Byrne's Dictionary of Irish Local History Page 7
carruca. (Med. L., a plough) A heavy plough with an iron share, coulter and mouldboard employed in Ireland in areas of English influence during the middle ages.
cartage. 1: The obligation of a tenant or vassal to provide carts for transporting the lord’s goods 2: The levying of carts for the transportation of supplies as, for example, when a general hosting for the defence of the Pale was declared. In the fifteenth century carts were levied at a rate of one cart for every four ploughlands.
cartboote. The right without payment to procure timber from the manorial woods for the purpose of repairing or making carts.
cartouche. An ornamented tablet, usually elliptical, surrounded by scrolls or vines and bearing an inscription or coat of arms.
cartron. A unit of spatial measurement, equivalent to 30 acres in Connacht and 60 acres in Longford. See acre.
carucate. (Med.L., carruca, a plough) Nominally, the amount of land a team of eight oxen could plough in a year, usually equivalent to 100– 120 acres. In 19 Edward III a carucate was declared to be 100 acres but it varied considerably on account of soil quality and could contain up to 180 acres. Also known as a villate or ploughland.
cashel. See caiseal, cathair.
cassock. The black outer garment or frock worn by a clergymen.
cast. 1: Equivalent to three fish. Forty-two casts were equivalent to a hundred (126) and five hundreds were equivalent to a mease (630) 2: In falconry, refers to a couple of hawks which is the number of hawks released or cast off at a time.
castle chamber, court of (Star Chamber). The court of castle chamber was a prerogative court rather than one based on common law procedures. It commenced operations in the sixteenth century, the first clerk of the court being appointed in 1563. It was a juryless, inquisitorial court, formally presided over by the chief governor with the assistance of the lord chancellor and exercised jurisdiction over serious infringements of the law such as official corruption, treason, riot, perjury, libel, fraud, forgery, refusal to produce recusants and conspiracies. Such offences were outside the remit of the regular courts and affected good government and the administration of the law. Castle chamber was a popular and speedy court and less expensive to litigants than the regular courts. As a court associated with the royal prerogative it attracted the wrath of parliament and was abolished in England by the Long Parliament. It was never formally abolished in Ireland but lapsed during the Commonwealth. Attempts were made to revive it after the Restoration but the house of commons objected and it simply disappeared. The officers of the court continued to draw their salaries until 1701. (Report on the manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont; Crawford ‘Origins’; Wood, ‘The court’.)
cathair. (Ir.) A stone-built open fortress or caiseal.
cathedral. The church of the bishop of a diocese. The cathedral and its revenues were administered by a chapter which in the provinces of Dublin and Cashel usually comprised a dean, precentor, chancellor, treasurer, archdeacon and prebendaries but which elsewhere had regressed to a simpler form. The actual work of the cathedral was carried out by the vicars choral, usually four in number, wherever they existed. The cathedral and its officials were supervised by the dean who also presided as head of the chapter. Most cathedral offices had their corps, a parish or number of parishes whose revenues went to the cathedral officials. Some benefices were highly lucrative and therefore greatly prized. In return, the cathedral officials preached or acted as parish priests in the relevant parish or parishes. In some cases the spiritual duties were performed by a curate or vicar; in others the benefice had no cure of souls and the office was a sinecure. The chapter administered the rents and leases which pertained to the cathedral. Revenue accrued from the corporate lands and the rectorial tithe (the great tithe) of certain parishes and was held in the common or economy fund for the maintenance of the fabric of the cathedral. After the Reformation Irish cathedrals came under the control of the Church of Ireland and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Catholic bishops were compelled to adopt a cautious attitude towards church-building. Catholic chapters were essentially diocesan advisory councils
