INTRODUCTION

Eamon Darcy, Annaleigh Margey and Elaine Murphy

Reflecting on nearly 350 years of the troubled historiography of the 1641 Depositions, Aidan Clarke commented that these statements had been continuously evoked but they were rarely opened in the process.1 With a few notable exceptions scholars rarely used the depositions as a source in their own right for the turbulent 1640s let alone as a source for seventeenth-century Ireland. This was due in no small part to the nature of the collection itself. The 1641 Depositions comprise over 8,000 witness statements, describing the course of the 1641 rebellion and confederate wars in Ireland. In their original format they are a difficult source to engage with due to the sheer size of the collection, its deteriorating condition and its haphazard organization. In October 2007, having received 1 million from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the library of Trinity College Dublin, a team of academics from the Universities of Aberdeen, Cambridge and Trinity College, Dublin collaborated to digitize and transcribe the depositions. The 1641 Depositions Project, as this collaboration came to be known, ensured that for the first time, this rich source was made available to a wider audience. In October 2010, almost three hundred years after they were deposited in the library at Trinity College Dublin, the depositions were finally published online for all to interrogate and study (http://1641.tcd.ie). After their publication, a community of scholars interested in the seventeenth century began interrogating these testimonies. This collection provides some of the fruits of the first research that made use of the online archive. The 1641 Depositions are, without doubt, an unrivalled source for the study of early modern Ireland. As this collection shows, they provide significant detail on all aspects of Irish life in the seventeenth century. As a resource, they have wide multidisciplinary appeal for historians, historical geographers, linguists, anthropologists, literary scholars and sociologists. This collection aims to draw on this multidisciplinary appeal to introduce the wider public to the latest findings of early research from the depositions using a variety of methodologies. Moreover,

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The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion

the collection is intended to suggest future avenues for exploration, now that these statements are fully accessible online. The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion therefore wishes to answer the challenge set by Aidan Clarke and contribute new perspectives on mid-seventeenth-century Ireland.

The 1641 Depositions

The 1641 Depositions are a collection of witness statements that relate to the outbreak of the Ulster rising in Ireland in October 1641 and to the events that followed.2 The testimonies document loss of goods and chattels, military activity, and the alleged crimes of the Irish rebels, including assault, imprisonment, the stripping of clothes and murder. Two months after the start of the rising, on 23 December 1641, the lords justices of Ireland issued a commission, in the name of the king, to gather evidence concerning the rising. This evidence would become the 1641 Depositions collection. They appointed eight clergymen, headed by Dr Henry Jones, the dean of Kilmore and after 1645 the Bishop of Clogher, as commissioners to examine

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all such persons as have been robbed and dispoiled, as all witnesses that can give testimony therein, what robberies and spoils have been committed upon them since the 22 of October last.3

Subsequent commissions in the months that followed broadened the scope of the investigations, allowing commissioners to examine traiterous or disloyal words and murders, massacres and attempts to force Protestants to convert to Catholicism.4 The practical difficulties for Protestants from Munster getting to Dublin safely led to the establishment of a separate commission for that province. In March 1642, Philip Bysse, an English clergyman, was appointed to take depositions there.5 A further set of examinations were taken in the 1650s as part of the proceedings against the defeated rebels.6 On the anniversary of the rising in 1741 the bishop of Clogher donated the depositions to Trinity College Dublin. The surviving depositions consist of thirty-three volumes and cover every county in Ireland. There are over 19,000 pages and in excess of 8,000 individual items in the collection. There are thirty-one volumes of depositions, an index volume and a miscellaneous volume of papers concerning the rising. The depositions are currently divided on a county-by-county basis with eleven volumes from Leinster, ten from Munster, eight relating to Ulster and two from Connacht. Every county is represented within the collection but the number of depositions varies considerably for each county. In Ulster, for example, there are sixty-four pages of surviving depositions for County Donegal and sixty pages for County Londonderry both contained in MS 839. By way of contrast the depositions for County Cork take up over 3,900 pages and 6 volumes (MS 8228).

