Between the early sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, a simple inheritance dispute arose over the O’Driscoll lordship of Collymore in west Cork, in the area south of the Ilen river and incorporating the village of Baltimore/Dún na Séad and the islands of Sherkin and Cape Clear. It grew into a protracted and wide-ranging legal battle that pitted cousin against cousin, overlord against planter, and neighbour against neighbour. The initial conflict derived from tensions between Irish practices of partible inheritance and the English practice of primogeniture. In the early sixteenth century, the O’Driscolls had attempted to reconcile those two inheritance practices by splitting the lordship between two cousins, each of whose descendants would retain their portion of the lordship in perpetuity. Within two generations, however, the settlement had failed, with one line encroaching on and effectively disinheriting the other in the 1580s.

This kind of dispute over inheritance practices wasn’t uncommon in late medieval Gaelic lordships. But as we learn from a lawsuit in 1628, this particular intrusion set off a wave of litigation that was facilitated by Tudor bureaucracy and intensified by the growing legal pressures facing Gaelic lordships in plantation. The competing O’Driscoll claimants to Collymore employed a variety of legal strategies rooted in both Irish and English legal traditions. Some looked to medieval precedent, seeking a restoration of the original settlement. In other cases, parties on both sides sought to legitimize their claims through contemporary legal manoeuvres, as when two apparently opposed parties surrendered the same contested lands to the Crown for regrant. And in a move that would turn out to have unfortunate consequences for all the O’Driscoll claimants, one party (who had cultivated an extensive social network within the Munster plantation) mortgaged the lands. The result was that the pool of claimants to Collymore grew from the two O’Driscoll cousins and their descendants to include the O’Driscolls’ MacCarthy Reagh overlords, the Coppingers (an Old English family of Cork merchants), and a planter named Thomas Crooke. These external claimants, an increasingly hostile legal system, and political and economic pressures posed both local and structural barriers to either O’Driscoll line reclaiming the lordship. Despite several decades of litigation by O’Driscolls on both sides, the lands ultimately remained in the hands of Walter Coppinger and his descendants.

So what’s at stake in failure? Why study these unsuccessful strategies of negotiation employed by Gaelic lords, when the end result seems to have been inevitable? One important answer, as I argue in my article, is that although they didn’t succeed in reclaiming Collymore, the O’Driscolls and their contemporaries did succeed in reframing the sources of their authority. Through shifts in rhetoric (for example, trading the language of overlordship for that of landlordship) and in practice (trading tanistry for primogeniture), the O’Driscolls and their neighbours shed the vocabulary of Gaelic lordship while attempting to maintain the substance of their authority. These flexible approaches to identity allowed the O’Driscolls to negotiate the multiple legal contexts of plantation Munster even as they faced concerted efforts by the administration to disenfranchise them. The O’Driscolls didn’t emerge unscathed from the decades of war, rebellion, and confiscation; but they changed the terms on which the Tudor-Stuart state interacted with them. Both their attempts and their failure speak to their agency in withstanding a colonial regime

Image credits: Looking out to Cape Clear Island from the hill above Lough Hyne, showing Baltimore, Sherkin Island, and Cape Clear Island, https://www.geograph.ie/photo/2643448.

Overlords, underlords and landlords: negotiating land and lordship in plantation Munster by Margaret K. Smith