http://grantonline.com/grant-family-genealogy/Normans-in-Ireland/3-barons-of-iverk.htm
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~irlkik/history/fitzgerald.html
The Barons, or Fitzgeralds, of Brownsford
Rev. Carrigan in his "History" published in 1905 describes the Barons, or Fitzgeralds, of Brownsford on pages 195-196 of Volume IV.
They were probably a branch of the Barons, or Fitzgeralds, of Burnchurch, and appear to have been settled down in the neighbourhood of Inistioge before the close of the 15th century. Their property included the castles of Brwnsford and Cloone, and the townlands of Brownsford, or Aughavroona, Curraghmore, Cloone, Ballygub, and Coolenamuck. Myles, or Milo, Baron, Prior of Inistioge, and Bishop of Ossory for twenty-two years, belonged to this stock, and at his death, in 1550, was buried, with his forefathers (in sepultura maiorum), in Inistioge Priory.
David Baron, gent., of Brownsford, is mentioned in documents of the years 1543, 1549, and 1551.
Edmund Baron, gent., of Brownsford, apparently his son, received a pardon, on the 2nd Jany., 1571-2 [Fiants of Eliz.].
Thomas Baron, of Cloone, son of Edmund, died at Cloone, on the 3rd October, 1584, leaving a son and heir.
David Baron, otherwise Fitzgerald, who was born on the 25th Nov., 1564. Being a minor at the time of his father's death, his wardship was granted to Richard Harding, gent. He married Joan Morress, daughter of Sir John Morres, After his death, which happened on the 14th April, 1621, his wife caused a wayside cross, the base of which now adorns Inistioge square, to be erected to his and her own memory. His son and successor,
http://www.inistioge.ie/143/Inistioge_Village_-_Historical_Overview.html
In the square a handsome fountain was erected in 1879 by Lady Louisa Tighe (1803-1878) of Woodstock, to the memory of her husband William Tighe (1794-1878). Near it is an obelisk to David Fitzgerld alias Baron of Brownsford, who died in 1621. This monument once supported a wayside cross. The cross itself is now missing and tradition states that it was smashed by the Yeoman in the troubles of 1798
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25507939?uid=3738232&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104568107477
Every hundred years or so in the post-mediaeval modern era an upheaval occurs which realigns the central pivots on which old certainties had hitherto hung like oblivious fruit ripened for the fall. A hurricane which rips up the roots of all life; now serenely cold, stonily calm, the sparks of new worlds are infused into the limp mangled tendrils; "from death springs life and from the graves ..." . The sack of Constantinople by the Turks dispersed Byzantine monks across the Mediterranean bringing with them the old Graeco-Roman learning; the spirit of Socrates. humanism, the church assailed, the old dogmas destroyed, Luther and Calvin half-triumphant, land and feudal dues "re-appropriated", the papacy on its knees battered & broken, the tax harvest re-channelled & titled entitlements exchanged; cracking atwain the half-consumed heart of Europe - the Thirty Years War. "Reason" simmers the warring religious flames, and, Goodness!, by a disappearing God distracted, the rape of the world begins; some call this Enlightenment but Raynal and Diderot yet shine. Next, "The Revolutions" - the aristo-monarchical world order assailed in the Age of the People, the Age of Democracy, the Age of Paine; the internationalist "bridge-builder", founder of the first League of Nations (all in his mind of course); he dies, fittingly enough, in a world that couldn't listen (Oh, crescendo Vincenzo!!); in poverty, and a mongrel's grave, his epitaph, scrawled in invisible gold ink, is of course, barring mutations, forever illegible to us, perceptible, in fact, only to the sun-kissed-blazy retinas of the triple binary, satellite dwellers of Vegan 9 in the Frolix dimension of Carpodian Eight (just left of Andromeda), as garbled "quantum tunnelling" reveal to us only the tantalisingly mish-mashed clue - "My country is the world, all mankind are my brethren and my religion is to do good". Shirley, that can't be all!? After the aborted hijinks of Napoleon who wrested for himself laze poops gutter be-splattered crown, Europe's increasingly incestuous royalist monopoly convenes the (drumrolloverbakedoven) - Congress of Vienna. For all the castle-raised dilemma presents; how to cage 'Freedom' Finnegan's three Fates of Liberty, Democracy & Nationalism?? Matternick's 'forest of bayonets' is erected, the French genie put back in a (rather stale) Bourbon bottle, spies are dispatched post-haste across the continent - and such things as Mazeinnee are born. 1848, an earthquake shatters "Vienna", but the nobility bail out monarchy with the help of? - the peasantry!! Marx despairs, spits out the juvenile Manifesto, rolls up his sleeves and plants a time bomb in Hesperides (turreted Jenny presciently tut-tutting her polarized stretch-marks from afar) - and Kapital!!, the fourth (and final) Fate is born, or rather, flung onto a stinking tenement sidewalk in an aborted slop bucket. Ah! From such humble origins must we rise. Meanwhile, the world must be raped afresh, even, if necessary, be "civilized" - so, the child of Adam's lust, "Free Trade", hitherto sheltered under Cornlaw's lazy boughs (a magnificent protected demesne, all mod cons etc,.) is launched into "Society" on the gun-boat arms of that incorrigible rogue and opiate hound, Lord Palmerston.
