Byrne's Dictionary of Irish Local History

by Joseph Byrne

  nomina patrinorum. In Catholic baptismal registers, the name of the godparents.

  nomina sponsorum. In Catholic marriage registers, the Christian names of the couple.

  nominy money, nominy penny. A sum of 5% paid to the land agent on the return of goods distrained for non-payment of rent.

  nonage. Below the age of 21 years, not of full age. See majority.

  non assumpsit. (L.) The plea of a defendant in a personal action in which he denies having entered into a promise.

  non-conformist. A Protestant, such as a Presbyterian, who did not conform to the Anglican church (also a dissenter). Strictly speaking Catholics were also non-conformists.

  non-cure. A religious sinecure. An Anglican benefice which did not involve the performance of any religious ceremony since it did not have a congregation. The minister appointed to the non-cure simply collected the emolument pertaining to the benefice. Under the Church Temporalities Act (1833) the ecclesiastical commissioners were entitled to void all such appointments when they next became vacant (with the exception of those under lay patronage) and to appropriate the income from the non-cure.

  non est culpabilis. (L.) He is not culpable, the plea in an action of trespass.

  non est inventus. (L.) He is not to be found, the return of a sheriff following the failure of a felon to answer at five successive county courts.

  non-subscribers. Between 1719–26, a dissenting group of Presbyterians who refused to subscribe to the Westminster Confession, the statement of Presbyterian doctrine. See Presbyterian, Remonstrant Synod, New Light, Seceders, Southern Association.

  Non-Subscribing Presbyterian church. See Unitarians.

  non utlagat. (L.) He is not guilty.

  notary, notary public. A legal clerk who took affidavits or depositions and attested the authenticity of deeds and documents.

  novel disseisin, assize of. The form of action of writ and hearing before a jury began with the assize of novel disseisin and was adapted to other cases of civil dispute such as mort d’ancestor. Novel disseisin (recent deprivation of seisin) determined whether an individual had unjustly disseised (dispossessed) another of his freehold. It was introduced at the Assize of Northampton in 1176 when judges were ordered to hear actions to recover lands of which the plaintiff had been dispossessed arising from May 1175.

  nuncupative will. A death-bed testament in which the testator’s last wishes were recorded and witnessed.

  nuns. The paucity of contemporary records makes it difficult to ascertain the size and state of female religious houses in the centuries prior to dissolution of the monastic institutions. A small number of earlier Celtic female abbeys appear to have continued into the late medieval period to become Arroasian Augustinian houses through the influence of St Malachy. Malachy also founded female houses including St Mary’s Abbey, the chief Augustinian house, at Clonard in Co. Meath (c. 1144) which had 13 daughter houses. From 1223–4 Kilcreevanty became the leading Augustinian house in Connacht and when Clonard declined c. 1383 it was superseded by Odder. Other female congregations active in Ireland in the middle ages included the Cistercians, the Benedictines and the Franciscans (represented by six houses of the Order of St Clare in 1316). Female religious were frequently attached to male monasteries where they served in the almonries and hospitals and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries female congregations of the Franciscan Third Order Regular are recorded in the west and north of Ireland. At the dissolution the convents were suppressed and their temporalities confiscated, the superiors receiving small pensions by way of compensation. During the Counter-Reformation attempts were made to revive or establish convents but with little success and according to the Report on the State of Popery there were only nine nunneries operating in Ireland in 1731. The foundation of the Presentation Sisters in 1776 initiated the process that was to result in the great nineteenth-century conventual efflorescence. In 1800 there were only 120 nuns living in 11 houses in Ireland. By 1900 37 female religious orders were active, comprising 8,200 sisters dispersed in 327 communities across the island. The Brigidines (1809), the Sisters of Charity (1815), the Loreto nuns (1821) and the Sisters of Mercy (1828) joined older established orders such as the Dominicans, the Carmelites, the Poor Clares and foreign orders such as the Ursulines and Sisters of St Louis to provide a broad range of welfare, health and educational services. See Popery, Report on the State of.(Clear, Nuns; Hall, Women; Magray, The transforming power.)

