Byrne's Dictionary of Irish Local History

by Joseph Byrne

  justiciar’s court. The court, sometimes referred to as ‘the chief place’, which followed the justiciar in his peregrinations throughout the country and the forerunner to king’s bench. Its official title was nostrum justiciarum Hiberniae sequentia or the pleas following our justiciar in Ireland. Few justiciars were trained in jurisprudence and the pleas (both civil and criminal) were heard by an attendant justice. When Richard II came to Ireland in 1394 the justiciar’s court, because of the king’s presence, became the king’s bench in Ireland. After he returned to England the justiciar did not return to the court and thereafter it was presided over by professional judges and retained the name of king’s bench. See Dublin Bench.

  justiciary rolls. The records of the transactions of the justiciar as he travelled in Ireland, largely comprising pleas heard before the justiciar’s court. All but one of the original justiciary rolls perished in 1922 but calendars of late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century rolls have been published. (Mills, Calendar of the justiciary rolls; Wood, Langman and Griffith, Calendar of the justiciary rolls in Ireland.)

  K

  Keating, Geoffrey (Seathrún Ceitinn). See Foras feasa ar Éirinn.

  keening. A lamentation performed over a corpse by women who were usually hired for the purpose.

  keep. The stoutest and most secure part of a medieval castle. Also known as a donjon. Originally it was a free-standing structure without a curtain wall.

  keeper of the peace. (L., custos pacis) From about 1300 an officer appointed by a commission of peace to maintain order in frontier regions. Usually there were a number in each county and they were chosen from the upper strata of local society. The keeper of the peace performed an essentially military role in the localities, holding musters, assessing arms, repressing crime, taking recognisances for the peace and conducting parleys with the native Irish. In the fifteenth century keepers of peace began to assume a judicial role and were sometimes referred to as ‘justices of the peace’ but their primary function was to maintain order. See justice of the peace. (Frame, ‘Commissions’, pp. 3–7; Idem, ‘The judicial powers’, pp. 308–26.)

  Kells, Book of. Dating from early in the ninth century, the lavishly-ornamented Book of Kells is a Latin gospel book of 340 folios. The original golden cover is missing. As there is no colophon, the provenance and craftsmanship is uncertain but it is certainly the work of several hands and may have been begun at Iona and completed in Kells, Co. Meath. Seven legal documents in Irish are included in the text in addition to the religious material. The Book of Kells and The Book of Durrow were presented to the library of Trinity College, Dublin, by Henry Jones, the seventeenth-century Anglican bishop of Meath. (Henry, The Book of Kells.)

  kerne. (Ir., ceithearn) Native Gaelic footsoldiers who were equipped with swords, bows, darts or javelins. As mercenaries they were often quartered on the country by Gaelic lords (see coyne and livery). Woodkerne were the sons and relatives of those dispossessed by plantation who took to the woods and used them as a base from which to attack and plunder the settlers.

  kerntye, kernety. (Ir., ceithearn tighe, household kerne) 1: The lord’s personal kerne who performed policing duties such as the capture of wrongdoers and the collection of fines 2: The quartering of the lord’s kerne, horses, horseboys and dogs on the local inhabitants. See coyne and livery.

  keyage. Originally ‘quayage’, dues paid for tying up at a formal quayside.

