Byrne's Dictionary of Irish Local History

by Joseph Byrne

  martello tower. A circular or drum tower constructed during Napoleonic times as a coastal defence.

  martyrology. A medieval register of Christian martyrs containing lists of saints’ (and other) holy days and details of the lives of the saints. The earliest Irish martyrologies are calendars which name the martyr and the place of martyrdom under his/her feast day which is often the date he/she was martyred or died. Later martyrologies provide additional biographical detail. (Kelly, Calendar of Irish saints; O’Clery, The martyrology; Stokes, Félire; Idem, Céli Dé.)

  Maynooth College. A Catholic seminary founded in 1795 with the aid of a government building grant of £8,000 and subvented annually for a similar amount for many years. Government support for the institution derived from its concern to eradicate the practice of Irish student-priests travelling to European seminaries for their education. By ensuring that Irish priests received their training at home it was hoped to halt the spread of European ideas and to secure for the government a toehold measure of influence over the Catholic church in Ireland. When Gladstone disestablished the Church of Ireland in 1869 state aid to all churches was discontinued and Maynooth received a final subvention of £372,000 which was appropriated from the surplus revenue of the disendowed church. (Eighth report of the commissioners of Irish education inquiry, HC 1826–27 (509) XIII; Corish, Maynooth College.)

  meal months. The lean, summer months when stocks of old potatoes were low, the new potatoes were not ready for eating and grains formed a significantly greater proportion of the native diet.

  mearing. A boundary. Intermixed pre-plantation holdings were divided by mearings and baulks. These were unploughed strips dividing open-field agriculture with, occasionally, slight or temporary fencing.

  meather, meadar, meador, meadher. A four-cornered pitcher of uncertain capacity, hollowed out from a single piece of wood and used to hold butter or oats. In Donegal it had a capacity of two gallons, in Fermanagh six quarts. See raskins.

  mease, meise, meyse. Equivalent to 630 fish. Five ‘hundred’, each hundred being 126 fish, was equivalent to a mease.

  mechanics’ institute. First introduced in Ireland in 1825 with the founding of the Belfast institute, mechanics’ institutes were established to provide education to adult workers. Sponsored by middle-class philanthropists, the institutes provided courses of lectures on the Arts and Sciences together with library facilities and reading rooms. Later in the century their work was largely eclipsed by public libraries and other educational institutions. (Cooke, ‘The Dublin Mechanics’, pp. 15–31; Morton, ‘Mechanics’, pp. 59–74.)

  meere. A Gaelic spatial unit of measurement which in Limerick was equivalent to a quarter or about 240 acres. In Tipperary a quarter meere was equivalent to five great acres and four quarter meeres made a capell land or 20 great acres.

  meitheal. (Ir.) 1: A reaping party 2: The obligation of the base clients or tenants of a Gaelic lord to attend and harvest the lord’s corn 3: In modern times the communal harvesting of the corn of each individual in the community.

  memoranda rolls. The working records of the upper exchequer, the memoranda rolls consisted of copies of documents and notes relating to exchequer affairs. They contained balances, accounts, debts paid to the crown, investigations of financial irregularities, details of the sheriffs’ twice-yearly accounts (proffers), escheators’ accounts, appointments of attorneys, claims for and decisions about allowances, orders for the seizure of property, inquisitions and grants of land. Only two original memoranda rolls survive for Ireland (1309–10, 1319–20) but before its demise in 1830 the Irish Record Commission had prepared 43 manuscript volumes of extracts drawn largely from the memoranda rolls for the period 1294–1509. The extant memoranda rolls and the commission’s volumes of extracts are in the National Archives. As the accounts of the Irish treasurer (head of the exchequer) were audited at the English exchequer, material relating to exchequer business in Ireland can be found in the English memoranda rolls. See pipe rolls. (Connolly, Medieval record sources, p. 22; Lydon, ‘Survey’, pp. 51–134; Phair, ‘Sir William Betham’, pp. 1–99.)

  memorial. 1: A letter of petition 2: A copy of a deed. See Deeds, Registry of.

  mensal lands. Lucht tighe or the lands which traditionally supplied food to the lord’s table and hence were free of exactions.