Catholic Association. Two bodies bore this name. The first was founded in 1756 and represented Catholic commercial and landed interests. It enjoyed a brief existence before being superseded by the Catholic Committee from 1760. The second, a popular political pressure group, was founded on 12 May 1823 by Daniel O’Connell and Richard Lalor Shiel to win political representation for Catholics and gain access for them to government positions. Specifically it aimed to adopt ‘all such legal and constitutional measures as may be most useful to obtain Catholic emancipation’. The annual membership fee was one guinea and, inevitably, membership was largely confined to the middle class. The groundwork for a broader and more popular base was laid in January 1824 when O’Connell introduced an associate membership which could be had for as little as one penny per month (Catholic rent). The collection of fees required the association to organise on a local basis. Local branches, with the enthusiastic support of Catholic clergymen who publicised the rent scheme, organised meetings and petitions and corresponded with the central committee. Their proceedings were regularly reported upon in the newspapers. The Catholic Association campaigned in elections and on issues such as tithe, the tolerance shown towards Orange outrages, patronage, education and the administration of justice. It disbanded briefly in 1825 when Goulborn’s Act outlawed bodies campaigning for church or state reformation but re-appeared within days with a new set of aims purged of political content. The association proceeded to campaign for a census of the Catholic population, a liberal education system, public peace and charity. The great breakthrough came in the Clare by-election of 1828 when O’Connell successfully defeated William Vesey Fitzgerald by 2,057 votes to 982. By law O’Connell was entitled to seek election but was disbarred from taking his seat by the nature of the oath he was required to swear to do so. O’Connell’s stunning victory made the emancipation of Catholics inevitable and relief legislation was duly enacted in April 1829. See Catholic emancipation. (O’Ferrall, Catholic emancipation; O’Hagan, ‘Catholic Association’, pp. 58– 61.)
Catholic Committee. The name borne by an eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century moderate body which attempted to ameliorate the position of Catholics in Ireland. It sprang from the earlier Catholic Association and was founded in 1760 by John Curry, Charles O’Conor and Thomas Wyse. The committee sought relief for Catholics by addresses to the crown and played a prominent role in the campaign to break the monopoly of the Protestant trade guilds. Initially the Catholic landed gentry were the driving force behind the movement but these were later edged aside by the more aggressive Catholic business and professional classes. John Keogh, a Catholic tradesman, rose to prominence in the association and with Wolfe Tone as its secretary the committee began to flex some muscle. By 1791–2 it was pressing for Catholic enfranchisement. A delegation was dispatched to London to meet Pitt who promised no obstruction to Catholic enfranchisement if the Irish parliament wished to proceed along those lines. The response of the Irish parliament, however, was a pitiful Catholic relief bill in 1792 which went no distance towards answering the franchise demand. Hobart’s Catholic Relief Act of 1793 (See relief acts), a response to a delegation dispatched from a representative national convention organised by the Catholic Committee in Dublin, proved more substantial in that Catholics were permitted to vote as forty-shilling freeholders in the counties and free boroughs, to bear arms, to become members of corporations, to serve as grand jurors, to take degrees in Dublin University, to hold minor offices and to take commissions in the army below the rank of general. The concession of participation in urban corporations proved a dead letter since it depended on the willingness of the corporations to enlarge their franchise and almost all refused to do so. Catholics also remained excluded from parliament and from senior offices such as lord lieutenant and lord chancellor. Nevertheless, the Catholic Committee dissolved itself in gratitude. It was reviv
ed in 1809 and hoped to avoid the Convention Act by claiming that its purpose was to draw up a petition and not to challenge parliament. Under pressure from the government it again dissolved and re-emerged as the Catholic Board (1811), made up of named individuals to avoid all claims to representative status. It dissolved finally in June 1814 when the Convention Act was again invoked. See Catholic Convention, guilds, Municipal Corporations Reform Act, quarterage. (Edwards, ‘The minute book’, pp. 3–170.)