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Corn Price 1835-1842
One possible approach to the problem is to view the fluctuations in wheat price in the preceding decades and determine what proportional restraints in supply gave way to precisely what percentage of increase. By doing this we should ascertain just how alarming a picture presented itself to the Peelite government in the event of a supply curtailment from Ireland.
http://www.bahs.org.uk/AGHR/ARTICLES/28n1a1.pdf
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1842/aug/04/repeal-of-corn-laws#S3V0065P0_18420804_HOL_23
Lords 4th August 1842. Repeal of Corn laws. Earl of Radnor
"For instance, the average price of wheat in 1835 was 39s. 4d.; in 1840, 66s. 4d.; a difference of 27s. per qr. Now, stating the population of Great Britain at 18,000,000 of people, and assuming, which is the usual calculation, that the consumption of the people, one with another, is one qr. per person, the mess of the sum paid for necessary corn in 1840, over what was paid in 1835, would be no less a sum than 24,300,000l. Again, the price in 1841 was 64s. 4d.; 25s. per qr. higher than in 1835: in this year the excess of price paid over the former year would be 22,500,0001, so that in these two years there must have been paid 46,800,0001. more for the purchase of necessary food, than would have been required if the price had con 1012 tinued as it was in 1835; and all this money would have been expended in the purchase of other articles, some of necessity (but of a necessity less imperious than that of food,) some of use or luxury, and thus would have increased the general fund for the employment of labour."
The other day, when the noble Earl (the Earl of Ripon) moved the second reading of the present act for regulating the importation of corn, he appeared to admit fully, that we did not habitually and uniformly raise a sufficient quantity for our own people, and calculated the annual average deficicency at 1,000,000 qrs. At the same time, the noble Earl took great trouble, in another part of his speech, to prove, that there was no country from which we could be sure of having this constant supply. Now, what is the fact? Is this country independent of the foreigner?
It is curious to observe, too, how those imports have gradually increased:—
For his own part, as he said before, he thought it a measure so pressing, that it could not be delayed with safety to the prosperity of the people. Having that opinion, he had brought it forward as a matter of imperative duty. It would, he believed, greatly relieve the present great and lamentable distress which prevailed in all parts of the country —not only in the manufacturing districts, where they were notorious and admitted, but also in the agricultural parts—and would lay the foundation of future prosperity. Without it, he despaired of seeing any permanent or uninterrupted course of well-being to either the agricultural or manufacturing interests.
Lord Kinnaird
. The feeling against that law was becoming stronger and stronger from day to day, and more widely diffused. Last year the number of signatures to petitions against the Corn-Law was only 1023 about one million, while this year the number of signatures exceeded four millions. There was no limit to our prospective trade with the United States, if we would only consent to receive their agricultural produce in exchange for our manufactures.
