by Joseph Byrne
quare impedit, suit of. A form of writ issued in cases of dispute regarding the presentation to an ecclesiastical benefice. Quare impedit required the defendant to state why he hindered the plaintiff from presenting to the benefice.
quarter (quarterland). 1: A territorial unit with field boundary. 2: A spatial unit of measurement comprising 90–480 acres in Donegal, 120 acres in Connaught (4 cartrons = 1 quarter), 360 acres in Munster (3 ploughlands = 1 quarter), 240 acres in Longford, Tyrone Fermanagh and Coleraine and 200–400 acres in the Pale. Four quarters were equivalent to a ballybetagh. 3: In terms of volume, a quarter was equivalent to eight bushels.
‘quarter acre clause’. Introduced during the Famine with the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1847 (10 & 11 Vict., c. 31, sections 4–18), the penal quarter acre clause or ‘Gregory Clause’ declared occupiers of more than a quarter of a statute acre ineligible for relief. Thus starving tenants of small-holdings were faced with an invidious choice. They could surrender their sole means of subsistence in return for relief, retain their holding and starve or they could emigrate. Sponsored by William Gregory, a Galway landlord and Co. Dublin MP, the clause was approved by landlords who felt that it militated against unnecessary claims on poor relief (which they would have been required to fund through the poor rate). Moreover, landlords were absolved from paying the full poor rate where circumstances forced a destitute family to surrender a holding valued at under £4. Some used the tenants’ inability to pay rents to launch a campaign of eviction, thereby sparing themselves the burden of poor rates which lay heaviest on areas where there was a high proportion of holdings valued at under £4. Coupled with a sharp rise in evictions, the quarter acre clause advanced the amalgamation of small-holdings in many areas at the cost of great human misery. See outdoor relief, relieving officer. (Kinealy, This great calamity, pp. 216–227.)
quarterage. The quarterly payments of guild members to their guilds. The payment of quarterage plus an admission fee known as ‘intrusion money’ was the means by which Catholics (and other non-freemen), excluded from civic life by the imposition of oaths, were permitted to exercise their trades or crafts in their native cities in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Quarterage entitled them to an associate membership of the guilds known as the quarter-brother or quarterer. Quarterers had no right to participate in guild elections and were ineligible for office. As quarter-brothers far outnumbered the numbers of brothers, their contributions played an important role in keeping the guilds solvent. Catholics resented the demand for quarterage and challenged the legality of its imposition. From the middle of the eighteenth century they began to default and attempts to enforce payment through the courts were rebuffed by the justices. It now appeared that the privileges and rights claimed by the guilds and corporations of Ireland were contrary to the law. The guilds changed tack and between 1767 and 1775 tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to have their demands enshrined in legislation. The active opposition of the Catholic Committee on behalf of Catholic tradesmen proved too strong for a system that was already in decline throughout Europe and, with the exception of Dublin, had collapsed in Ireland by 1800. (Wall, ‘The Catholics’, pp. 61–84.)
quarter days. The days on which tenancies began and ended. The four quarter days, Lady Day (25 March), Midsummer Day (24 June), Michaelmas Day (29 September) and Christmas Day (25 December), were the days on which rent fell due, although leases usually stipulated 25 March and 29 September for such payments (1 March and 1 September by the nineteenth century). In Gaelic Ireland, the traditional quarter days were Lughnasa (1 August), Samhain (1 November), Imbolg or St Brigid’s Day (1 February) and Bealtaine (1 May).
quarter-sessions. The quarterly county court presided over by the justice of the peace. It originated in an instruction to the justices of the peace in a county to meet in session four times yearly. Trial was conducted in the same manner as the assize courts. The accused was presented by the grand jury and tried by the petty jury. Serious crimes were usually referred from the quarter-sessions to the judges in the assize courts.
Queen’s Colleges. In 1845 Robert Peel proposed for Ireland a state funded non-denominational system of third-level education to be known as the Queen’s Colleges, a measure designed to detach moderates, especially Catholic clergymen, from Daniel O’Connell and weaken the push for repeal of the union. Colleges free of religious tests and departments of theology would be established in Belfast, Cork and Galway, staffed by crown-appointed professors. Catholic bishops were divided on the issue. Some favoured acceptance provided they were granted a degree of control at board level, the appointment of Catholic professors to certain departments and public funding for the teaching of Catholic theology. Others rejected the colleges outright. In the end the issue was decided in Rome where papal rescripts forbade Catholic clergy to teach or take office in the colleges and discouraged the attendance of Catholic students. Opposition to the Queen’s Colleges was re-stated at the Synod of Thurles in 1850 and, in a counter-move, the Catholic University of Ireland was established in 1854. The scheme went ahead, nevertheless, under the umbrella of the Queen’s University of Ireland (from 1879 the Royal University) but it was not a success. Neither, however, was the Catholic University and the debate on how to create a university system to meet the conflicting demands of the different denominations without, from the administration’s point of view, public endowment of denominational university-level education continued for decades. The 1908 universities bill (8 Edw. VII, c. 38) represented a compromise between church and state that was broadly acceptable to all. Two new universities were created, the National University of Ireland (which consisted of three colleges at Cork, Galway and the reconstituted Catholic University – now known as University College Dublin) and the Queen’s University, Belfast, both of which were to be publicly funded and non-denominational. What made the previously unacceptable acceptable, apart from legal guarantees against proselytism, was the recognition by the churches that the de jure non-denominational status of their institutions counted for little when compared with the de facto denominational profile of the respective staffs and students. The National University of Ireland, together with the associated Maynooth College, became effectively a Catholic university. Queen’s became Protestant (largely Presbyterian). (Coolahan, Irish education, pp. 105–130; Kerr, ‘A nation of beggars’?, pp. 282–309.)
