This article examines a hitherto unexplored source for the history of the Irish clergy in England — English episcopal ordination lists — to see what they can reveal about Irish clergy in medieval England: their geographic origins, their numbers and, less tangibly, their motivation both for coming to England and for remaining there.

Episcopal ordination lists survive, with gaps, for most English dioceses from the later thirteenth century onwards and are the formal records of the diocesan ordination ceremonies held quarterly by bishops or their suffragans, at which men wishing to be ordained to the priesthood were ordained successively to the orders of acolyte, subdeacon, deacon and priest. The ordination lists can add substantially to our knowledge of the vast mass of the medieval clergy, especially the unbeneficed, who frequently remain almost hidden from the historian. Episcopal ordination lists detail information such as the date and place of ordination, the ordinand’s diocese of origin, and occasionally a more precise place of origin and educational qualifications. If the candidate for ordination belonged to a religious order, usually this order and the actual house to which he was attached are listed. Thus these lists can provide a substantial corpus of information, particularly since every member of the clergy ought to be included in the ordination lists as they climbed the ranks of the clerical hierarchy; the same information should be available for everybody, whether they later became an archbishop or found themselves scratching out a living as an underpaid vicar or an unbeneficed mass priest. Over the last few years the computerisation of this material has produced a database of English medieval clergy drawn from the contents of surviving English episcopal ordination lists.

In April 1421 the Irish parliament, meeting at Dublin, chose the archbishop of Armagh and Sir Christopher Preston as its messengers to convey to the king in England a long list of complaints. Among these was the following:

This was, of course, something of an exaggeration. The Inns of Court certainly did not exist at the time of the English ‘conquest’ of Ireland; indeed, it is now fairly certain that the inns only came into existence around 1340. It is also clear, however, that some kind of organised legal education was taking place in London before the inns were created, certainly as early as the 1270s and quite possibly as early as 1260, though definitely not in the twelfth century. We also know that as early as 1287 Irishmen (or at least one specific Irishman, Robert de St Michael) were crossing the channel ‘causa addiscendi in Banco regis apud Westm’’, that is, specifically for the purpose of legal education at Westminster through attendance at the king’s court there.

In the second half of the twentieth century few subjects have excited more extensive historical debate in the western world than black slavery. American investigation has centred upon the actual operation of the institution. An impressively wide range of historical techniques, cliometrics, comparative history, cultural studies, the imagination of the novelist, have all been employed in a vigorous attempt to recover and evaluate the slave past. In Britain, the first great power to abolish the Atlantic trade and emancipate her slaves, the emphasis has been on the development of the anti-slavery movement, described by W. E. H. Lecky in 1869 as ‘a crusade’ to be rated ‘amongst the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations’, and therefore an obvious candidate for twentieth-century revision. Any discussion of black slavery in the New World immediately involves the historian in economic matters. Here the nineteenth-century orthodoxy launched by Adam Smith and developed by J. S. Mill and his friend J. E. Cairnes, author of The slave power (1862) and professor of political economy and jurisprudence in Queen’s College, Galway, saw slavery as both morally wrong and economically unsound, an anachronism in the modern world. Since the 1970s this view has been challenged head-on by American historians arguing that, however morally repugnant, slavery was a dynamic system, an engine of economic progress in the U.S.A. Such a thesis inevitably revives some of the arguments used by the nineteenth-century defenders of slavery and has equally inevitably attracted bitter anti-revisionist denunciation.

On Wednesday 24 March 1847 a national day of fast and humiliation was observed throughout the United Kingdom, imploring, in the words of the royal proclamation, ‘the removal of those heavy judgments which our manifold sins and provocations have most justly deserved’. The fast-day was marked by a general stoppage of work and the opening of places of worship for special services. Substantial collections for the relief of famine distress in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands were made at church and chapel doors as the congregations retired. The effect was, as one Hampshire clergyman observed, dramatic: ‘The whole nation has this day lamented their sins and prayed for pardon; imagination can scarcely picture a more affecting scene than that of millions of people, assembled at the same moment in the presence of the Almighty, imploring his forgiveness, praying for grace to amend their lives, and deprecating the continuance of his displeasure.’

What was the meaning of this seemingly archaic reaction to the Irish Famine? Considered through the filter of late twentieth-century religious scepticism, it might appear at best a marginal distraction from the catastrophic drama of the Famine, at worst a cynical attempt by the political establishment to lay a moral smokescreen around the question of responsibility for famine relief by reviving pre-modern conceptions of divine agency. To understand the significance of the fast-day and its repercussions, however, it is necessary to recognise the extent to which a Christian — and more particularly a Protestant evangelical — world-view permeated early Victorian British society.

Most Irish people, when asked what they know of the life and death of Kevin Barry, will pause for a moment while they recall the words of a famously maudlin ballad. A few points will emerge: ‘a lad of eighteen summers’ … ‘British soldiers tortured Barry’ … ‘refused to turn informer’ … ‘hanged him like a dog’ … ‘another martyr for old Ireland, another murder for the crown’. That they know anything at all about Kevin Barry is testimony, among other things, to the power of popular music for the making of political propaganda. Along with Father Murphy, Seán South and Fergal O’Hanlon, Kevin Barry figures in the pantheon of nationalist Ireland’s popular historical heroes, largely because somebody happened to write a good song about him. In many ways this is unfortunate, for Barry and the rest were once living people, and the process of iconographifying them in popular balladry, like all forms of political propaganda, serves not to clarify their roles in the historical events in which they played a part, but rather to obscure and distort them. So it is worth reconsidering the story of Kevin Barry, for a number of reasons. To begin with, his short life reached its climax at a vital moment in the long struggle for Irish self-government, a moment when the violence unleashed in 1916 burst forth again with renewed savagery on both British and Irish sides, involving in the Barry case the deaths of four young men aged between fifteen and twenty.

In a collected volume assessing Ireland’s involvement in European integration Gearóid Mac Niocaill and Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh wrote that

However, Patrick Keatinge reminded readers of the same volume that ‘Up to the late 1950s Ireland’s diplomatic persona was only slightly “European”.’ Most Irish diplomatic historians would agree with this interpretation, arguing that Britain, the Commonwealth and the League of Nations remained the primary focus of Irish foreign policy in the inter-war period. Supporting Keatinge’s interpretation, the existing historical literature suggests that Irish diplomats were rather slow in renewing the perceived longstanding contacts with continental Europe before the Second World War. Indeed, Roy Foster has criticised the discursive claim of Ireland’s longstanding contacts with continental Europe, made by many Irish policy-makers at the time of Ireland’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973, as a ‘grandiose self-delusion’. Most historical accounts, therefore, suggest that Ireland’s involvement in Europe tentatively started with the involvement in the Marshall Plan and participation in the Council of Europe.

Almost a century after the publication, in 1911, of the first two volumes of his magnum opus (the third and fourth appeared together in 1920) Goddard Henry Orpen’s Ireland under the Normans remains controversial. The way to test this is not to read the polite comments of this generation of his successors but to go to a university library, take all four volumes off the shelf, and expose one’s eyes to the palimpsest of student marginalia added down through the decades. Pencilled emotions ranging from anger and outrage to ridicule and blasphemy litter the pages and tarnish its author’s memory, every bit as much in the reprint (dating, interestingly, from 1968) as in the original edition.

When the first two volumes, covering the period 1169-1216, were published, they were warmly greeted in certain quarters, British journals in particular carrying laudatory reviews. But in nationalist Ireland grave offence was taken not merely at some of the author’s apparently callous and hurtful statements, but at his basic thesis, a thesis which Orpen set out clearly in the preface to his first volume: