We have isolated a number of λ dg HFT lysates which carry proximal fragments of the galactose operon. Most of these have been shown to be different, and each terminates in either the kinase or transferase cistron. They divide the kinase cistron genetically into seven blocks of mutants, and the transferase into eight.

When a λ dg is used to transduce a bacterium which carries a mutation in a cistron which is intact in the λ dg the transduction frequency is high in the presence of λ-helper. This is attributed to integration of the transducing fragment at the λ-attachment site and complementation between the two operons in the heterogenote. When the same λ dg transduces a mutation lying in the cistron in which the λ dg terminates, so that recombination within the galactose operon is obligatory, the transduction frequency is 10 to 1000 times less.

In such cases there is a general increase in transduction frequency between distal mutations (i.e. those lying near the termination of the deletion) and proximal mutations, but the relationship does not hold for many individual pairs of mutants, probably due to physiological differences between the bacterial strains.

By the fourteenth century the descendants of those who had gone from Britain to Ireland in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries had come to call themselves ‘the English of Ireland’ or ‘the English born in Ireland’. Or, to be more accurate, they did so when faced by Englishmen from England: within Ireland they described themselves simply as ‘the English’. From the 1340s onwards a series of disputes with agents of the king formed a context in which they collectively stressed their Englishness. By the fifteenth century this identity was from time to time problematical, both for those who claimed it and for the metropolis. Historians who work on the late medieval and early modern periods have found it equally so, and have argued about the atuitudes and nationality of the settler élite. While fourteenth-century evidence has been called upon in these debates, there has been little serious consideration of the first two centuries of the lordship of Ireland. In what senses were those who went to Ireland during the founding period ‘English’? Why does the emphasis upon being English appear to have intensified among their successors as time went by? What does the self-proclaimed Englishness of the fourteenth century signify? How far do the complexities and tensions associated with it foreshadow the better-known difficulties of later periods? These are the matters I wish to explore.

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.

On 26 May 1315 a Scottish army commanded by Edward Bruce, recently created earl of Carrick, landed near Larne in County Antrim. From this date until his death at Faughart on 14 October 1318 there was a Scottish presence in Ireland. We are told that Edward was crowned king of Ireland near the scene of his eventual defeat soon after 1 May 1316; his supporters certainly regarded him as king, and he himself used the title. In reality, however, his control never extended beyond the lands of the earldom of Ulster, which he used as a base from which to launch destructive expeditions to other parts of the country. Yet at least until the retreat of the Bruces from Limerick in April 1317 a Scottish conquest of Ireland must have appeared to be within the bounds of possibility; it is hardly too much to say that during this brief period the future political shape of the British Isles depended on the outcome of an often obscure series of campaigns and alliances in Ireland.

When the Irish chieftains sent their ‘Remonstrance’ to Pope John XXII at the time of the Bruce invasion, they included among their indictments of English rule in Ireland the murder of Murchertach MacMurrough, the Irish king of Leinster, and of Art, his brother. The killer they named as ‘Geoffrey de Pencoyt’. This was evidently an event of some moment, to be classed with the more famous murder of Brian Rua O’Brien by Thomas de Clare in 1277 and the slaughter of the O’Conors of Offaly by Peter de Bermingham in 1305. Yet beyond the fact that the murder took place at Arklow on 21 July 1282, very little is known about it. The documents printed below shed new light on the event, suggesting strongly that it was politically motivated and inspired by the Isish justiciar, Stephen Fulbourne. They also furnish tlie crucial missing links between facts that have long been known, but which have not hitherto made coherent sense.