querela. A complaint, action, suit, accusation or charge.
querent. Plaintiff, complainant.
quern. A bullaun (Ir., bollán) or hollowed stone which, with the aid of a stone pestle, was used for grinding corn. A saddle quern was a roughly rectangular piece of stone with a curved upper surface along which another stone or rider was rubbed back and forth over the grain.
questing. The right to gather alms at the altar after mass. Oliver Plunkett disapproved of the practice, conducted by the Dominicans and Franciscans, because he felt it discouraged attendance at mass.
questman. A sidesman or church-warden’s assistant.
Quia Emptores (1290). This statute (18 Edw. I, cc 1–3) was an attempt to secure the interests of the crown and greater feudal lords in their feudal entitlements. Excessive sub-infeudation made it difficult to track feudal services and so Quia emptores forbade sub-infeudation by chief tenants and alienation to mortmain but permitted free tenants to alienate their land by substitution without the lord’s consent provided the services owed to the lord were divided proportionally among the substitutes.
quick. Trees, especially hawthorn, set to form a hedge, so called because the hedge was composed of living or quick-growing trees.
quinzaine. The fourteenth day after a feast.
quitclaim. A deed renouncing all claims to a property.
quit-rent. 1: A rent payable to the crown on forfeited land which had been distributed under the Restoration land settlement acts of 1662 and 1665. In Munster it was levied at a rate of 23/4d. per acre, in Ulster 2d., in Connacht,11/2d. and in Leinster 3d. 2: When labour
services were commuted to money payments and combined with rent the total money payment owed became known as quit-rent. It was called quit-rent because the tenant was now quit of his obligations to service.
quit-rent office. The agency established after the Restoration to collect quit-rents that were payable by the new owners of all land forfeited after the Confederate War of 1641–52. The quit-rent office also assumed responsibility for little parcels of forfeited land (the ‘plus acres’) which remained in the king’s hands after the adventurers and soldiers had received their grants as well as those forfeited lands which had not been distributed by the time of the Restoration in 1660.
quoad ad hoc. (L.) A legal term used to state what the law was as to a matter. It was used in the court of claims established under the Act of Settlement (1662) to state what the law was with regard to a petitioner’s claim.
quiet, to. An instruction to the sheriff to put a person in possession of an estate and protect him from disturbance.
quoin. The external corner of a building. Also the interlocking stones which form the corner.
quo minus, writ of. (L., by which the less) 1: A legal device invented by the exchequer to attract cases of debt between individuals which properly belonged in common pleas. The fiction was based on the claim that default in repaying a debt rendered the creditor less able to satisfy the debts he owed to the crown, debts which the crown’s revenue court, the exchequer, should have cognisance of 2: A writ to restrain a person from committing waste in a wood having granted houbote and haybote to another so that the grantee was less able to exercise his right.
quo warranto, writ of. A writ issued on behalf of the crown to inquire by what right a person or corporate body claimed or usurped a privilege, office or liberty and so determine the issue. It was so named because the defendant was required to show quo warranto usurpavit (by what right or authority he lays claim to the matter in dispute). In the 1630s Thomas Wentworth, the lord deputy, used quo warranto proceedings to sequester town charters in Ireland, thereby extinguishing 16 Old English seats in the Irish parliament amongst other tactics to ensure government control of the house of commons. Quo warranto proceedings were also used in the late 1680s by Richard Talbot, earl of Tyrconnell, ostensibly to compel corporations to demonstrate that they had exercised their powers according to their charters. In reality he sought to remove the charters and re-model them to accommodate Catholics. In later times matters of this nature were effected by an information in the nature of a quo warranto filed by the attorney-general.
R
rack. An instrument of torture on which an unforthcoming victim was stretched until his limbs were dislocated.
rackrent. To subject to an excessively high rent.
rampant. In heraldry, a creature in profile – usually a lion – standing upright with paws in the air.
rapparee. A tory or bandit. The term derives from the Irish rapaire, a half-pike, which some of them bore.
raskins. (Ir., rusg, bark) A wooden vessel made by scooping out a hollow in a log to leave an edge of about two inches wide including the bark. It was used as a container for butter and was roughly equivalent to a firkin. See meather.
