Second paragraph of third chapter (a long’un, about a list of the havens of Ireland; this paragraph alone has many more words than the document it is describing):
The list’s comprehensiveness is impressive, considering that it was likely drawn up in the early Tudor period, a time when knowledge in England of Ireland’s geography, most especially of the west and north-west, was limited. In the commonplace book of Christopher Cusack, sheriff of Meath – a copy of which survives from the early sixteenth century but which contains disparate material which is probably much older – there is a geographic description of the island of Ireland in which its most southerly and northerly points are aligned against St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and Dumfries in Scotland, respectively. Here, it was inaccurately stated that Ireland was larger than England: ‘Irland should be mor then Ingland by iiixx miles’ its author concluded.2 Later, in 1543 Sir Anthony St Leger, lord deputy of Ireland, offered Henry VIII a detailed description of Ireland’s havens – ‘The more parte of the notable havons of Ireland’; but he named only thirty-seven, and was quick to point out those havens which lay within (or near) the Irishry and which were, in effect, beyond royal control.3 It was only in Elizabeth’s reign, as Tudor rule extended throughout the island, that a greater awareness of such geographical detail was achieved in governing circles, and mainly through the increasing use of maps.4 This is evident, for example, in the well-known, and richly detailed, maps of Ireland drawn in the 1560s by Laurence Nowell and John Goghe.5 When these are compared with the crude ‘Cotton’ map of Ireland drawn in the 1520s – this drawing represents the earliest known attempt under the Tudors to map the island – and a later Italian map of Ireland from 1565 – in which Dublin and its hinterland are plotted too far south, and Sligo is depicted as lying north-east of Donegal – the new-found superiority of English knowledge of Ireland’s geography and topography becomes immediately apparent.6 Of course the act of listing havens, and ultimately plotting them on maps, did not conjure these locations into being. For centuries Englishmen and Irishmen had relied on local knowledge to move about the country, by land and by sea, without a reliance on lists of places or maps. Lists of places, such as that included in the Hatfield Compendium and on maps, were not intended to replace local knowledge. Rather they represent an effort to impart some of this local knowledge to those unfamiliar with Ireland, so allowing them to measure and to visualize that which they could not see first-hand.
2 TCD MS 594, fo. 36. The description in Cusack’s commonplace book is nearly identical to the undated and anonymous ‘Geographical account of Ireland’, which was placed in the year 1514 in the State Papers of Henry VIII: TNA, SP 60/1/5, fo. 7 (see also below, p. 138).
3 Havens of Ireland, 6 Apr. I543, TNA, SP 60/11/2(1), fo. 15. St Leger provided a brief description of each haven: ‘Dublyn, a badde haven. Wicklowe, but a crecke’.
4 William Smyth, Map-making, landscapes and memory: a geography of colonial and early modern Ireland, c.1530-1750 (Cork, 2006), ch. 1.
5 ‘General description of England and Ireland’, c. 1564, BL, Additional MS 62540, fos 3v-4r; ‘Hibernia: insula non procul ab Anglia vulgare Hirlandia vocata” , 1567, TNA, MPF 1/68.
6 The well-known ‘Cotton’ map is reproduced in Smyth, Map-making, landscapes and memory, pp 40-1. Bolognino Zaltieri’s 1565 map of Ireland, published in Venice, is a copy of Sebastiano de Re’s 1558 map of Ireland. The former is reproduced in S.G. Ellis, ‘The Tudor borderlands, 1485-1603’ in John Morrill (ed.), The Oxford illustrated history of Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford, 1996), pp 66-7. See also the Elizabethan effort to set out the depths of some of the harbours in Munster: the depths, anchorages etc., of the harbours of Ireland, 21 Apr. 1567, BL, Cotton MSS, Titus B XII, fo. 482.
Coming at the Tudor period, and Ireland specifically, with the tools of the historian rather than the literature scholar, this is a deep analysis of a 15-folio manuscript preserved in Hatfield House, by two of the top writers on the period. The manuscript includes eight short documents, all about different aspects of Ireland in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; the most substantial are a potted history at the beginning and a set of Ordinances for Ireland at the end, though it’s not clear if these last were ever put into effect.
The Hatfield Compendium was clearly written for a newly appointed Tudor official with a senior role in the government of Ireland, and the authors spend a large part of the book examining the very poor state of knowledge of Irish affairs in England throughout the Tudor period. The overthrown Yorkists had had much better links than their Lancastrian predecessors or Tudor successors – not mentioned here, but Richard of York, before he gave battle in vain, was the chief governor of Ireland for over a decade and launched the 1460 campaign to retake England from there.
Henry VII came to throne only vaguely aware of his nearby realm, and devoted significant effort and personnel (though not a lot of money) to getting a grip on it. Maginn and Ellis are able to trace the information in the Hatfield Compendium both backward and forward, looking at how it was created to satisfy the needs of the king and his senior advisers for data about a rather unknown place.
The book then traces the story through the ending of the Fitzgerald dominance and the beginning of surrender and regrant, and the definition of the kingship of Ireland (rather than lordship as it had been since Henry II), through the policies of successive underfunded chief governors appointed by Henry VIII.
Taking a step back, it strikes me that when the English court thought of Ireland, they really meant the Pale and a few outposts under government control (loosely defined), and the areas under the control of the greater magnates, the Butlers and Fitzgeralds; about half of the island, under the control of the Irish clans, just didn’t feature in calculations except as a source of trouble and potential fodder for land grabs. It’s a normal enough paradigm for this sort of conflict between a well-armed but under-informed military and a hostile and well-dug-in population; one thinks of Israel v the West Bank and Gaza, but there are plenty of other parallels.
Quite a short book, but with a lot of good stuff in it. You can get it here.