  Kildare Place Society. Properly, The Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in Ireland, the Kildare Place Society was founded in 1811 and in its first decade developed one of most advanced systems of elementary education in the world. As the society aimed to provide an education for the lower classes ‘divested of sectarian distinctions in Christianity’, its schools were religiously neutral. Bible readings were conducted on a daily basis without doctrinal exposition or, to use the contemporary expression, ‘without note or comment’. The fact that this approach had already been endorsed by the Commissioners of Education (1806–12) enabled the society to petition successfully for public funds. It received a grant of £6,000 in 1816, rising to £30,000 by 1831. Kildare Place published the first major series of school textbooks in these islands, established model schools for teacher training and provided an efficient school inspectorate. By 1820 26,474 pupils were enrolled in its 381 schools. Some Catholic clergy and laymen were dissatisfied with the composition of the overwhelmingly Protestant board of governors (of which Daniel O’Connell was a member) and with the practice of reading scripture without note or comment but they tolerated the society’s educational work until the 1820s. Serious dissension emerged when, against the background of sectarian hostility created by the Second Reformation mission to convert Catholics, Kildare Place began to allocate part of its income to a number of Protestant proselytising bodies such as the London Hibernian Society, the Baptist Society and the Association for Discountenancing Vice. O’Connell resigned and Catholic clergymen sought to keep Catholic children away from the schools. Government support was withdrawn from 1831 and public money was diverted into the newly-established national system of education. The remaining Kildare Place schools were later absorbed into the competing Anglican educational system, the Church Education Society. See Education, National System of, and Education, Commissioners of. (Akenson, The Irish education experiment, pp. 85–122, 143–4; Parkes, Kildare Place.)

  kilderkin. 1: One quarter of a tun, by statute 18 gallons of beer or 16 gallons of ale. A kilderkin of butter weighed 112 pounds 2: A cask.

  Kilkenny, Confederation of. See Catholic Confederacy.

  Kilkenny, Statutes of (1366). Concern about the creeping Gaelicisation of the Anglo-Irish colony led to the enactment of the Statutes of Kilkenny which prohibited the use of Brehon law to the Anglo-Normans in Ireland. Settlers were forbidden to use Irish customs such as fosterage and gossipred, play Irish sports, Gaelicise their names or employ Irish bards. The use of the Irish language was forbidden on pain of attainder and confiscation of estate. (Otway-Ruthven, A history, pp. 291–4.)

  Kilmainham Treaty. An agreement between Gladstone and Parnell in early 1882 which signalled the end of the Land War. Parnell had been jailed for sedition in 1881 and, despite the relatively favourable terms offered by Gladstone’s Land Law Act (1881), issued a ‘No Rent’ manifesto from prison to draw attention to the problem of arrears of rent facing thousands of tenants. The ‘treaty’, negotiated while Parnell was on parole, represented a compromise. Parnell agreed to halt the ‘No Rent’ manifesto and to wind down agrarian agitation in return for amendments to the 1881 act. These amendments were enacted in the Arrears of Rent Act (1882) which entitled 130,000 tenants to retrospective reductions in their rents. (Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, pp. 196–204.)

  kiln. 1: A structure where corn was dried, common in damp areas 2: An enclosure where a substance is processed by burning. Limekilns were constructed to burn limestone or shells, the remains of which were used to improve the quality of the soil or to provide mortar for building.

  kincogish. (Ir., cin comocuis, offence of a kinsman) Under Brehon law, the liability of the kin group to make restitution for the crimes and debts of its members. Where an offender fled, liability devolved to his sons or father and ultimately to the kin group. See éiric.

  king’s advocate. A senior law officer who appeared for the crown in admiralty cases. In 1886 the treasury proposed to abolish the office and the small salary attached to it but it survived as an unpaid honour until 1924.