Catholic Confederacy. In October 1642, a year after the outbreak of war, Old English and native Irish Catholics combined to form an alliance known as the Catholic Confederacy or Confederate Catholics of Ireland. They insisted they were loyal to the crown but determined to secure religious freedom and a role in the government of Ireland. According to the confederate oath of association they aimed to restore the rights of the church, maintain the royal prerogative and defend the liberties of the nation. The confederates established an independent assembly in Kilkenny to govern those parts of the country that had come under Catholic control. A supreme council was appointed, taxes were raised, a mint was established and a printing press set up. The confederate army, though large, was poorly equipped, badly trained and lacked a unified command. Provincial commanders were unable or unwilling to co-operate in the field and failed to take military advantage of the pitiful state of royalist forces throughout the decade. A history of long-standing distrust made the alliance of Old English and native Irish inherently unstable. The Old English dominated the supreme council and sought a speedy conclusion to the war. They were willing to compromise since they realised a parliamentary victory in England spelt ruin for Catholic landowners. The native Irish, having lost their lands in earlier confiscations, had little to lose and wished to press on. An agreement to cease hostilities in 1643 split the alliance and relations deteriorated further in 1646 over the terms of a treaty proposed by Ormond. The supreme council and Old English nobility agreed to provide the king with an army of 10,000 men in return for the abolition of the court of wards, the substitution of an oath of allegiance for the oath of supremacy, the admission of Catholics to all civil and military offices and the lifting of restrictions on Catholic education. Rinuccini, the papal nuncio, and the native Irish demurred. They rejected the proposal for its failure to restore Catholicism. The success of the clerical faction convinced Ormond that any terms that he would find acceptable would be rejected by Rinuccini and he began to make preparations to transfer Dublin to the parliamentary forces. The military and political situation became chaotic in 1648 with Ormond’s departure from Ireland. The army was mauled by parliamentary forces, the confederacy split along ethnic lines and the factions went to war with each other. When the dust settled in January 1649, Rinuccini was sidelined and, with episcopal approval, the confederates had signed up to a treaty with the newly-returned Ormond that differed little from that of 1646. Having lasted for seven years, the confederacy was now formally dissolved and Ormond became the leader of anti-parliamentary forces in Ireland. Although he failed to take Dublin in June 1649, the bulk of the island remained in royalist hands. The arrival of Cromwell in August, however, signalled the beginning of the end for confederate hopes. See cessation, Commentarius Rinuccinianus. (Cregan, ‘The Confederate Catholics’, pp. 490–512; Gilbert, History of the Irish Confederation; Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland; Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland.)
Catholic Convention (1792). In December 1792 the Catholic Committee convened a representative national assembly in Dublin to draw up a petition for the removal of disabilities imposed on Catholics by the penal laws. Membership of the assembly was determined by an election process conducted on a nationwide basis. One or two delegates from among ‘the most respectable persons’ were chosen by Catholics in each parish to go forward to county meetings where delegates to the national assembly were selected. Over 200 members assembled in Back Lane (hence the phrase ‘Back Lane Parliament’) on 3 December and agreed to a generalised petition for Catholic emancipation and a specific request for concessions on the franchise and membership of the grand jury. Suspicious of the Irish administration, the convention by-passed the lord lieutenant and presented the petition to George III directly. Many Protestants, both within and without parliament, reacted angrily to the assembly and its petition yet a substantial Catholic relief bill followed. In early 1793 most of the disabilities were removed although Catholics remained excluded from parliament. See Catholic Committee, relief acts. (O’Flaherty, ‘The Catholic Convention’, pp. 14–34.)
Catholic Defence Association. Founded in the 1850s as a response to the Ecclesiastical Titles Act (14 & 15 Vict. c. 60, 1851) which proposed to infringe the liberty of the Catholic church, the Catholic Defence Association comprised a group of Irish liberal MPs who proceeded to campaign for the repeal of the act. They allied themselves with the Tenant League by including the Tenant League campaign for lower rents and tenant-right within their programme. Pledged to pursue an independent policy in the house of commons and boosted by clerical support, the association returned 48 members to parliament in 1852 but was riven by the acceptance of posts in the new Whig-Peelite administration by two of its leading members, William Keogh and John Sadleir. The alliance was reduced to 26 members in 1853 and to a dozen two years later. It finally collapsed over an 1859 Conservative parliamentary reform bill. (Larkin, The making of the Roman Catholic Church, pp. 99–100 passim.)
Catholic Emancipation. The phrase used from the 1790s to express the demand of Irish Catholics for the right to sit in parliament, to be members of the privy council, to hold senior governmental positions and to become king’s counsels and county sheriffs. Decades of agitation – culminating in Daniel O’Connell’s election as MP for Clare in 1828 – finally wrenched an emancipating relief act (10 Geo. IV, c. 7) from the British parliament in 1829. This legislation effectively repealed many of the outstanding penal laws. Catholics could now sit in parliament without renouncing their religious faith, they could become members of corporations and were eligible for most of the higher civil and military offices from which they had been excluded. The positions of regent, lord lieutenant and lord chancellor, however, remained closed to them. (O’Ferrall, Catholic emancipation.)