  mensal parish. A parish set aside to supply the episcopal table.

  mercer. A dealer in cloth, a draper.

  merchet. A payment owed to the manorial lord by a tenant for permitting his daughter to marry.

  mercy, let him be in. Let him be fined.

  mere. (L., merus, pure) In a multi-ethnic society – as Ireland was in early modern times – the term mere Irish (pure Irish) was used to distinguish the native Gaelic Irish from those Irish-born descendants of Anglo-Norman settlers (the Old English) and the Irish-born descendants of Elizabethan and Jacobean planters (the New English). (Ferguson, ‘The “mere English”’, p. 508.)

  merlon. The solid intervals between the crenelles (openings) of a battlement which sheltered defenders from missiles.

  meskenningham, meskenningha, miskenninga. A fine imposed for mispleading or for offering a false plea.

  mesne lord. An intermediate lord in the feudal chain, one who holds an estate of a superior lord.

  mesne process. The intermediate stage in legal proceedings (the first being to select the court appropriate to the alleged offence) by which a court attempted to secure a defendant’s appearance and where either plaintiff or defendant might lawfully have the hearing postponed. If the sheriff could not locate the alleged criminal to compel his attendance he was exacted or summoned on five successive meetings of the county court and outlawed on the fifth. The final stage in legal proceedings was the action itself.

  mesolithic. (Gr., mesos, middle + lithos, stone) Middle period of the stone age, the hunter-gatherer era, transitional between the neolithic and paleolithic periods.

  messuage. A house with outbuildings and a parcel of land or yard.

  metayage. A system of land tenure which required a rental payment by the tenant of a proportion of the produce of his holding, the stock and seed having been provided by the owner.

  Methodism. Originally a movement within the Established church, Methodism appeared in Ireland in the mid-eighteenth century and was characterised by an itinerant ministry, lay preaching, an emphasis on disciplined living and evangelicanism. In 1816 there was a division in Methodism between the Primitive Wesleyan Methodists, who favoured a continued presence within the Established church, and the Wesleyan Methodists who wished to secede. The rift was healed in 1878 and the two branches re-united. Methodist numbers grew consistently in the first half of the nineteenth century, peaking at over 44,000 in 1844, but emigration contributed to a decline thereafter. Although its mission to convert Catholics and Presbyterians made little headway, Methodists contributed significantly to the emergence of evangelicalism in Ireland in the nineteenth century. The supreme governing body of Methodism in Ireland is the Methodist Conference which first met in 1744 and was responsible for defining policy, for ordinations and stationing of ministers. The next level in the structure was the district synod which met twice yearly. Further down the hierarchy were the individual circuits which comprised two to four churches served by one minister. Circuit meetings of the minister, officials and lay delegates were held quarterly. Local meetings, known as the monthly class or leader’s meetings, were held in a house and concentrated on pastoral affairs. (Cooney, The Methodists; Jeffery, Irish Methodism; PRONI, Guide to church records; Ryan, Irish church records.)

  metropolitan. The primate of an ecclesiastical province. In Ireland the four metropolitans were the respective archbishops of Armagh, Dublin, Tuam and Cashel. See visitation.

  Michaelmas. 1: 29 September, the feast of St Michael and All Angels, one of the quarter days when rents were due 2: A term in the legal and university year. See sittings.

  microlith. A tiny geometrical blade tool
from the mesolithic age.

  midden. 1: A refuse heap or dunghill 2: A coastal site where shellfish were consumed regularly, the evidence of which is preserved in a dense layer of shells.