  king’s (queen’s) bench. One of the four royal courts and the last to emerge from the undifferentiated curia regis. Originally king’s bench was the court presided over by the justiciar as he attended the itinerant king. However, as the king rarely visited Ireland it was essentially the justiciar’s court held by the justices as they attended the justiciar. When Richard II came to Ireland in 1394 the justiciar’s court naturally became the king’s bench in Ireland and when he returned to England the court retained this designation.
In the sixteenth century it acquired a fixed location in Dublin where it was presided over by a chief justice and two puisnes (three from 1783). King’s bench exercised jurisdiction principally over criminal cases, offences against the king’s peace falling appropriately into the compass of the court most intimately connected with the monarch. It took cognisance of common pleas but the unreliability of juries in civil cases led to the loss of this jurisdiction to chancery in the sixteenth century. It was from king’s bench that the judges of assize were dispatched on circuit to have the gaols delivered up to them, hear civil actions of nisi prius and resolve cases referred from the quarter-sessions. Through the issue of the prerogative writs of mandamus, certiorari, habeas corpus, quo warranto, and prohibition king’s bench acquired the latter-day equivalent of the reviewing powers of the modern high court over government and the judicial system. Originally error from king’s bench in Ireland lay to king’s bench in England and ultimately to the English house of lords. From the late seventeenth century a turf war erupted when the Irish house of lords began to assert its right to exclusive power in the case of appeals. The Declaratory Act (6 Geo. I, c. 5) pronounced the Irish house incompetent to hear appeals and until 1782 – when the act was repealed – appeals went to the English house of lords. Eighteen years later came the Act of Union and the lords brief reign as supreme court of appeal in Ireland ended with the abolition of the Irish parliament. In 1877 the Judicature Act (40 & 41 Vict., c. 57) created the supreme court of judicature in Ireland comprising the high court of justice and court of appeal. Subsequently four of the constituent courts of the high court, viz., common pleas, exchequer, probate and matrimonial and admiralty were amalgamated with queen’s bench to leave a high court of just two divisions, queen’s bench and chancery.

  King’s Inns, Society of. The regulatory body which governs admission to the profession of barrister-at-law. The oldest institution for the education of lawyers in Ireland, it was founded in 1541 when judges and leading lawyers took a lease of the sequestered property of the Black Friars north of the Liffey. It was modelled on the English inns of court with some significant differences. From the date of its foundation to the late nineteenth century it was not possible to practise as a counsellor in Ireland unless some years had been spent at one of the English inns. No similar requirement applied in England. The self-sufficiency of the English societies is also evident in the fact that they admitted members to practise and called them to the bar. The Irish society could admit them but they must be called by a chief justice. King’s Inns was reconstituted in 1607 and its formal record, the ‘Black Book’, commences in that year. From 1634 voluntary affiliation ceased and membership became a requirement for all barristers who wished to practise in the courts. In 1786 the society was compelled to vacate the Black Friars site to facilitate the construction of the Four Courts. A lease was secured on land lying between Henrietta Street and Constitution Hill and the foundation stone was laid in 1795 for its current premises. The library of King’s Inns began with the purchase of Mr Justice Robinson’s library in 1787 and was enlarged during the first three decades of the nineteenth century when it was designated a copyright library. Catholics were denied membership from 1704 until the close of the century. Their re-admittance was facilitated by the passage of Hobart’s 1793 relief act which opened the outer bar to them but maintained their exclusion from the office. That was not conceded until 1829. (Keane and Eustace, The King’s Inns; Cosgrave, ‘The King’s Inns’, pp. 45–52; Duhigg, History; Hamilton, An account of the Honourable Society of King’s Inns; Kenny, King’s Inns.)

  kirk. See presbytery.

  kistvaen. (W., cist faen, stone chest) A prehistoric stone coffin formed of slabs.

  kitchen. Any food such as shellfish, fish, meat or eggs consumed with the monotonous potato diet to add relish to the meal.

  knight’s fee. An estate in land for which the service of one knight (knight-service) was required by the crown when a hosting was declared. In medieval Ireland there were officially about 425 knight’s fees but in reality there were many more for through sub-infeudation the great magnates often exacted cumulative service in excess of what was required to satisfy the crown. Thus, when personal attendance (knight-service) was commuted to a cash payment (scutage) the lord made a profit on each hosting.

  knight-service. Originally unpaid military service owed in return for tenure of land. Its distinctive feature was the knight’s obligation to support his lord with a fixed number of men-at-arms for forty days annually. In Tudor times it denoted the form of tenure itself which was distinguished by heavier feudal dues on the tenant, including wardship, relief, marriage and escheat. Knight-service was eventually commuted to a cash payment known as scutage which was tendered in lieu of personal service. (Otway-Ruthven, ‘Knight-service’, pp. 1– 15.)

