̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - John Morrill

Eyewitness accounts of 1641 Irish rebellion released

bjb42 — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��unparalleled collection of accounts, which provide graphic details about the massacres and plunder accompanying the Catholic uprising of 1641, will be available for free at www.1641.tcd.ie, giving users the chance to scrutinise their contents in depth for the first time.

It follows a painstaking three-year research project in which all 19,000 pages of the original depositions (more than 5,000 separate sworn statements), many of which are almost illegible, were transcribed by a team of researchers, led by the Universities of Cambridge and Aberdeen and Trinity College, Dublin.

̽��ֱ��project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with substantial contributions from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and Trinity College, Dublin.

Researchers believe that the site's launch will enable historians to understand much more fully what remains one of the least-understood massacres in European history, in which many thousands of men, women and children lost their lives.

Experts are still divided over whether the uprising by Irish Catholics in October 1641, which followed decades of simmering tension with English Protestant settlers, was meant to be bloodless, or if violence was always intended.

In the event, the rebellion only enjoyed brief and partial success, before it sparked a decade of savage warfare that culminated in Oliver Cromwell's equally brutal conquest which began in 1649 (with the infamous Drogheda Massacre).

In its aftermath, half of all the land of Ireland was taken from Catholics born in Ireland and given to Protestants from Britain. So deep was the impression left on the national consciousness that images of the massacre are still used on banners by the Orange Order.

Despite their significance, however, the depositions have never been studied in full - partly due to their poor condition, and partly because of the sheer quantity of material involved. ̽��ֱ��digitisation means that they can now be examined by historians and members of the public anywhere in the world.

Professor John Morrill, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, one of the project's principal investigators and chair of the management committee, said: " ̽��ֱ��events of 1641 transformed Irish history and, as a result, can be justly said to have transformed British and world history as well."

"GK Chesterton once wrote that the problem with the English conquest of Ireland is that the Irish cannot forget it and the English cannot remember it. Now, for the first time, the Irish will be able to read about what happened in full and the English will have complete access to an episode that they have frequently overlooked."

Professor Tom Bartlett, Chair in Irish History and principal investigator from the Aberdeen arm of the project team, said: " ̽��ֱ��sheer volume of witness testimony is what makes the depositions so valuable. Transcribing them has enabled us to get down to what ordinary people were saying about these events and is of interest not just in terms of what they were saying but how they were saying it. "

"There is a huge amount to be learned from the language they were speaking and the words they were using about the make-up of the population and everyday life from their views of the world around them to the agricultural instruments they were using."

"We knew when we began that this was a very significant resource but the range of what we can learn from it has been wider than any of us expected and will be of interest to economic, social and cultural historians, linguists, genealogists and anyone interested in popular action."

As a result of the digitisation of the depositions, linguists from the ̽��ֱ�� of Aberdeen were awarded £334,000 under the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Digital Equipment and Digital Enhancement for Impact scheme, to help devise new techniques to analyse the manuscripts.

̽��ֱ��year-long project, which began in March, will see a team of researchers interrogate the database for a variety of information including the development of the English language in Ireland and the settlers' lifestyle there in the 1640s, the language of atrocity appearing in the witness testimony and the reliability of the evidence in the depositions.

Few gory details were spared when the testimonies were first compiled, as the newly-digitised collection reveals. One of the best-known is that of Eleanor Price, a widow and mother of six from County Armagh, who was imprisoned by insurgents before five of her children were drowned, along with other settlers, in the River Bann at Portadown Bridge.

̽��ֱ��account describes how the rebels "then and there instantly and most barbarously drowned the most of them: And those that could swim and come to the shore they either knocked them in the hands and so after drowned them, or else shot them to death in the water."

As a result of the new online resource, users will be able to view both the transcription of the testimonies, and a digitised version of the original document, side-by-side on their computer screens.

Ahead of the launch of the digitised collection, and to mark the 369th anniversary of the rebellion itself, an international seminar was held at Trinity College Dublin on Friday, 22 October. Professor Jane Ohlmeyer of TCD spoke about the project, Professor John Morrill of Cambridge spoke about the consequences of the Rebellion and Massacre for Britain and Ireland, and Professor Ben Kiernan of Yale compared the Irish massacres of 1641 with massacres in modern times.

An exhibition, "Ireland in Turmoil: the 1641 Depositions", was also opened by the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, and Dr Ian Paisley spoke at the event. ̽��ֱ��display runs until April.

̽��ֱ��first-hand testimonies of thousands of people who witnessed the bloody rebellion that paved the way for centuries of sectarian conflict in Ireland have been released online.

̽��ֱ��events of 1641 transformed Irish history and, as a result, can be justly said to have transformed British and world history as well.

Professor John Morrill

Extract from the 1641 Depositions at Trinity College Dublin Library

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Rebellion, repression, retribution

tdk25 — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��true course of events of the Irish rebellion of 1641 has never been fully known. Initiated by disaffected Irish Catholics rebelling against Protestant settlers, the rebellion quickly escalated in violence, resulting in widespread killing. But was the rebellion intended to be a bloodless coup that spiralled out of control, or were the thousands of Protestants deliberately driven out and massacred? What’s clear is that the years that followed were a time of savage revenge for the events of 1641 – Oliver Cromwell arrived with 30,000 English troops to conquer Ireland in the name of the English Republic and to exact ‘a just judgement of God upon those barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood’ – and the groundwork was laid for Ireland’s Catholic–Protestant divide.