Ireland provides perhaps the world's lengthiest case study of the effects of an encroaching colonial superpower on an indigenous culture (from early mediaeval times arguably till the present); its study therefore should be of intrinsic interest to anyone seeking to understand the numerous post-colonial satellites of 'underdevelopment' in today's world; particularly Latin America (anti-colonial rhetoric of the new 'Bolivarianism'), India (the arguable solidification of caste-based hierarchies under the Raj) and sub-Saharan Africa (post-colonial resource extraction under neoliberal structural adjustment) who still struggle to divest themselves of the legacy of imperial exploitation. Is the Good Friday Agreement, for instance, a stable and realistic template for future peace given the communal hold and shared cultural identifications of Irish (particularly Gaelic) history on northern nationalist consciousness? Or have we utterly by-passed traditional affiliations in a 'post-modern' capitalist world order? What is particularly interesting is the shifting terrains of allegiance provided by the post-famine re-articulation of Gaelic cultural nationalism and separatist republicanism; their interlocking, overlapping and (more often) antithetical stance and discourse with proponents of a diluted 'federalist' Home Rule (O' Connellite, Parnellite, Redmondite) and how individual members of the four mooted 'communities'; Protestant English, Protestant Anglo-Irish, Northern Presbyterian and Catholic nationalist all managed to locate and assert themselves (often contrary to 'sect' expectations) within this rapidly changing pre-and post-Great War environment (amidst the rise of socialism, franchise expansion, collapsing influence of land-based aristocracy, mooted League of Nations etc.).
The famine (1846-51) is the central defining event in modern Irish history. A social catastrophe of unprecedented proportions it obliterated a whole class of small rural landholders and peripatetic labourers who had for generations clung desperately to ever denuding portions of their native soil. Among this economic strata; those whom it did not destroy outright were disgorged to the four corners; taking ship with whatever means left to them principally to America, England and Australia. In the crude mathematics of economic necessity it resolved at a stroke the Gordian knot of the Malthusian 'catastrophe', drastically depopulating the countryside and allowing at last the shift to more 'rational' and 'modern' modes of agricultural management. Such at least was the prevailing narrative quickly constructed to situate what for many remained an unutterable horror into some vaguely identifiable locus of meaning. One causative framework was erected for the consumption of the respectable 'propertied' middle and upper classes (both Anglo-Irish and Catholic nationalist), or, generally those who stood to benefit from the mass depopulation, another, closer to the bone, conveying all the horrendous immediacy of those dark days was retold and recycled orally among the survivors and their kin as they fled from their ancestral homes across the Atlantic. On the pivot of these two starkly contrasted interpretative experiences emerged the essential bifurcation of subsequent nationalist separatism; the one constitutional and pacifist which sought redress within the confines of Westminster; the other Fenian, republican and determinedly 'physical force' which repudiated the very legitimacy of the British 'liberal state'. The immediate impact of the famine therefore was to delegitimise the pre-existing constitutionalist O' Connellite Repeal movement not only in the eyes of the vast bulk of the dispossessed emigrés but also in the hearts of that huge swathe of small tenant holders who had suffered the most during 'the hunger'. Buoyed by the cultural and literary revivalists (Gaelic League, Yeats, Synge) it was the confluence of these two distinct modes of agitation which eventually provided the motor influence for the forces which propelled the Irish Revolution (1912-1923).
Generally, within Irish history at least, I'm attracted to 'liminal' figures who either straddle differing traditions, stand on the verge of new worlds waiting to be born or exhibit in their complex personalities all the contradictions of their age; for example Eoghan Ruadh (an early 'republican'?), John Toland (rara avis; an important enlightenment figure from a Gaelic speaking background) , Cornelius Neary (sought rapprochement with liberal Anglicans during penal era), some of the 'new light' Presbyterians which formed the backbone of the early United Irishmen, Mary Ann McCracken in particular, Thomas Russell, for the cross-cultural friendships he inspired, William Carleton for his colourful (and priceless) literary ethnographies, Mitchel for his thunder and inexplicable defence of Southern slavery, Lalor for his outrage and prescience, John MacHale for his quotability and sustenance of the Irish language ... the list goes on, but it is these types of figures perhaps (more for the variability of their thought) which can tell us something about the intricacies of decision-making during periods of intense political upheaval such as is found in decolonisation and independence movements.