rate-in-aid. A temporary tax of sixpence in the pound levied on all rateable property in Ireland to provide additional relief to the most distressed poor law unions. It was introduced in 1849 (12 & 13 Vict., c. 24) amidst great controversy because it made relief of distress a charge on the entire country rather than a local one. Thus the more prosperous unions of the north and east were required to subsidise the 22 poorest unions in the west and south. Although Leinster and Munster were taxed more heavily for rate-in-aid, opposition to the proposal was particularly virulent amongst Ulster MPs who saw it as a transfer of taxes from the industrious north to feckless Connacht. Others, including Edward Twistleton, the senior poor law commissioner, objected to the tax on constitutional grounds. As Twistleton saw it, if the Act of Union created a true union then responsibility for distress properly lay with the kingdom as a whole and particularly so in the case of localities that did not have the fiscal capacity to relieve themselves. A second rate-in-aid of two pence in the pound was introduced in 1850. (Kinealy, This great calamity, pp. 254–64, 278–9.)
rath (ringfort). A circular or near-circular enclosure protected by a clay bank (vallum) and outside trench (fosse) or a series of banks and trenches. Within the rath there was a raised mound upon which the farmstead of a lord or wealthy individual stood. Nearly 40,000 have been identified in Ireland and the term figures prominently in placenames. Raths are classified as univallate, bivallate or trivallate according to the number of banks which form the enclosure. In areas where stone was plentiful the banks were constructed of stone and the fort was called a caiseal or cathair. (Stout, The Irish ringfort.)
Rathbreasail, Synod of. See diocese.
reacaire. (Ir.) A reciter or singer of poems often accompanied by a harper.
Real Property Act (1845). The Real Property Act (8 & 9 Vict., c. 119) simplified the complex process of conveyancing by establishing the ordinary deed of grant as the standard mode of conveyance. It gave to a simple deed of grant the same efficacy in relation to the transfer of all corporeal hereditaments and tenements as the conveyance that combined the bargain and sale and the lease and release.
Recess Committee. See Agriculture and Technical Instruction, Department of.
recognisance. 1: A surety entered into before a court or magistrate to refrain from or to carry out a particular act 2: The sum pledged as guarantee.
record. A document on which the proceedings of a court of record were entered including common pleas, pleas of land and criminal proceedings. A court of record was a court entitled to hear pleas as distinct from an inferior court such as a manorial court.
recorder. A magistrate who exercised criminal and civil jurisdiction in a city or borough. The recorder was the sole judge at the quarter-sessions held in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Derry, Cork, Galway and Carrickfergus. Originally he was a person with legal experience appointed by the aldermen and mayor to ‘record’ the proceedings of the borough courts and to keep in mind the proceedings and the customs of the city or town, his word being authoritative on these matters.
recovery. Alienation by tenants-in-tail was forbidden by the statute De Donis Conditionalibus (13 Edw. I, c. 1, 1285) but the courts, believing this to be an unreasonable restriction on landowners, permitted the collusive fiction of recovery by which a tenant-in-tail in possession could bar the entail and dispose of his property. In practice the vendor allowed the intending purchaser to bring an action against him for the property. Instead of defending his title the vendor called upon a collaborator (a ‘man of straw’) who was supposed to have sold him the land previously with good title. Collaborator and intending purchaser then withdrew from the court to parley after which the purchaser returned alone having ‘convinced’ the collaborator that he had never had title to the land. The court called upon the collaborator three times to return to defend his title but he never did and so judgement was made in favour of the purchaser. As the tenant-in-tail was now deemed never to have been legally possessed of an estate the entail was effectively barred. The 1834 Fines and Recoveries Act (4 & 5 Will. IV, c. 92) removed the need for such chicanery by providing that a tenant-in-tail could bar an entail by the execution of a disentailing assurance, in effect by executing a conveyance using words that a fee simple (freehold) owner would have to use to pass the fee simple. Prior to De Donis monastic institutions had employed the recovery to evade the provisions of the statute of mortmain which outlawed alienations to corporations or monastic institutions. Rather than ‘purchase’ or receive a grant of land, the institutions ‘recovered’ land they claimed was theirs as of old title. See fine. (Megarry, A manual, pp. 57–61: Wylie, Irish land law, pp. 219–224.)
recto. Abbreviated in footnotes as r, the side of a document which is to be read first. It is the right-hand or front page. The side to be read second is verso (v).
See folio.
rector. A rector is the Church of Ireland equivalent of the Catholic parish priest, distinguished from the vicar in that the rector was in full possession of the parish tithe. Where the incumbent received only part of the tithe – if a portion belonged to someone else – he was a vicar. The distinction emerged after the Reformation in the sixteenth century when monastic lands and the accompanying tithe were alienated to lay people and religious institutions such as cathedrals. Where tithe was wholly paid to someone other than himself, the resident minister was known as a perpetual curate. See appropriate, impropriate.
recusant. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a person, usually a Catholic, who refused to attend Anglican services and denied the ecclesiastical supremacy of the crown. Recusants were liable to fines of 12 pence for every offence committed and office-holders in corporations who refused to take the oath of supremacy were heavily fined and forbidden to hold office. In the early seventeenth century, grand jurors who refused to present recusants were hauled before the court of castle chamber, fined and imprisoned. The imposition of recusancy fines was not consistently enforced. During international crises they were often over-looked.