  middleman. Also known as landjobber, rentier or lease speculator, a middleman was a lessee who re-let part or all of the land leased to him. The term appears to have been coined by Arthur Young in the eighteenth century. The rise of the middleman is associated with absentee landlords who were anxious to secure a regular income by granting long leases at low rents. The middleman secured a lease on a property and then sublet at a higher rent to maximise his profit, contracting leases which expired before his own in order to treat with the landlord as an occupying tenant. Middlemen employed the tactic of canting to secure the maximum possible return on their investment. This involved advertising the expiry of leases in chapels and towns, inviting private bids and leasing to the highest bidder without any consideration being given to the former tenant, a practice not dissimilar to the modern-day sealed tender. David Dickson has challenged the stereotypical view of the middleman as a rapacious parasite by illustrating the complexity of intermediate tenure in terms of origin, scale, function, change over time and regional differentiation. He notes that contemporary critiques of the middleman (some of which were laudatory) differ because the authors were referring to distinct manifestations of the phenomenon. At the close of the eighteenth century the middleman system was in decline caught between the vice of tenant poverty and the determination of landlords to extract a better return from their estates. (Dickson, ‘Middlemen’, pp. 162–85.)

  middle nation. A term used by Anglo-Irish settlers in the middle ages to define their status as neither wholly Irish nor wholly English. (Lydon, ‘The middle nation’, pp. 1–26.)

  Middlesex, bill of. See latitat.

  mile. A statute mile is equivalent to 1,760 yards, the Irish or plantation mile, 2,240 yards and the Cunningham or Scottish mile, 1,984 yards. The difference derives from the use of a different linear perch, the statute perch measuring five-and-a-half yards, the Irish measuring seven and the Cunningham six-and-a-quarter.

  mile line (the ‘line’). A belt of land, originally four miles wide, around the coast of Connacht as far as Sligo and south along the west bank of the Shannon which was to be planted by Cromwellians, effectively sealing in the transplanted Irish from the outer world and preventing their escape back to where they had come from. Its breadth was successively reduced to three miles and later to one mile because there was insufficient land to meet the needs of the transplanted.

  miles. (L., a soldier) A knight.

  militia. Part-time militias or citizen armies were raised in Ireland from the seventeenth century. Until the late eighteenth century – and with the exception of Tyrconnell’s Catholic militia – they were exclusively Protestant and brought into being during periods of external threats. In 1715 (2 Geo. I, c. 9) the militia was placed on a statutory basis and all male Protestants between the ages of 16 and 60 were required to muster for four days annually. The force was raised on a county basis by the governors and gentry in each county and organised into county regiments and small independent companies. It was mobilised during the invasion scares of 1739 and 1745 but after 1760 became moribund. After decades of inactivity a full-time infantry force comprising at least 38 regiments was raised in 1793 for service anywhere in the British Isles. This innovation was accompanied by severe anti-militia disturbances as poorer Catholics rioted because they had received nothing from the 1793 Catholic Relief Act (which enfranchised the forty-shilling freeholders) yet now found themselves subject to effective conscription since they could not buy substitutes to perform their militia service. The policy of requiring men to serve outside the home county was designed to inhibit the influence of local affinities. Officered by Protestants but overwhelmingly Catholic in the ranks, the Irish militia was regarded with suspicion by the administration because it was believed to have been heavily infiltrated by United Irishmen and Defenders. Nevertheless, the force proved adequate during the 1798 rebellion and the anticipated defection of Catholics to the rebels did not take place. The militia continued in active service until 1816. (Bartlett and Jeffrey, A military history; Blackstock, An ascendancy army, pp. 36–38, 42–3, 50; McAnally, The Irish militia.)

  millenarianism. A belief in the coming through revolutionary action of a utopian society which took root in Ireland in early decades of the nineteenth century with the dissemination of Pastorini’s prophecy that the destruction of Protestant supremacy was imminent. (Donnelly, ‘Pastorini’, pp. 102–39; O’Farrell, ‘Millenialism’, pp. 45–68.)

  ministers’ money. A house tax imposed in lieu of tithe in 1665 (17 & 18 Chas. II, c. 7) on householders in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Drogheda, Kilkenny, Clonmel and Kinsale and collected by church-wardens for the upkeep of Anglican ministers. The tax was assessed on the yearly value of a house to a maximum of 12 pence in the pound and no house could be rated above a yearly value of £6. It was inequitable in that the burden fell largely on non-Anglicans, on the poorer citizens proportionally greater than the richer and it did not apply to towns in the north. In the nineteenth century about £15,000 was levied annually by this tax. Minister’s money managed to escape the tentacles of the Church Temporalities Act of 1833 but was reduced by 25% in 1854 and abolished in 1857. A body known as the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for Ireland – which had been established under the temporalities act – was then charged with paying the ministers out of its own funds though it was permitted to recoup the payment from the municipal governments. In the event the municipal governments contributed only a fraction of the payment and after the passage of William Fagan’s private member’s bill through the commons in 1857 (20 & 21 Vict., c. 8) the ecclesiastical commissioners had to shoulder the entire burden. (Power, ‘A minister’s money’, pp. 183–200.)