Catholic petition (1805). Although no clear promise had been made, Catholics were led to expect that the passage of the Act of Union would be accompanied by a further relaxation of anti-Catholic measures. In 1804 a proposal to petition parliament for Catholic relief was raised at a number of Catholic meetings in Dublin. Knowing George III’s antipathy towards concessions to Catholics, the government advised Catholic leaders against pressing the issue at that time. Nevertheless, the proposal was carried and a delegation was dispatched to London in 1805 to request Pitt to present the petition in parliament. He refused for he had promised the king that he would resist all attempts to bring forward an emancipation bill and he spoke against the petition when it was presented in parliament by the Whigs Fox and Grenville. It was rejected by large majorities in both houses. Two further petitions were laid before parliament in 1808 and 1810 against the background of the veto controversy, both of which were heavily defeated. Their addresses rebuffed, Catholics ratcheted up the campaign for emancipation in the 1820s. A new body, the Catholic Association, galvanised the struggle with the successful raising of Catholic rent, with rallies and marches and, above all, through the mobilisation of the Catholic forty-shilling freeholders at election time. Addresses and petitions were the means by which Catholic bodies sought to present their grievances to the king and assure him of their loyalty throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Petitioning (dubbed the ‘annual farce’ by O’Connell) yielded little in terms of redress but the business of petition-signing gave focus to and helped politicise the Catholic masses.
Catholic rent. The payment of one penny per month by Catholics which broadened the membership of the Catholic Association. Initiated by Daniel O’Connell to finance the association’s activities, it enabled ordinary Catholics
to identify with and buy into the struggle for emancipation and to demonstrate the strength of their constituency. The Dublin administration recognised the dangers implicit in the success of the Catholic rent scheme. Writing in 1824, William Gregory, an under-secretary, feared it would open ‘a direct communication between the popish parliament (the Catholic Association) and the whole mass of the popish population’. (Bartlett, The fall and rise, pp. 329– 333.)
ceannuigheacht. (Ir., literally, buying) Protection money paid to a Gaelic overlord to fend off cattle raids.
censer. A thurible or container in which incense is burned.
census. Decennial censuses were conducted in Ireland from 1821. A census conducted during 1813–15 by William Shaw Mason proved unsatisfactory because the administration was placed in the hands of county grand juries which did not have the competency nor the will for the task. Only ten counties submitted complete returns so that the accuracy of the final tally of 5,937,856 is questionable. Shaw Mason had greater success in 1821 when he employed tax collectors as enumerators but both his and George Hatchell’s 1831 censuses remain suspect because the enumerators had no maps to guide them and some (remote) areas were not counted. Enumerators may also have over-counted in 1831 in the belief that they were to be paid in proportion to the numbers enumerated. From 1841 police constables were employed as enumerators and provided with the new ordnance survey maps on which administrative boundaries were defined. The census of 1841 differed radically, both in concept and structure, from earlier censuses. The 1841 commissioners believed that a census should serve the purpose of a social survey as well as fulfilling its traditional role as an enumerator of population. Accordingly, they sought data on such areas as housing, education, farmers’ resources, emigration and the value of agricultural produce. It broke new ground by including a 74 page analysis of mortality by Sir William Wilde, complete with over 200 tables. The 1851 census was the most comprehensive census ever undertaken in the world to that date. It appeared in ten volumes: a single volume general report, a volume for each province, one each on agriculture, education and the national age profile and three volumes on disease and death. A valuable addition was the inclusion of data from the 1841 census to facilitate comparisons. With few exceptions, the census returns for 1821–1851 perished in the fire in the Four Courts in 1922 and later censuses were destroyed by government order. The printed statistical aggregates and reports, however, contain a vast range of localised data and constitute a key source for nineteenth-century local studies. The individual returns for the censuses of 1901 and 1911 remain intact and can be viewed at the National Archives. See pension for extant 1841–51 census extracts produced after 1908 to validate pension claims. (Crawford, Counting.)