A curious aspect of the rebellion is that although it is the least understood of all the great massacres of European history, it is amongst the best recorded. Historical narratives in the form of eyewitness accounts of those who lived through the rebellion are still in existence in the library of Trinity College Dublin, where they have remained largely unstudied. This is chiefly because there is too much of a record of what happened and it has taken until now, with improvements in technology and the political climate, to conspire finally to make it possible for the secrets of the ‘1641 depositions’ to be unlocked. A team of scholars in Cambridge, Dublin and Aberdeen are poised to do just this. Professor John Morrill from Cambridge’s Faculty of History is chairing the three-year project, working alongside Professor Jane Ohlmeyer and Dr Micheál Ó Siochrú (Trinity College Dublin), and Professor Tom Bartlett ( ̽��ֱ�� of Aberdeen).

Roots of an uprising

̽��ֱ��1641 rebellion had roots stretching back to the mid-16th century, when the Irish provinces were heavily colonised by English settlers. Throughout the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the English government, fearful that continental Catholic kings would use Ireland as a springboard for invading England to exploit the dynastic weaknesses (Elizabeth was, in Catholic eyes, a heretic bastard tyrant, unmarried and the last of her line), sought to impose strong Protestant control of Ireland. This led to a dreadful cycle: Catholic rebellion, repression of the uprising, replacement of Irish landowners by English as part of a ‘Plantation’ policy, then more rebellion, more repression and further Plantation.

In and after 1610, the largest of the Plantation policies, in which not only the Irish landowners but also the tenant farmers and urban elites were displaced, affected large parts of Ulster in the far north of Ireland. Previous Catholic owners and occupiers were driven into exile, where thousands either became mercenary soldiers (‘Wild Geese’) in the armies of the Habsburg kings or fell into destitution.

For 30 years, the strong authoritarian government, softened by a blind-eye to private Catholic worship, kept the dispossessed of Ulster and elsewhere in check. But in 1641, England was paralysed by the disputes that were to lead, a year later, to civil war.

King Charles I’s puritan opponents had plans to introduce much more effective religious persecution of the Catholic Irish and to make Ireland increasingly part of an enlarged English state. This provoked, from late October 1641, a series of pre-emptive strikes by members of the Catholic nobility and, in the ensuing chaos, a series of what (unless this research project tells otherwise) appear to be spontaneous revenge attacks on Protestant settlers that quickly got out of control.

An imperfect account

Although we have no idea how many people were killed during the events of 1641, the most prudent estimates are that 4000 died through acts of violence and that 6000 more died of the consequences of being driven out naked into the winter cold, while many more fled from their homes and made their way eventually back to England. So much is clear. But the precise chronology and geography of the rebellion have remained hazy at best.

̽��ֱ��English government had to do something to protect the English Protestant settlers, but their own country was in chaos. They could not raise taxes to fund the army. So they borrowed money from 2000 venture capitalists (the ‘Adventurers’) against the promise that they would receive two million acres of Irish land once Ireland was conquered. To establish which land was to be confiscated, all (mainly Protestant) witnesses to the rebellion were questioned by government-appointed commissioners and their accounts recorded as ‘depositions’ that could be used in court.

Today, 3400 depositions are in existence, providing the fullest and most dramatic evidence we have for any event of this kind before the 20th century. They add to up 19,000 pages of testimony in crabbed 17th-century hands. Trinity College Library acquired the documents in 1741 and for centuries there they have remained, far too extensive for any one scholar to explore them all and in too poor a condition for widespread access. Even with a team of researchers, it will take a total of more than eight person years to transcribe the accounts.

A new kind of history

̽��ֱ��spirit of co-operation between the UK and Irish governments following the Good Friday agreement has made it possible to fund a project of this size – the most ambitious British-Irish collaboration in the humanities ever undertaken. Separate but linked funding streams in the UK and Ireland have raised more than 1 million euros from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK, the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) and Trinity College Dublin.

Once the depositions are captured and online, they will constitute a database that can be arranged and re-arranged in any way a scholar would like: by date, by map reference, even by act of violence. Many of the depositions give detailed inventories of goods taken and destroyed, affording unique insights into the material culture of a colonial society. Members of the general public might even use depositions to trace family trees. There are endless possibilities for further study, both looking backwards to the pattern of exploitation that provoked the explosion of Catholic violence, and forwards to the way in which these massacres resulted in the confiscation of 40% of the land of Ireland and its transfer from Catholics born in Ireland to Protestants born in England. These are events that transformed Irish history and therefore British and world history. This collaborative project represents a new kind of history: one where the medium and the message can change how we understand ourselves in time.

For more information, please contact the author Professor John Morrill (jsm1000@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of History.

John Morrill explores one of the most extraordinary and least understood aspects of Anglo-Irish history - the rebellion of 1641.

But was the rebellion intended to be a bloodless coup that spiralled out of control, or were the thousands of Protestants deliberately driven out and massacred?

Credit- the Board of Trinity College, Dublin

Deposition taken from a witness to the 1641 Irish rebellion

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Yes