  O

  Oakboys, Hearts of Oak. This militant, highly public mid- and south-Ulster combination emerged in 1763 in protest against the passing of the Road Act which required all highways to be repaired by the personal labour of householders along the route. The largely Protestant Oakboys objected to the fact that landed proprietors, in their capacity as grand jurors, often had roads and bridges made for their own convenience with the burden of repairs falling on the poorer ratepayers. Thus it was a protest against the use of public taxes for private roads. They also objected to attempts by the Anglican ministers to exact the strict legal rate of tithe and the exaction of small dues (fees for christenings, marriages, funerals and churching). Wearing oak boughs in their hats, they gathered together to erect gallows and paraded to the clergymen’s houses. There they compelled them not to exact more than a specified proportion of the tithe. They also visited the houses of the resident gentlemen and forced them to swear they would not assess the county at more than a specified rate and that they would make no more roads. The sting was taken out of the protest by the passing of a less contentious road act within a few months. (Donnelly, ‘Hearts of Oak’, pp. 7–73.)

  Oates, Titus. See Popish Plot.

  oakum. Caulking fibre made by picking and unravelling old hemp rope. It was used to stop the cracks in wooden ships.

  ob. Contraction of the Latin obiit which means he or she died. See obolus.

  obit. A memorial mass or recitation of prayers performed on the anniversary of the death of a person, usually that of a deceased member of a cathedral or monastic institution, a lay member of a confraternity, a benefactor or well-disposed civic official. Religious institutions such as cathedrals or monasteries maintained a register known as a ‘book of obits’ in which such dates were entered. (Crosthwaite and Todd, The book of obits.)

  oblations. Small dues and offerings or gifts for religious purposes, usually small monetary payments for specific church services such as weddings, baptisms, churching of women and funerals. Oblations of one penny or halfpenny were also paid at major religious festivals such as Christmas, Easter or on the feast-day of the parish.

  obolate. Land worth one halfpenny per year.

  obolus. (Abbreviated as ob.) A halfpenny or coin of small denomination.

  observant. See conventualism.

  octave. The eighth day after a festival, both days being included so that the eighth day always falls on the same day as the festival itself.

  Octennial Act (1768). The octennial act (7 Geo. III, c. 3) introduced the practice of a fixed-term parliament, in this case a period of eight years. Previously parliament was dissolved only on the death or proclamations of the monarch.

  O’Curry, Eugene (1796–1862). Self-taught calligrapher, translator and scholar, O’Curry worked for three years in the Ordnance Survey where he met John O’Donovan and George Petrie. He catalogued Irish manuscripts for the Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College Dublin and the British Museum. In 1854 he was appointed professor of Irish history and architecture in the Catholic University of Ireland. His lectures (1855–6) on ancient Irish manuscript sources were published in 1861 and a further three volumes of lectures (1857–62) called The manners and customs of the ancient Irish appeared posthumously in 1873. (O’Curry, Lectures.)

  O’Donovan, John (1809–61). Born in Co. Kilkenny, O’Donovan is numbered (along with Eugene O’Curry and George Petrie) among the outstanding Irish scholars of the nineteenth century. After a three-year stint in the Irish Record Office (1826–9) he transferred to the Ordnance Su
rvey where he compiled over 140,000 placenames. His letters which contain notes and observations on the placenames and antiquities of Ireland were published in 50 volumes posthumously between 1924 and 1932 by Michael O’Flanagan. O’Donovan published a grammar of the Irish language in 1845, contributed articles on history and topography to the Dublin Penny Journal and to publications of the Irish Archaeological Society (of which he was a co-founder with Eugene O’Curry and James Todd). His translation of The martyrology of Donegal was published posthumously by William Reeves and James Todd in 1864. O’Donovan’s crowning achievement was his translation of the annals of the kingdom of Ireland by the four masters which issued in seven volumes between 1848 and 1851. See Four Masters, Annals of.

  oenach. Ancient Gaelic assembly or fair, apparently associated with political or social as well as commercial affairs.