  misprision. A failure of duty, an omission or misdemeanour committed by a public officer.

  mocket. A bib or handkerchief.

  model schools. Nineteenth-century district training schools vested in, controlled and funded by the National Board of Education where aspiring primary teachers worked for a six-month period before progressing to the Central Model School in Dublin, a residential training institution conducted on non-denominational principles. The first model school opened in Dublin in 1834 and by mid-century there were 25 in existence. Catholic bishops disapproved of the non-denominational ethos of the training institutions and campaigned against them. In 1862 priests were forbidden to send trainees to the model schools or hire model school graduates and Catholic school-children were withdrawn from 1866. The Powis Commission (1870) recommended government subvention for denominational teacher-training and in the 1880s St Patrick’s College, Carysfort, Mary Immaculate (Limerick) and the Church Of Ireland Training College were established. Some model schools, shorn of their teacher-training role, continue to operate. (Akenson, The Irish education experiment.)

  moderator. The president of a Presbyterian governing body.

  moiety. A half portion.

  Molyneaux, William. Author of the Case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England stated (Dublin, 1698), Molyneaux criticised the anomalous legislative relationship between the kingdom of Ireland and the neighbouring island. Ireland was a separate kingdom, had a parliament of its own and was not represented in Westminster. On this basis the English parliament had no right to bind Ireland by legislation passed in Westminster. Molyneux was not preaching separatism for he believed a political union of the two kingdoms with Irish representation in Westminster would be preferable to the arrangement as it was. In the early 1700s there were appeals from Ireland for such a union but they were not heeded in England and the Declaratory Act of 1720 copperfastened the subordination of the Irish parliament to Westminster. See sole right. (Simms, William Molyneaux.)

  month’s mind. A memorial mass held usually about one month after a person’s decease.

  monolith. A sing
le upright stone.

  Moravian. An evangelical religious sect of Czech origin founded in Saxony by persecuted Hussite emigrants from Moravia, the Moravians appeared in Ireland in the mid-eighteenth century. Their greatest success was achieved in Co. Antrim yet although the missionary work of John Cennick resulted in the formation of over 200 societies, the sect never attained critical numerical mass and by 1836 there were but seven congregations in Ireland. A Moravian model village was laid out at Gracehill, Co. Antrim, in 1746. The records of Moravian congregations in Ireland are retained at Gracehill and are available on microfim in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.

  mortar. A mixture of water, sand and lime used as cement for construction purposes.

  mort d’ancestor, assize of. A possessory action to settle disputes as to who was the immediate heir of a person last seised of a particular estate. It was initiated to recover lawfully inherited land that had been taken by another before the heir was able to take possession. Introduced under Henry II, the writ issued to commence the action demanded of the jury an answer to the question: ‘Did X, the ancestor of Y (plaintiff), die seised in his demesne and as of fee of Z (the property) and is Y his nearest heir?’ If the jury answered ‘yes’, the plaintiff was immediately given seisin of the estate. See novel disseisin.

  mortmain, alienation to. (Fr., dead hand) Magna Carta (18 John, c. 39, 1217) forbade the alienation of land to corporations or monasteries because, unlike human tenants, corporate bodies cannot die, marry or be in a minority and so the crown was denied its entitlement to the feudal incidents of escheat, wardship, marriage and relief. The Statute of Mortmain (1279) increased the penalties for such transactions and periodically between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries additional statutes were enacted to forbid alienations to mortmain without licence. Monastic institutions, nevertheless, managed to evade the restrictions imposed by the statute by taking an action for recovery, a legal fiction which the courts accepted in order to maintain the principle of alienability of land. See use, feeoffment to.