by Joseph Byrne
Betham, Sir William (1779–1853). Sir William Betham, Ulster king of arms, supervised the construction of an alphabetical index to wills proved in the prerogative court, produced brief genealogical abstracts (over 37,000) of most of the wills that pre-dated 1800 and extracted outline pedigrees from them. Betham’s industry assumed enormous importance with the large-scale destruction of original testamentary material in the Public Record Office (now National Archives) in 1922. His original notebooks were acquired by the Public Record Office with the exception of volumes of pedigrees which can be seen at the Genealogical Office. (Phair, ‘Sir William Betham’, pp. 1–99; Guide to the Genealogical Office.)
bettimore. (Ir., beiteáil) The paring and burning of sods in marginal areas to increase the fertility of the soil. This practice resulted in temporary improvements in yield but the land quickly returned to infertility. See paring and burning.
bill. See civil bill.
birnie, byrnie. An early version of the chain mail shirt, forerunner to the hauberk.
Birrell’s Act (1909). See Irish Land Act (1909).
Births, Deaths and Marriages, Registry of. Although non-Catholic marriages were registered by the state from 1845, official registration of all births, deaths and marriages for the entire population began in 1864 with the establishment of the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages (26 & 27 Vict., c. 11). Births, deaths and marriages were registered in the dispensary district of the poor law union in which they occurred, the registrar usually being the medical officer for the district. A superintendent registrar gathered in the returns for the entire union and these were collated and indexed at the General Register Office in Dublin. Only the master indexes are available for public scrutiny at the General Register Office. A small payment is made for a copy of the full entry. (Kinealy, Tracing, pp. 13–16.)
black oath. An oath imposed on all Presbyterians in Ulster in 1639 by Lord Deputy Wentworth requiring them to abjure the Solemn League and Covenant and swear allegiance to Charles I.
Black Rod. Chief usher of the house of lords, so called after the ebony rod carried as symbol of his office. Black Rod’s function was to keep order within the house, a role not dissimilar to that performed by Sergeant-at-Arms in the commons. At the opening of parliament he was dispatched (as he is today at Westminster) to summon the members of the commons to the house of lords for the opening address.
blackrent. Rent or tribute illegally extorted most commonly by Gaelic chiefs on English marchers in return for protection or agreement to desist from plunder.
blazon. 1: In heraldry, a shield 2: A verbal description of heraldic arms.
Blood’s Conspiracy (1663). The plot conceived by disgruntled Protestants (including at least seven members of parliament) to seize Dublin Castle and ignite an uprising throughout the country. The source of their disaffection lay in the Act of Settlement (1662) which provided for the restoration to their former estates of Catholics innocent of complicity in the 1641 rebellion. Alarmed at the numbers being restored by the court of claims and fearing the loss of their own newly-acquired estates, the conspirators, led by Thomas Blood, assembled in Dublin in March 1663. The administration appears to have been forewarned of the plan which fizzled out when an innkeeper’s wife became suspicious of the gathering in Thomas Street. A small number were executed and the parliamentarians were expelled from the house of commons. Blood’s later lack of success as an assassin (the Duke of Ormond, 1670) and as a jewel thief (the crown jewels, 1671) appear not to have damaged him in the eyes of the crown. The pardon and grant of land he received from Charles II fuelled suspicions that he had been a spy for many years.
blimp. An airship. The term derives from its designation as type B-limp dirigible. Blimps were employed along Ireland’s east coast from 1918 as anti-submarine escorts for cross-channel shipping.
blue books. The official British parliamentary papers which include house of commons sessional papers, select committee reports and royal commissions, so called because so many of them, particularly the larger ones, were bound in dark blue covers. Many, in fact, were bound in buff.
bluesay. A light, delicate woollen or serge cloth. Also known as ‘say’.
bó-aire. (Ir., cow nobleman?) 1: A prosperous farmer. 2: The head of a creaght.