  OESA. The Order of Hermits of St Augustine. See Augustinian Friars.

  office. For devotional purposes the monastic day was divided into seven or eight canonical hours. The night prayers of matins (also known as vigils or nocturns) began at 2am or 3am in the summer and were followed by the singing of lauds at first light in Benedictine monasteries. Thereafter the office was recited at 6am (prime), 9am (terce), noon (sext) and 3pm (nones). Vespers (also known as lucernarium because candles were lit at its celebration) was recited in the evening and compline, the last of the canonical day-hours, was said before retiring at night.

  OFM. The Order of Friars Minor. See Franciscans.

  ogham. A short-hand writing style based on a 20-letter alphabet derived from Latin. Ogham stones, which were upright and inscribed, were erected as boundary markers as well as gravestones. Over 300 have been identified in Ireland dating from 350 ad to 600 ad.

  ogee. An arch or moulding associated with Gothic architecture which is described by means of four centres so as to be alternatively convex and concave.

  Old English. The Catholic descendants of Anglo-Norman settlers who monopolised government positions until the Reformation, after which they were gradually edged out and replaced by the Protestant New English (Tudor and Jacobean settlers and administrators). In the late medieval period they are also referred to as the ‘middle nation’ because they represented a middle ground between the Gaelic Irish with whom they shared a common birthplace and the English of England with whom they shared a common ethnic origin. (Canny, The formation.)

  Old Pretender. James III, the Stuart claimant to the throne of England, who died in 1766.

  ollamh. Currently translated as professor, this Gaelic term originally referred to a chief poet, physician, carpenter, goldsmith, metalworker or indeed any person of high status in their profession.

  Onomasticon Goidelicum. A dictionary of Irish placenames, their location and the documentary source from which it was extracted. It was compiled by Edmund Hogan between 1900–10 as an aid to scholars working on old Irish manuscripts.

  OP. Order of Preachers. See Dominican.

  op. cit. (L., opere citato or opus citatum, in the work cited) A footnote convention, now almost obsolete, referring the reader to a work already quoted. In modern usage this is obviated by shortening the original reference. Use Ibid. (and the relevant pagination if appropriate) where the work cited is the same as the reference immediately previous.

  openfield. See commonfield.

  oral history. Oral history, the recording and transcription of reminiscences, is a method of gathering evidence rather than a subject area. The evidence acquired supplements and enhances evidence assembled through conventional means. Oral history has grown in popularity over the last 50 years as the boundaries of historical study expanded to embrace groups of people whose lives and experiences heretofore were not considered important enough to be documented. It has opened up new and varied fields of inquiry such as labour history, the social life of families, the socialisation of boys and girls, courtship, urban culture and leisure activities and the experiences of combatants in wartime. The method has limitations. The interviewees may be unrepresentative; they may falsify their accounts; they may have poor recall. These, however, are limitations that historians account for in dealing with all historical evidence. Unrepresentativeness does not make evidence invalid; it only becomes problematic when the experience of a small sample is generalised. Falsification, for whatever reason, is always a possibility but the interviewer should be alert to internal inconsistencies and data provided by the interviewee should be compared with what has been obtained from other sources. (Brewer, The Royal Irish Constabulary; Finnegan and Drake, Sources; Thompson, ‘The voice of the past’, pp. 21–28.)

  Orange Order. A sectarian association founded in 1795 in Loughgall following an armed confrontation between the Catholic Defenders and Protestant Peep O’Day Boys in which the Defenders came off worst. The Orange oath required members to pledge themselves to support and defend the monarch as long as he supported the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland. Catholic relief acts, competition for land and fear of a French invasion – all of which threatened Protestant dominance in Ireland – heightened sectarian tension and encouraged the rapid spread of the order. Highly confrontational, it almost immediately engaged in pogroms against Catholics who were expelled in large numbers from their homes in Armagh, Down, Tyrone and Fermanagh. By the close of the century the order had attracted almost 170,000 members and the yeomanry was heavily infiltrated. Although the order was officially neutral, many Orangemen opposed the Act of Union because they believed it was to be accompanied by measures to emancipate Catholics. In the nineteenth century the government made several attempts to curb Orangeism. It was suppressed in 1825, persisted for a number of years in the guise of Brunswick clubs but disbanded after 1836 following a critical select-committee report. It emerged renewed under William Johnson to defy the Party Processions Act and became more broadly-based in the 1880s in opposition to the activities of the Land League and government proposals for home rule for Ireland. Since 1905 the order has been a constituent element of the Unionist Party. (Gray, The Orange Order; Haddick-Flynn, Orangeism; McClelland, ‘The later Orange Order’, pp. 126– 137; Senior, ‘The early Orange Order’, pp. 36–45.)