Introduction

The depositions are not a homogenous collection of witness testimonies. They house an eclectic range of information about many aspects of Irish life and society from the price of livestock to the presence of an Indian Pethagorian in County Laois.7 Although the format and content of the depositions varies considerably, most contain standard information. The name and address of the deponent were frequently recorded. Many of the deponents also gave details of occupation or status, age and martial status. Some deponents made reference to their religion or nationality. For example, Henry Bermingham a gentleman aged twenty-eight gave his address as the townland of Philipstown in County Carlow. Jane Hughes from Carrickmacross in County Monaghan described herself as late wife to John Hughes who was lately murthered by the Rebells. In his deposition in February 1642, John Davies, a slater from County Dublin referred to himself as a brittish protestant.8 The deponents then outlined information for which they possessed direct personal experience such as the theft of their goods and property, and attacks on them by the rebels. They often named many of the insurgents who attacked them. Alice Tibbs, a widow aged thirty-eight from Fermanagh, outlined her loss of land, hay, corn, cattle, debts and ready money worth 469 to a group of named rebels after the murder of her husband. She reached the relative safety of Dublin and deposed on 4 January 1642. The deponents then proceeded to outline any other relevant information they knew, such as words they heard spoken by the rebel leaders, reports of atrocities and of Protestants being forced to attend mass. John Howell, for instance, heard from some of the leading citizens in Limerick that they had the kings commission. In the same county John Lillies and Francis Bridgeman listed a number of people who they were credibly informed had turned papists.10 Two or more commissioners usually witnessed each deposition and the deponent signed or made their mark on the statement if they could not sign. The range of information within individual depositions is quite staggering, and it is only now that scholars are beginning to engage fully with this collection. This is due entirely to the work of the 1641 Depositions Project.

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The 1641 Depositions Project

The 1641 Depositions Project brought together the expertise of early modern scholars at Aberdeen, Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin. These included the principal investigators Professor Jane Ohlmeyer and Dr Michel Siochr from Trinity College Dublin, Professor Thomas Bartlett, University of Aberdeen, and Professor John Morrill, University of Cambridge; the editor Professor Aidan Clarke, and three researchers Dr Edda Frankot, Dr Annaleigh Margey and Dr Elaine Murphy, who transcribed and marked up the depositions. Overall, the project consisted of four strands: conservation, digitization,

The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion

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transcription and computer-based mark-up, and online edition. Seven volumes of the depositions required conservation work which took place in the Preservation and Conservation Department of the Library in Trinity College Dublin. Eneclann, a Trinity Campus Company, undertook the digitization of the depositions.11 The editorial team then worked directly from these digitized images, transcribing and checking each deposition. The resulting transcribed text is a faithful rendering of the original text, where the spelling and punctuation is not modernized or standardized. Following transcription, each deposition was marked-up with certain key metadata such as personal names, places names and dates to make the text searchable for online users. The online edition of the website went live in October 2010 and to date (April 2012) over 65,000 visitors have visited the site. In conjunction with the online edition, the Irish Manuscripts Commission will publish the 1641 Depositions in twelve print volumes beginning in late 2012.12 Following the launch of the online edition, an exhibition entitled Ireland in Turmoil: the 1641 Depositions and curated by Dr Eamon Darcy, was held in the Long Room of Trinity College Dublin from October 2010 to April 2011.13 As the project began to wind down, it became obvious that many scholars had already begun to engage with the whole collection of depositions. Much of this early scholarship was set in train by the publication of the Ulster depositions online in December 2009 as a pilot for the overall project. Researchers based in several institutions across Britain and Ireland were using the depositions for their postgraduate and postdoctoral work. Building on this surge in scholarly interest a conference entitled The 1641 Depositions: Politics, Society and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, took place in Trinity College Dublin in April 2010. This conference aimed to capture the fruits of this new research, inviting papers from early career researchers working across a whole spectrum of aspects of seventeenth century Ireland including print culture, warfare, material culture, memory and religion. This book originates from the papers at this conference. Many of the papers presented at the conference are now published in this collection, while other papers came from scholars who worked directly in the 1641 Depositions Project. They are, therefore, uniquely placed to provide new and dynamic perspectives on social, cultural, military and political aspects of seventeenth-century Irish life, through close interrogation of the depositions themselves. The collection brings together a wide spectrum of research on these depositions, using a multidisciplinary approach to unravel the rich material contained within them. This volume, therefore, moves beyond the traditional debates on the 1641 rebellion in Ireland and captures cutting-edge research on the depositions. In this book we have chosen to address three key themes that can be identified within the depositions warfare, culture and society which help to explain