Board of Works (1831). The Board of Works was constituted out of an eighteenth century institution, ‘the Barrack Board and Board of Works’, whose military division was responsible for quartering the army in Ireland. It also had a civil division which maintained Dublin Castle, the Viceregal Lodge and the Four Courts. In the early years of the nineteenth century public money under the supervision of the lord lieutenant was voted for the improvement of inland navigation, fisheries and public works such as roads or bridges and to provide employment during periods of hardship. See Inland Navigation, Directors General of. From 1831 the new Board of Works, staffed with a national inspectorate of engineers, retained these functions but was also given the remit to oversee relief works, drainage, and to maintain public buildings, ports and harbours. The board supplied the majority of members and influenced the conclusions of many committees and commissions established to consider the state’s role in infrastructural development. In turn it was charged with the regulation of land use and granted the power to levy those who benefited from drainage schemes. By 1845 it had spent over £1 million in grants and loans. During the famine the board supervised massive public works schemes, employing in excess of 600,000 people daily on road construction and drainage in the winter of 1846–7. These works were shut down when soup kitchens were opened to relieve the distressed who, in any case, were often too debilitated to work on the roads. Under the 1870 Landlord and Tenant Act the Board of Works was mandated a role in Gladstone’s tenant-purchase scheme, providing loans of up to two-thirds of the price of the holding conditional upon the payment over 35 years of the sale price plus an annuity of 5%. In 1881 the tenant-purchase scheme was transferred to the Irish Land Commission. Late in the nineteenth century the Board of Works loaned money for the construction of farm buildings and labourers’ cottages and for land improvement. It arbitrated between landlords and the railway companies over the acquisition of land for tracks, was responsible for the maintenance of national monuments and constructed harbours and piers. The Board of Works was re-styled the Office of Public Works after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. (Griffith, The Irish board; Lohan, Guide to the archives; McParland, Public architecture.)
bobbin. Tightly-bound twists of straw arranged in a decorative row along the ridge of a thatched roof.
bog. Irish bogs are broadly classified as either raised bogs or blanket bogs. Raised bogs developed in lowland areas and are raised above the level of the surrounding countryside. They were formed between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago as a result of fen growth on the periphery of post-glacial lakes, through silting and the accumulated deposition of debris from water-living plants. As the fen expanded the lakes gradually shrank and a layer of peat was built up. Sphagnum moss, which thrives on the small amounts of nutrients in peaty soils and rainwater, colonised the surface of the peat in hummocks thus creating a raised effect. Blanket bogs, which appeared about 5,000 years ago largely in upland areas in the west, are believed to have formed because of a deterioration in climate, the clearance of woods and agricultural activity. The impact of natural forces and human intervention resulted in leaching and the creation of a layer of iron pan just below the soil surface. This impeded drainage and the resultant waterlogging encouraged an invasion by rushes, the creation of peat and, later, colonisation by sphagnum moss. Continued waterlogging triggered the spread of the bog so that, in time, wide areas of land were blanketed in a layer of peat. (Mitchell, The Shell guide, pp. 122–29.)
bonaght. See buannacht.
bona notabilia. In testamentary matters, the case of a person who died possessing goods to the value of £5 or more in a second diocese. In such cases jurisdiction lay not with the diocesan consistorial court but wi
th the prerogative court of the archbishop of Armagh.
bondsmen. Unfree tenants such as villeins, serfs or betaghs.
bonnyclabber. (Ir., bainne clabair) Sour, curdled milk which constituted part of the native Irish diet. It was made by adding rennet from the stomach of a calf to milk, causing it to coagulate.
booley. (Ir., buaile, a temporary milking place) An enclosure on the summer pasture lands where cattle were milked. Also known as a shieling or bothy. Booley, bothy or shieling huts were constructed to accommodate the herdsmen and women who accompanied the herds. Booleying (transhumance) was a feature of the rundale system.
boon work. Unpaid manorial labour service such as ploughing or harvesting owed to the lord by tenants.
bord alexander. A kind of striped silk fabric used for altar cloths and vestments.