  ordeal, trial by. An early method of legal proof derived from the belief that divine intervention either by sign or miracle could determine an issue between contending parties. If you could clasp red-hot iron, plunge your hand into boiling water or sink when cast into water, God must surely be on your side and therefore you must be right. The role of the court was simply to determine which party should go through the proof and to ensure the forms were observed. As a method of proof it very quickly fell into disuse for the guilty were as like to pass through the ordeal as the innocent and it proved almost impossible to get a conviction. It was condemned by the Lateran Council of 1215 and prohibited by Henry III in 1219. See battle, compurgation and fire.

  Order of Saint Patrick, The most illustrious. The Order of St Patrick was established in 1783 by George III to reward high officials and peers for their loyalty. Modelled on the Order of the Garter it was the national order for Ireland. It was a one-class order consisting of the sovereign and 15 knights-companions (22 from 1833), none of whom ranked below an earl. The grand master (the sovereign’s deputy) was always the current lord lieutenant. Investitures took place in the hall of Dublin Castle and were followed by the installation in St Patrick’s cathedral. Six installations were conducted between 1783 and 1868. The prince of Wales, Albert Edward (later Edward VII), got the Patrick at the last installation. The star of the order consisted of the cross of St Patrick on a field argent, surmounted by a trefoil vert charged with three imperial crowns and surrounded by the motto Quis separabit. The order’s most celebrated insignia – the badge and star worn by the lord lieutenant – were known as the Irish ‘crown jewels’. They were stolen in 1907 from a safe in the Bedford Tower and never recovered. The order disappeared after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. (Casey, ‘The most illustrious’; Galloway, The order.)


  ordinary. 1: A prelate, either a bishop or archbishop, who exercises authority over a diocese or province 2: A book listing heraldic descriptions of arms 3: A simple common charge or device on an escutcheon.

  Ordnance Survey. The Ordnance Survey was established in 1824 to provide a precise admeasurement of the townlands of Ireland as a precursor to a nationwide valuation of buildings and land. Although the eighteenth-century maps of the British Ordnance Survey (the Board of Ordnance) were produced for military purposes – the threat of a French invasion – the first Irish Ordnance Survey maps were designed to meet civil needs in the area of local taxation. Its military origin, however, was not severed for the nucleus of the new body comprised army officers and soldiers as well as civilians. From 1825 a number of field survey teams, headed up by a lieutenant from the Royal Engineers or the Royal Artillery, commenced the process of mapping the country from north to south using a scale of six inches to the statute mile. The first maps were published in 1833 and by 1846 six-inch maps of the entire country were on sale. The new maps became the basis for the geological survey, the census of population, the creation of new administrative divisions and proved invaluable in the field of valuation. Thomas Frederick Colby, first director of the Ordnance Survey, intended to supplement the maps with a comprehensive biographical memoir of each parish to be compiled from materials accumulated by the field survey teams. The Board of Ordnance, however, took fright at such ambition and cancelled the programme before it had extended beyond the counties of Ulster. The Ulster memoirs have since been published. In addition to maps, the records of the Ordnance Survey contain much to interest the local historian. The field books contain the numerical measurements taken by the surveyors as they progressed, including the dimensions of buildings. A different set of field books, the name books, list the various spellings of each townland together with letters and notes on placenames and antiquities. The registers and remark books describe the boundaries of each townland. These records can be found in the National Archives, together with a large volume of correspondence between the surveyors in the field and the central body in the Phoenix Park. (Andrews, History; Idem, A paper landscape; MacNeill, The Ordnance; Madden, ‘The Ordnance’, pp. 155–63.)