Introduction

what happened in Ireland in October 1641 and in the months and years that followed. As editors of this collection we sought to bring together essays that will illustrate the importance of the depositions as source material for seventeenthcentury Ireland; reveal innovative methodologies to using the depositions; and challenge traditional uses of sources and to draw out the significance of the events of the 1641 rebellion in its local and national contexts. The first section is dedicated to augmenting our knowledge of the outbreak of the rebellion and discusses: the role of fosterage and kinship networks in shaping rebel alliances; the relationship between the Old English and the native Irish in the crucial days after 23 October 1641; the course of the rebellion in Cavan and the organization of the rebel alliance and future Confederation of Kilkenny (Chapters 14, below). The second section investigates social and cultural aspects of the 1641 rebellion (Chapters 58, below). Here scholars show the importance of credit, the social order, the language of the settlers and town life in shaping the course of the rebellion and contemporary understandings of what actually happened during its outbreak. Finally, the third section is dedicated to investigating key military and political battles fought during the 1640s and suggests how the rebellion came to be represented to the wider world (Chapters 912, below).

The 1641 Depositions have attracted controversy since the seventeenth century. Selections of the depositions were printed within months of the outbreak of the rebellion and have continued to be selectively printed ever since.14 The studies in this book will contribute significantly to the historiography of the 1641 Depositions, where to date, historical research has often had to pay close attention to political and sectarian sensitivities in Ireland.15 For example, the Irish government in the 1930s and the 1960s suppressed the publication of the depositions for fear of exacerbating tensions north and south of the border.16 As a result of this, much work has focused on what really happened in 1641 or on chronicling the number of lost souls as recorded in the depositions.17 The debate on 1641, therefore, had a distinctly sectarian and partisan character that reflected contemporary politics.18 Contesting versions of the Irish rebellion engaged in a series of accusations and appropriations of blame in repetitive exchanges that saw little new information arise on the events of the 1640s in Ireland.19 The 1641 Depositions played a crucial role in this, particularly those printed by Henry Jones and John Temple. The sheer size of the collection meant that many scholars were too daunted to investigate the depositions any further, preferring instead to peruse Joness Remonstrance and Temples Irish Rebellion.20 Mary Hicksons Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, published in 1884, was the first book to print a substantial number of depositions in nearly 250 years.21 Hicksons work, however,

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Historiography of the 1641 Depositions

The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion

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Conclusion

perpetuated the Protestant version of 1641 and discredited Irish Catholics calls for land reform and Home Rule (a limited form of independence for Ireland). Unsurprisingly, Hicksons account of the depositions prompted vigorous rebuttals of her conclusions from a Catholic perspective, as exemplified by Thomas Fitzpatricks Bloody Bridge.22 This tit-for-tat exchange of denial and counterdenial lasted until the 1960s.23 In more recent times historians reassessed the events of 1641 and the evidence presented in the depositions. They evaluated, for example, why rebellion broke out in Ireland, moving beyond early modern sectarian explanations. This fresh approach to the collection resulted in a dynamic new perspective on the 1640s. New research suggested social and economic factors were catalysts in the outbreak of the rising. A more comprehensive historical narrative emerged from these studies, and their authors avoided patently biased accounts, such as that of Temple. These studies outlined the various nuances of the events that led to the outbreak of the 1641 rebellion. Nicholas Canny, Aidan Clarke, Raymond Gillespie and Michael Perceval-Maxwell, located the succintly different causes, both short-term and long-term, that led to the outbreak, through an analysis of the depositions. The plantations, Wentworths government in the 1630s and the Bishops Wars in Scotland all prompted some measure of social, economic and political unrest that led to the outbreak of the 1641 rebellion.24 As well as assessing the outbreak of the rebellion historians such as Nicholas Canny, Willie Smith and R. J. Hunter, also began to make use of the depositions to examine social and cultural developments in Ireland.25 In short, historians have only recently begun to unravel some of the complexities of Irish life in the seventeenth century, but were hampered by the inaccessibility of the depositions. These essays bear the fruit of a vastly enhanced resource, the 1641 Depositions website.

While the validity of the 1641 Depositions as a source for the massacre of Irish Protestant settlers has been oft debated and contested, the purpose of this volume is to move beyond these debates and build upon more recent work on social, cultural and economic aspects of Irish life. The depositions are much more than a chronicle of cruelty and an archive of anarchy. They illuminate social interactions and economic ties between natives and newcomers; how armies conducted themselves during the 1640s; they capture the vivid process of communication, action and assembly that shaped the lives of deponents and the people they testified about. This collection of essays is by no means an exhaustive survey of the depositions, but provides a tantalizing glimpse of what can be achieved with this unique body of evidence.