  knights hospitallers. The religious and military hospitaller order of St John of Jerusalem was established in the twelfth century to care for the sick and protect pilgrims to Jerusalem. After the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 the hospitallers peregrinated through the islands of the Mediterranean, settling successively at Cyprus, Rhodes and at Malta until 1798 when they were evicted by Napoleon. Hospitallers took the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and followed the rule of St Augustine. Like the knights templars they were richly endowed with lands throughout Europe. They first appeared in Ireland during the Norman invasion, playing a military role in the subjugation of the native Irish. Here, too, they were endowed with lands and about twenty houses or preceptories were founded, including some which devolved to the hospitallers after the suppression in 1312 of their bitter rivals, the knights templars. The chief house in Ireland was the priory of St John the Baptist at Kilmainham, Dublin. The order also had a number of frankhouses or free hospitals in different parts of the country. (Falkiner, ‘The Hospital’, pp. 275–317; Lennox Barrow, ‘The knights hospitallers’, pp. 108–112; McNeill, Registrum.)

  knights templars. The knights templars were members of the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, a religious military order established c. 1120 to protect pilgrims to Jerusalem from Muslim attacks. They were known as templars (and each individual branch was styled temple) because their quarters in Jerusalem were located in the area where the temple once stood. In 1128 St Bernard of Clairvaux wrote their rule of life. Although the knights took the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, the order acquired vast wealth and property in Europe and the Holy Land through endowments. They appeared in Ireland in the late twelfth century, establishing their chief house at Clontarf. Subsequently they founded about a dozen houses largely in the eastern and southern counties. The knights templars were bitter rivals of that other great military order, the knights hospitallers, and several unsuccessful attempts were made to combine the two orders. Rumours of heresy and immorality, and possibly a desire to seize templar wealth, resulted in the arrest, torture and execution of templars in France and the order was eventually suppressed by papal decree in 1312. In Ireland the templars were imprisoned and interrogated and the bulk of their property was transferred to their enemies, the hospitallers. (Wood, ‘The Templars’, pp. 327–377; Gwynn and Hadcock, Medieval religious houses, pp. 327–331.)

  L

  i. (L. libra, pl, libri) The abbreviation used to denote a pound.

  ladder farms. Distinctively regular-shaped farms which climb from valley floor into the uplands in parallel lines. They are usually a result of striping, a rationalisation of the field system which followed the extinction of the rundale system in the west. Striping was initiated in the nineteenth century by landlords and later by the Congested Districts Board or the Irish Land Commission.

  Lady Day. The feast of the Annunciation of Our Lady, 25 March, is Lady Day, in ancient times the supposed date of the creation of the world. All Marian feastdays, however, including the Assumption (15 August), the Nativity of Our Lady (7 September) and the feast of the Immaculate Conception (8 December) were known as lady days. Lady Day
was also a gale day, the date for the payment of half-years rent. Michaelmas Day (29 September) was the other. During the nineteenth century the gale days were 1 March and 1 September. See calendar.

  Lancaster, Joseph (1778–1838). Lancaster was an educational reformer who promoted the use of the monitorial system in schools, a system widely employed in Ireland in the nineteenth century. Under the Lancasterian method the teacher instructed the more advanced pupils (monitors or prefects) who proceeded to instruct the remainder of the pupils. Designed to meet the basic educational needs of large numbers of pupils with the greatest economy, the procedure was workable but flawed. In effect the teacher became a bystander and pupil learning was characterised by drills, routine and rote memorisation. (Kaestle, Joseph Lancaster.)

  lancet. 1: A narrow, pointed window 2: A pointed two-edge surgical knife.

  land gable. Ground rent for a house site, usually based on the length of the street frontage. (Bolster, ‘A landgable’, pp. 7–20.)

  landed estate courts (1858–1879). The landed estate courts were introduced in 1858 (21 & 22 Vict., c. 72) as successor to the post-famine encumbered estates court which had been established to facilitate the sale of bankrupt estates. Unencumbered as well as partially encumbered estates could be sold in the landed estate courts. The court rentals – prospectuses issued for the information of prospective buyers – provide details of the estate for sale, the names of occupying tenants, the rents paid and the condition of tenure. The records of the landed estates courts are held in the National Archives.