bordure. In heraldry, a border round an escutcheon. A bordure is a mark of cadency (descent of a younger or cadet branch from the main family line) or, anciently, a mark of bastardy.
borers. Narrow flint flakes, chipped on one or both edges and brought to a sharp point, probably serving to make stitch-holes in leather.
borough. A town conferred with corporation status by a royal charter which also guaranteed the right to self-government. Prior to 1603 they numbered 55 in Ireland. James I enfranchised a further 46 to further the programme of plantation and to secure a Protestant parliamentary majority. Between them Charles I and Charles II added a further 16. The importance of the boroughs lay not in the civic duties they performed – which beyond providing the senior officials in the quarter-sessions, small debt and misdemeanour courts were negligible – but in their role in the election of members of parliament. From the seventeenth century 117 boroughs sent 234 MPs to an Irish house of commons composed of 300 members, thereby giving rise to the comment that the Irish legislature was a ‘borough parliament’.
Many boroughs were tiny insignificant places, with few or no inhabitants. Harristown, Co. Kildare, for example, had no houses. Others were large and heavily populated but, as McCracken observes, size was irrelevant. It was the nature of the franchise that mattered. A large town like Belfast whose parliamentary representation was determined solely by a corporation of about one dozen burgesses was just as rotten as Harristown. The elective procedure by which members were sent to parliament varied considerably. In the eight county boroughs the electorate included the members of the corporation, the (often non-resident) freemen and the (largely fictitious) forty-shilling freeholders. In the 12 ‘potwalloping’ boroughs the franchise was vested in £5 householders (including Catholics from 1793) who had resided in the constituency for six months (one year from 1782). Tightly controlled by their manorial lord, a tiny electorate of Protestant freeholders and resident householders sent 12 members to parliament from six manor boroughs. Each of the remaining 91 boroughs, Londonderry excepted, was controlled by a patron or patrons. The 55 corporation boroughs contained no freemen and the electorate comprised 12 or 13 burgesses. In the 36 freeman boroughs the freemen as well as the members of the corporation voted.
Catholics were excluded from borough membership by law from 1691 and the franchise remained exclusively Protestant until 1793. Protestant dissenters retained the franchise and could sit in parliament but were denied membership of the boroughs between 1704 and 1780 by the provisions of the Test Act. The Act of Union severely curbed the elective power of the boroughs, only 33 of which survived with that right intact. By drastically altering the weighting of Irish representation from the boroughs to the counties, the union also paved the way for the Catholic vote to become effective. Nevertheless, the corporations remained exclusively Anglican until the reforms of 1840. See franchise, freeman, Municipal Corporations Reform Act (1840), Newtown Act, rotten borough.
bote. Literally, compensation, bote was the right of a tenant to procure timber from the manorial woods for a variety of purposes. It was often incorporated into leases. See cartbote, estovers, haybote, houbote and ploughbote.
bothach. (Ir., both, a hut) A cottier. The Gaelic equivalent of a villein or unfree tenant.
bothy. (Ir., both, a hut) A rough dwelling or hut on the summer pasture lands, also known as a booley-hut.
‘bottle riot’. Orange resentment at prohibitions on 12 July demonstrations and the October dressing of King William’s statue lay behind the hissing and abuse visited on Arthur Wellesley, the viceroy, when he attended a performance of She Stoops to Conquer in the New Theatre Royal in Dublin in December 1822. During the performance a number of objects, including a bottle, were thrown at the viceregal box inducing Wellesley to believe that a conspiracy to murder him was afoot. The miscreants were apprehended and arraigned on a conspiracy charge rather than for riotous behaviour but the Orange grand jury of Dublin threw it out. Wellesley clearly overreacted to the ‘bottle riot’ but the episode effectively ended Williamite demonstrations in Dublin. (O’Ferrall, Catholic emancipation, pp. 13–15.)
bouchot. (Fr.) A method of mussel culture consisting of a series of upright poles in the sea on which mussel spat settles and matures.