What colonial parallels (if any) can be drawn from similar movements around the globe to the Irish revolution?
http://www.bahs.org.uk/AGHR/ARTICLES/28n1a1.pdf
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1842/aug/04/repeal-of-corn-laws#S3V0065P0_18420804_HOL_23
Lords 4th August 1842. Repeal of Corn laws. Earl of Radnor
"For instance, the average price of wheat in 1835 was 39s. 4d.; in 1840, 66s. 4d.; a difference of 27s. per qr. Now, stating the population of Great Britain at 18,000,000 of people, and assuming, which is the usual calculation, that the consumption of the people, one with another, is one qr. per person, the mess of the sum paid for necessary corn in 1840, over what was paid in 1835, would be no less a sum than 24,300,000l. Again, the price in 1841 was 64s. 4d.; 25s. per qr. higher than in 1835: in this year the excess of price paid over the former year would be 22,500,0001, so that in these two years there must have been paid 46,800,0001. more for the purchase of necessary food, than would have been required if the price had con 1012 tinued as it was in 1835; and all this money would have been expended in the purchase of other articles, some of necessity (but of a necessity less imperious than that of food,) some of use or luxury, and thus would have increased the general fund for the employment of labour."
The other day, when the noble Earl (the Earl of Ripon) moved the second reading of the present act for regulating the importation of corn, he appeared to admit fully, that we did not habitually and uniformly raise a sufficient quantity for our own people, and calculated the annual average deficicency at 1,000,000 qrs. At the same time, the noble Earl took great trouble, in another part of his speech, to prove, that there was no country from which we could be sure of having this constant supply. Now, what is the fact? Is this country independent of the foreigner?
It is curious to observe, too, how those imports have gradually increased:—
In ten years ending 1780, the excess of imports was 286,837 qrs.; in the next ten years, the excess was 645,311 qrs.; in the ten years ending 1800, it was 4,293,938 qrs.; in the ten years ending 1810, it was 5,996,350 qrs.; in the ten years ending 1820, it was 6,040,944 qrs.; in the ten years ending 1830, it was 9,413,459 qrs.; and in the ten years ending 1840, it was 14,953,408 qrs.Thus he found, that in the last of these ten years the average annual excess of imports above exports, was 1,495,340 qrs.; if the following year, 1841, be added, the average would be found to be 1,622,382 qrs. Again, taking the whole time during which the act of the 9th of Geo. 4th (the act repealed the other day) was in operation— that is, from 1829 to 1841— the annual average excess of imports above exports was 1,702,293 qrs. If the last five years only be taken, it would be found to be 2,193,254; and for the last three years, 2,800,140 qrs. So that, in fact, we may talk as long as we please of being independent; dependent we are, and with our increasing population are likely to remain so. If, then, we cannot supply ourselves, but must have recourse to foreign countries, what is the thing most to be desired?
For his own part, as he said before, he thought it a measure so pressing, that it could not be delayed with safety to the prosperity of the people. Having that opinion, he had brought it forward as a matter of imperative duty. It would, he believed, greatly relieve the present great and lamentable distress which prevailed in all parts of the country —not only in the manufacturing districts, where they were notorious and admitted, but also in the agricultural parts—and would lay the foundation of future prosperity. Without it, he despaired of seeing any permanent or uninterrupted course of well-being to either the agricultural or manufacturing interests.
Lord Kinnaird
. The feeling against that law was becoming stronger and stronger from day to day, and more widely diffused. Last year the number of signatures to petitions against the Corn-Law was only 1023 about one million, while this year the number of signatures exceeded four millions. There was no limit to our prospective trade with the United States, if we would only consent to receive their agricultural produce in exchange for our manufactures.
