked the potato crop. The disease had made its appearance some years previously in north America and shortly afterwards in Europe. There is reason to believe that it already existed in south America, and it is possible that its failure to reach Europe with the early-introduced tubers was due to diseased tubers rotting during the long voyages under ‘ sail ’. The progress of the blight in European countries in the summer and early autumn of 1845 was reported in the Dublin Evening Post, which, without raising any serious alarm, pointed out the danger to the crop in Ireland. The seriousness of a failure of the staple food of the majority of the population must have been clear to every man struck by that possibility.

The organization of the medieval Anglo-Irish lordship was designed to reproduce as exactly as possible the administrative system of England, but it was not introduced suddenly or all at once. Of the eleven shires which were governed by royal sheriffs at the end of the thirteenth century, Dublin is the only one which can be traced back to the twelfth century, and even then does not appear in the records till the 1190’s. It seems probable that at this date no other shire yet existed in Ireland, though it is possible that Waterford, with Cork, was already organized as a shire.

In 1930 the Bristol Record Society printed as the first volume of their Publications the complete text of Bristol’s earliest charters from 1155 to 1373. The text was prepared by the city archivist, Miss N. Dermott Harding, who was also responsible for a full translation of each document, and an accurate description of the various ancient records and documents from which the text was taken. But there was no attempt at an adequate historical survey of all this material. A second volume was planned which should carry the story down to the end of the medieval period, and Miss Harding ended her short introduction with the remark : ‘[This] is in no sense an exhaustive book of reference on the documents it contains. It is, literally, a bare text-book, providing, without other comment than the technical work of transcription required, a printed substitute for manuscript material. Research upon it is left for the users of the text, in the hope that they may find it a reliable and accurate basis for their work, saving them the task of difficult and troublesome search through the originals.’

The Irish house of commons in the eighteenth century was composed of 300 members: two were elected by each of the 32 counties; two by 117 boroughs; and two by Trinity College, Dublin. Only protestants were returned, for by an English act of 1691 all members of the Irish house of commons were required to take oaths of allegiance and supremacy. Catholics could still exercise the franchise until 1727, but an act of that year deprived them of the right to vote. The dissenters were equally excluded: a clause in an act of 1704 requiring all office-holders to receive communion according to the usage of the established church excluded them from the corporations and indirectly from the house of commons. Even the minority that remained was very inadequately represented.

In the counties the leading landlords were able to influence the return of members, and many of the Irish boroughs were quite as rotten as any in England prior to 1832. Bannow in co. Wexford, for example, was a mountain of sea-sand without a single inhabited house; at Clonmines in the same county there was one solitary house; at Harristown in co. Kildare there was none. A traveller in Ireland in 1755 found Naas ‘a shabby looking place’; Castle Dermot ‘a very poor town’; Callen ‘a poor dirty town, interspersed with the numerous ruins of old castles and religious houses’; Rathcormac ‘a poor borough’; and Kilmallock ‘a spacious street, composed of houses, which, though magnificent, were windowless and roofless’. The conclusion he came to was: ‘Happy would it be for Ireland, if her corporate towns were divested of the privilege of returning representatives to the great council of the nation; for it becomes the selfish policy of the lord of the soil to impoverish the voters into compliance’.

The catholic church in Ireland never, as a church, defined for itself an attitude towards emigration. Priests and bishops, when they spoke of emigration, usually spoke as individuals, not as members of their order. The relatively small number who have left any opinions on record were not necessarily the most influential. We cannot be certain that their views represented the feelings of the clergy as a whole. The day to day conversations and advice of ordinary priests, of which we can know little, mere far more influential in this matter than the pastorals or public letters which survive. In the place of a single voice speaking with authority or the steady murmur of unanimity, we can hear only the heterogeneous confusion of a score of voices, some perhaps seriously distorted by the public controversy in which they were raised.

Warfare in Ireland in the sixteenth century must be considered in close relation to the political conditions prevailing in the country during the century. In the beginning of the century the Pale, or that part of Ireland in which the writ of the king of England ran, comprised only half of the four counties lying near Dublin. Outside the Pale were ninety states or lordships ruled by lords, often called by the English captains, who, having despotic jurisdiction within the state, made peace or war as they chose. These lordships have, very appropriately, been called the autonomous states by a modern Irish historian. About one-third of these autonomous states were ruled by lords of English origin who had in language, manners, and customs become almost as Irish as the Irish themselves. Every state, even the smallest, had its armed forces.

Two themes are discussed in this article : first, the meaning and scope of ‘ historical geography ’ with reference to various examples; and second, the possibility that Irish historians may plan enquiries into this field as part of their research-programme. The dangers involved in any effort to unite two separate yet related fields of learning are considerable; historical geography must be based on the work of those understanding each of the specialisations involved or, at least, willing to allow their work to be tested by the knowledge of an expert in the cognate field.

The history of modern political parties is rich in examples of the law that a sharp change in the party line involves a tightening in party discipline, often including a structural re-organization. The Parnellite movement did not escape the operation of this law. The Kilmainham treaty, which marked the transmutation of Parnellism from a quasi-revolutionary movement into a completely constitutional one, could not have been implemented without a drastic subordination of the various branches of the movement to central control, i.e. the control of the parliamentary party itself. As the party had been reduced by secessions until it contained, for all practical purposes, no opponents of Parnell, this meant that the whole great movement of the ‘New Departure’, or what was left of it, was now to be steered, by the little group of Parnell’s lieutenants, out of land-agitation into the more or less peaceful ways of electioneering. It was not immediately necessary to tighten the internal organization of the party itself, partly because of the secessions and partly because its make-up was such that it was inclined to welcome rather than oppose shifts to the right. What was needed was to discipline the ‘peripheral organizations’, as they would now be called, one or two of which had in the past not merely acted independently of the parliamentarians but had exercised some control over them. Before going further with the description of how the party machine was perfected in the years following the Kilmainham treaty, it might be well, for the sake of clarity, to list these organizations and indicate briefly their relation to the parliamentary party in the immediate pre-Kilmainham era.