boulder burial. A burial site consisting of a large boulder supported by a number of smaller stones. A shallow pit containing cremated remains lies beneath.
boundary cross. A map symbol used by early cartographers to denote the junction of three properties.
box bed. A canopied bed with closed sides and sometimes hinged doors.
boycott. The practice of isolating and ostracising any tenant who took over the holding of an evicted tenant, so called after Captain Hugh Cunningham Boycott, agent to the earl of Erne in Co. Mayo from 1873, who clashed with the Land League in 1880 and whose name became a synonym for social isolation. The principle of the boycott, the eschewing of all social and economic contact with anyone who transgressed a particular code, had been employed in the 1790s by the Rightboys and in the 1820s by supporters of Catholic emancipation.
Boyne Societies. Early eighteenth-century, semi-secret Protestant defence and social clubs, initially composed of Williamite veterans, which operated in areas of strong Protestant settlement and together with the posse comitatus functioned as an unofficial local defence network until 1715 when a county militia was regularised. Boyne societies with their grades, rituals, passwords and signs were, to all intents and purposes, an Orange freemasonry. Their recognition signals derived from incidents associated with the Williamite War and society ceremonies were heavily influenced by Old Testament stories such as the Exodus, the Red Sea crossing and the wandering in the desert. The Orange Order was formed in imitation of the Boyne Societies. (Haddick-Flynn, Orangeism, pp. 100–107.)
brace. A cross-beam supporting the chimney-breast or canopy.
bread and ale, assize of. An ordinance defining the quantity and quality of bread and ale within a liberty. Short measures or deficiency in quality rendered the vendor liable to fines.
breakens. (Ir., breacán) A plaid.
Brehon law. (Ir., breith, a judgement) The complex Gaelic legal system which survived into the seventeenth century. It was rooted in ancient Celtic law and leavened with borrowings from canon law after the island was Christianised. The principal law tracts derive from the seventh century and were produced in Brehon ‘law schools’. Although they claimed to express the laws of Ireland, the tribalised nature of Irish society ensured that interpretation varied regionally. Brehon law was characteristically local and private – unlike English common law which was supported and diffused by a centralised administrative authority – but, like all legal systems, it was conservative, protected the status quo and favoured those with high social standing. Gaelic society was divided into the free (sóer) and the unfree (dóer) which corresponded to nobles, men of learning and craftsmen on the one hand and serfs on the other. Compensation was the chief means of righting a wrong and the level of compensation was determined by social standing and the possession of property. Disputes were arbitrated by brehons on the basis of equity and precedence, pledges having first been take
n from both parties to ensure that the arbitration would be accepted. Contract rather than tenure was the basis of Brehon property law and contracts were accompanied by sureties as a guarantee that contractual obligations would be fulfilled. The local administration of Brehon law was a matter for the wider kin group, the derbfine, to which certain rights and obligations were attached. The kin group, for example, was liable for the compensation payments of a defaulting family member as it was for exacting compensation if one of its members was slain or unable to prosecute in his own right. Land owned by the kin group was divided partibly among the male heirs or devolved as a life estate to the daughters where the male line failed. Subsequently, however, it reverted to the kin group. See éiric, kincogish, tánaiste, tanistry. (Kelly, A guide.)
bressumer. A brace or horizontal beam spanning a large opening and supporting the upper wall.
bretasche. A temporary wooden gallery (brattice) mounted on the battlements of a castle as an additional defence during a siege. The term is also used to refer to the wooden towerhouse erected atop a motte. See motte and bailey.
Breteuil, law of. A set of privileges named after the Norman town of Breteuil where it first emerged as a custom. Its principal features included the granting of burgage holdings at a fixed annual rent of one shilling, freedom of alienation of burgages, a low fixed fine for all but the gravest offences, the limitation of the period for which the lord might have credit, the right of burgesses to own their own hundred court and to enjoy a share in common fields. The lord could exact neither wardship nor marriage and restrictions were placed on the duration of imprisonment of burgesses. Such privileges were usually offered as enticements to lure settlers to Ireland.
