In 1435 the Irish council complained to Henry VI that there is not left in the nether parts of the counties of Dublin, Meath, Louth, and Kildare, that join together, out of the subjection of the said enemies and rebels scarcely thirty miles in length and twenty miles in breadth, thereas a man may surely ride or go in the said counties to answer to the king’s writs and to his commandments.

The letter was accompanied by a request that the king render payment due to the lord lieutenant Thomas Stanley for his service in Ireland, and also suggested that the king should travel to the colony to help fight off its enemies. Accordingly, the perilous state of English Ireland was almost certainly exaggerated to strengthen the arguments for financial and military support from the crown. Nevertheless this letter demonstrates that in the minds of the settler elite, which staffed the Irish council, the four counties of Dublin, Meath, Louth, and Kildare were the bastion of English rule in Ireland, beset, the council would have us believe, by enemies on all sides. This picture of the ‘four counties’ as the political, and to a certain extent the cultural, stronghold of Englishness in Ireland can be found in other contemporary sources, as the region was perceived as both distinct and distinctly English.

In the advertisement prefacing Charles O’Conor’s Dissertations on the antient history of Ireland (1753), the editor challenged an unnamed gentleman who had, apparently, smeared the good name of the author. The editor, Michael Reily (who went under the cognomen ‘Civicus’) was intricately involved in this dispute from its early stages and did not spare any criticism for the individual he deemed responsible, Dr John Fergus, the erstwhile friend and associate of both Reily and O’Conor. ‘A Gentleman of great Reputation’ alleged Reily, had branded O’Conor with ‘the meanest Species of Immorality’. The dispute did not centre on some esoteric point of Irish mythology or any disagreement over issues of interpretation. It was not even, at least not in any direct way, a rift over political issues regarding the penal laws and the status of papists in the Irish polity, a tendency quite prevalent among the fissiparous Catholic organisations and pugilistic personalities of this period. Rather, it was wholly concerned with those most pertinent aspects of existence for an eighteenth century gentlemen – credit and honour. The disagreement was about Newton’s Chronology and its application to the Irish annalistic corpus as a means of validating the latter – not about the principle of its applicability, nor regarding the minutiae of dates or similar arcana, but to who should gain the credit for appropriating Newton’s prestige to such a particularly Irish topic.

In 4 October 1842, Richard Mant, the Church of Ireland bishop of Down and Connor, presided over the first meeting of the Down and Connor Church Architecture Society in the Clerical Rooms in central Belfast. The scholarly Mant doubtless was in his element as he introduced this initiative dedicated to promoting discussion about historical and contemporary aspects of Anglican church architecture. The Ulster Times, the city’s self-proclaimed newspaper of the Church of Ireland, welcomed the new society, arguing that it was good to have ‘correct views’ on these matters and hoping that features like arched roofs, Gothic windows and lengthened aisles could be maintained so that Anglican churches could be distinguished from their Dissenting counterparts.

Female activists across the United Kingdom had insisted from the late nineteenth century that the employment of women police who would deal with problems specific to women and children could help to address pressing social questions, or at least to offer women some protection within the entirely male criminal justice system. Their campaign for women police was connected to similar demands for the employment of female prison visitors and inspectors and, later, jurors and lawyers, and it was predicated on the idea that neither prisons nor courts afforded women fair and equal treatment under the law. Early victories included the appointment of police matrons and searchers, but the resistance of police authorities and most other civil servants to female officers remained solid into the early twentieth century, feminist campaigning notwithstanding. The outbreak of the First World War, however, provided an ideal context for renewed activism on the issue, not least because commentators across the British Isles predicted that the apparent inability of girls and young women to resist the lure of uniformed men would lead to outbreaks of war-induced sexual promiscuity and a decline in standards of public behaviour.

In his vivid account of Easter Week 1916, The insurrection in Dublin, the writer James Stephens observed: ‘The finest part of our city has been blown to smithereens, and burned into ashes. Soldiers amongst us who have served abroad say that the ruin of this quarter is more complete than anything they have seen at Ypres, than anything they have seen anywhere in France or Flanders.’ In a letter to his sister, Henry Beater, company secretary of Arnotts, also likened the smouldering ruins of Sackville Street and the adjoining thoroughfares to a scene from the war:

It has long been accepted that memory plays a prominent role in the construction of Irish identities and yet historians of Ireland were relatively late in addressing the vogue for memory studies that emerged in the 1980s. Its arrival as a core theme in Irish historical studies was announced in 2001 with the publication of History and memory in modern Ireland, edited by Ian McBride, whose seminal introduction essay – the essential starting point for all subsequent explorations – issued the promise that ‘a social and cultural history of remembering would unravel the various strands of commemorative tradition which have formed our consciousness of the past’. The volume originated in one of the many academic conferences held in the bicentennial year of the 1798 rebellion, which was part of a decade of commemorations that listed among its highlights the tercentenary of the battle of the Boyne, the sesquicentenary of the Great Famine, and the bicentenaries of the United Irishmen, the Act of Union, and Robert Emmet’s rising. The following years produced a boom of studies on Irish memory, which has anticipated another decade of commemorations. Eyes are now set on the centenaries of the Great War, the Irish Revolution and Partition, all of which will undoubtedly generate further publications on memory. It is therefore timely to take stock of this burgeoning field and consider its future prospects.

A seventeenth-century manuscript miscellany, which once belonged to Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, contains a short treatise on the origins of government by Sir George Radcliffe. Radcliffe was legal assistant to Sir Thomas Wentworth, lord deputy of Ireland (from January 1640 earl of Strafford and lord lieutenant). The treatise insisted on the divine origin of all human political power and implied that the best form of government was absolute monarchy, in which the monarch was free of all human law and subject to divine restraint alone. It will be suggested below that the composition of this treatise can be dated to the summer of 1639. This introduction will offer an outline of Radcliffe’s education and political career, explain the genesis of his treatise on government, point out some pertinent aspects of its argument, and finally assess the document’s significance.

All power belongeth unto God: psalm 62. 11. whatsoever power any creatures have, they have it by communication from God: whether it be naturall power, or might, the principle of motion, and of action and passion, given to all creatures by the Law of their creation, and conserved since by Gods providence, and concurrence with them in the execution thereof: or else it be morall power, authoritie or dominion; which is exercised only amongst reasonable creatures; and seemes to be described in those words of God to Cain: Genesis 4. comment 7. Unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.

The following digest lists accessions to repositories in Great Britain and Ireland during 2013 relating to Irish history and reported to the National Archives: Historical Manuscripts Commission (T.N.A. H.M.C.). This information is also published on the internet via T.N.A.’s website (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk) and is added to the computerised indexes of the National Register of Archives (N.R.A.) which are available for consultation at the National Archives, Kew, Richmond, TW9 4DU. Alternatively, searchers may access the indexes to the N.R.A. and certain linked on-line catalogues via the website. Limited and specific enquiries can be dealt with by post, or email (asd@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk).

This book is a landmark publication in the field of Early Irish History. Working from the fact that Ireland, in the period c.AD 400 to c.AD 1000, produced a massive body of literature, in a wide variety of genres and in two languages, Irish and Latin, that was far more extensive than in any other country in Europe, the author offers a context for the ‘communities of learning’ that produced such literature. Previous writers have struggled to explain how a society situated at the very edge of the known world could have done such a thing. Not the least of Elva Johnston’s achievements is to force a rethink of such underlying perceptions. Rather than viewing Ireland as an isolated and backward intellectual desert, for her ‘it is useful to see the island as a frontier-zone, comparable to other Roman frontiers’ (p. 11), and to see the evolution of Irish literacy and literate elites against the backdrop of Roman Frontier Studies. Though Ireland never suffered the traumatic consequences of barbarian invasion and the fall of Empire, Johnston argues nevertheless that there was much more than trading and raiding, or colonizing and slaving involved; she would see a much more profound influence at work: ‘the culture of early Christian Ireland is incomprehensible outside of the Late Antique context’ (p. 25).

In his famous portrayal of the eminent Victorian Henry Manning, Lytton Strachey commented thus: ‘It was as if the Fates had laid a wager that they would daunt him; and in the end they lost their bet.’ As one of the high-profile British converts to Roman Catholicism (1851), archbishop of Westminster (1865), cardinal (1875) and candidate for the papacy (1878), Manning was one of the most formidable and influential churchmen of his day. Throughout his adult life, he shared an intellectual, respectful and fractious friendship with William Gladstone who, as Liberal party leader and four-time British prime minister (1868–74, 1880–5, 1886, 1892–4), was the most successful and prolific politician of his generation. The relationship between Manning and Gladstone is significant because in his political career the latter paid great attention to the former. Throughout, Gladstone was fascinated by religious polemics, while his views on constitutional government were shaped very much by his own religious convictions.