Ireland provides perhaps the world's lengthiest case study of the effects of an encroaching colonial superpower on an indigenous culture (from early mediaeval times arguably till the present); its study therefore should be of intrinsic interest to anyone seeking to understand the numerous post-colonial satellites of 'underdevelopment' in today's world; particularly Latin America (anti-colonial rhetoric of the new 'Bolivarianism'), India (the arguable solidification of caste-based hierarchies under the Raj) and sub-Saharan Africa (post-colonial resource extraction under neoliberal structural adjustment) who still struggle to divest themselves of the legacy of imperial exploitation. Is the Good Friday Agreement, for instance, a stable and realistic template for future peace given the communal hold and shared cultural identifications of Irish (particularly Gaelic) history on northern nationalist consciousness? Or have we utterly by-passed traditional affiliations in a 'post-modern' capitalist world order? What is particularly interesting is the shifting terrains of allegiance provided by the post-famine re-articulation of Gaelic cultural nationalism and separatist republicanism; their interlocking, overlapping and (more often) antithetical stance and discourse with proponents of a diluted 'federalist' Home Rule (O' Connellite, Parnellite, Redmondite) and how individual members of the four mooted 'communities'; Protestant English, Protestant Anglo-Irish, Northern Presbyterian and Catholic nationalist all managed to locate and assert themselves (often contrary to 'sect' expectations) within this rapidly changing pre-and post-Great War environment (amidst the rise of socialism, franchise expansion, collapsing influence of land-based aristocracy, mooted League of Nations etc.).
The famine (1846-51) is the central defining event in modern Irish history. A social catastrophe of unprecedented proportions it obliterated a whole class of small rural landholders and peripatetic labourers who had for generations clung desperately to ever denuding portions of their native soil. Among this economic strata; those whom it did not destroy outright were disgorged to the four corners; taking ship with whatever means left to them principally to America, England and Australia. In the crude mathematics of economic necessity it resolved at a stroke the Gordian knot of the Malthusian 'catastrophe', drastically depopulating the countryside and allowing at last the shift to more 'rational' and 'modern' modes of agricultural management. Such at least was the prevailing narrative quickly constructed to situate what for many remained an unutterable horror into some vaguely identifiable locus of meaning. One causative framework was erected for the consumption of the respectable 'propertied' middle and upper classes (both Anglo-Irish and Catholic nationalist), or, generally those who stood to benefit from the mass depopulation, another, closer to the bone, conveying all the horrendous immediacy of those dark days was retold and recycled orally among the survivors and their kin as they fled from their ancestral homes across the Atlantic. On the pivot of these two starkly contrasted interpretative experiences emerged the essential bifurcation of subsequent nationalist separatism; the one constitutional and pacifist which sought redress within the confines of Westminster; the other Fenian, republican and determinedly 'physical force' which repudiated the very legitimacy of the British 'liberal state'. The immediate impact of the famine therefore was to delegitimise the pre-existing constitutionalist O' Connellite Repeal movement not only in the eyes of the vast bulk of the dispossessed emigrés but also in the hearts of that huge swathe of small tenant holders who had suffered the most during 'the hunger'. Buoyed by the cultural and literary revivalists (Gaelic League, Yeats, Synge) it was the confluence of these two distinct modes of agitation which eventually provided the motor influence for the forces which propelled the Irish Revolution (1912-1923).
Generally, within Irish history at least, I'm attracted to 'liminal' figures who either straddle differing traditions, stand on the verge of new worlds waiting to be born or exhibit in their complex personalities all the contradictions of their age; for example Eoghan Ruadh (an early 'republican'?), John Toland (rara avis; an important enlightenment figure from a Gaelic speaking background) , Cornelius Neary (sought rapprochement with liberal Anglicans during penal era), some of the 'new light' Presbyterians which formed the backbone of the early United Irishmen, Mary Ann McCracken in particular, Thomas Russell, for the cross-cultural friendships he inspired, William Carleton for his colourful (and priceless) literary ethnographies, Mitchel for his thunder and inexplicable defence of Southern slavery, Lalor for his outrage and prescience, John MacHale for his quotability and sustenance of the Irish language ... the list goes on, but it is these types of figures perhaps (more for the variability of their thought) which can tell us something about the intricacies of decision-making during periods of intense political upheaval such as is found in decolonisation and independence movements.
What colonial parallels (if any) can be drawn from similar movements around the globe to the Irish revolution?
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