In 1998, Raymond Gillespie, general editor of the Maynooth Studies in Local History series upon which the present review focuses, described local history as being ‘primarily about people in places over time’ (Raymond Gillespie and Myrtle Hill, Doing local history: pursuit and practice (Belfast, 1998), p. 16). The first volumes in the series, published in 1995, covered subjects as diverse as education, landlordism, urban growth and popular pastimes in the local context, and 144 volumes later the variety of themes, periods and locales continues to open our eyes to the complexities of local societies and to the motivation of people within those societies. The genesis of most of these volumes is in theses submitted for Maynooth's M.A. in Local History. Others are the work of historians with long experience in local history research and who have been invited to contribute to the series, the two strands together representing ground-breaking microstudies in almost every aspect of historical research.
The five volumes forming the subject matter of this review together span three centuries; touch five counties; explore themes as diverse as landholding, murder, administration, rebellion and economic development; and involve social groups ranging from the socially and economically marginalised through upwardly mobile officials and artists to the landed and mercantile elites. Each study, while centring on a specific locality or community, throws light on broader political, social and economic issues.
The replacement of established by new elites, viewed through the lens of the development of Waterford port in the first half of the nineteenth century, is mapped out by Mary Breen, with particular attention given to the interaction between the rival bodies competing for control of the port. A mid-nineteenth-century murder case in Protestant middle-class Dublin provides the focus for Suzanne Leeson's discussion of legal, press and public reaction to domestic violence, as well as changing attitudes to the nature of evidence. The nightmare of managing and juggling conflicting demands within the Irish Poor Law system in the immediate post-Famine decades is explored in Fergus O'Ferrall's study of the career of an Irish workhouse master. The interwoven agrarian, personal, sectarian and political tensions behind the establishment and activities of the United Irishmen are teased out in Kerron Ó Luain's work on a County Dublin district at the close of the eighteenth century. The evolution of landholding in north-east Carlow is the focus of Oliver Whelan's study, throwing considerable light on change and continuity in patterns of investment and lease-holding between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
Multiple sub-themes run through these works, some being specific to the individual study – gendered values, political radicalisation, the advancement of careers, engineering advances, the shaping of settlements – while others form part of a unifying mesh which binds these disparate studies together. The six such linking themes chosen for discussion here are: place in its various manifestations; the constantly fragmenting nature of local society; community cohesion; the impact and interpretation of class; the dilemmas of administration; and the challenges presented by historical microstudies to existing interpretations of the past.
Place obviously forms the bedrock of local historical study, though the precise meaning of the term can, as these works illustrate, vary significantly from one case study to the next, encompassing location, geology, terrain, landscape. In the development of Waterford port, for instance, geography and geology collided, the benefits of a favourable location being offset by certain inconvenient physical features. Waterford's fortunate position – near the confluence of three navigable rivers, a commodious harbour and busy maritime routes – was undermined by the obstruction caused two miles downstream by rocks in the river channel, as well as by the ongoing build-up of mud at the city's quays.
In other cases, the fortunes of a place were shaped by its location on a political or economic fault-line. This was the case in seventeenth-century Hacketstown which, sandwiched between Ormond territory and the O'Byrne area of influence in west Wicklow, experienced all the problems of a frontier area. Similarly, a century later Rathcoole's location (ten miles south of Dublin and straddling the main roads heading towards Kildare and Munster, but bordering economically unimproved upland areas to the east) was a meeting ground for the opposing forces of paralysing destitution on the one hand, and rapid, if late, radical politicisation on the other.
The vital role of local historical research in identifying ‘the forces that made for cohesion … and those that drove people apart’ is emphasised in general editor Raymond Gillespie's foreword to the series, each study going on to show that this potential for local disruption is endless in its variety. Witness the ongoing bitter wrangling within the mid-nineteenth-century Sligo Board of Guardians, where the fortunes of officials (and the ensuing efficiency of administration) hung on the changing balance of opposing groups on the board. Times of crisis and change (feared or hoped for, depending on one's outlook) accelerated the widening of such local divisions, as evident in the bitter animosities in Rathcoole between ‘Crops and Tails’, and between minor and higher gentry before and after the 1798 rebellion.
In the previous century, those availing of credit arrangements with new settlers in Hacketstown were only too eager to turn on their creditors once rebellion broke out in 1641, destroying all relevant documents so as to obliterate any evidence of indebtedness. In a less violent context, the burgeoning age of reform in the early nineteenth century, in Ireland as well as Britain, saw the peaking of long-growing tensions between old political and emergent mercantile and administrative elites, Waterford experiencing this tension in the shape of a three-way rivalry between the corporation, Waterford Harbour Commissioners and Directors of Inland Navigation. All in all, in every period and place, the attempted breaking of old monopolies and the emergence of new personal, family, economic and political ambitions could quickly turn neighbours and associates into bitter enemies.
Yet, community cohesion – even temporary cohesion – is as important as division in understanding the local, and the five works under review explore the many linkages between individuals and groups. Kinship proved to be one of the most powerful (though not necessarily harmonious) links, whether within yeomanry officer ranks in County Dublin in the 1790s, urban political elites in Waterford in the pre-Famine decades or land speculators in Carlow well into the nineteenth century. Other networks were rooted in economic interests and denominational loyalties. Such linkages underlay the establishment of the Waterford Harbour Commission in the early nineteenth century when Quaker merchants in Clonmel, some twenty miles upstream, rowed in with their confessional and mercantile equivalents in Waterford city to develop the port. In other contexts, patronage linkages between local elites, clergy (the persuasion varying with place and circumstance), and ambitious persons were vital to both the advancement of individual careers and the protection of group interests.
This is obvious in John Ferrall's appointment as master of the Sligo workhouse in 1852 – an appointment facilitated at least partly by denominational bonds and shared experience on relief committees at local level. It is also obvious in 1830s Waterford public bodies’ divvying out of the sinecures of butter taster and water bailiff to political supporters. Patronage networks that reached into central decision-making arenas were particularly useful in this regard, not only in advancing the interests of individuals but also in promoting local prosperity. The mercantile fortunes of Waterford owed much to the efforts of Sir John Newport, especially in his role as M.P. for the city, a position that he held over most of three decades. In a very different context – the disturbed atmosphere of the late 1790s in Rathcoole – a good word from prominent magistrates and landowners succeeded in getting a number of local rebels released from prison.
Conversely, the absence of such support ‘from above’ could impact extremely negatively on an individual. This was so in the case of William Kirwan, convicted in 1852 of the murder of his wife Sarah and transported to Bermuda, repeatedly and unsuccessfully petitioning for release until he finally re-entered society in 1879. If this is puzzling in view of his ‘respectable’ background and record of good behaviour during transportation the sources reveal obstruction from on high: Sir Thomas Larcom, under-secretary at Dublin Castle, was the greatest opponent of his release on the grounds that his crime was too heinous to be pardoned.
The elusive but very real concepts of class and status raise their heads in different ways in all five studies, but probably most clearly in the study of the Sligo workhouse master and that of the Kirwan murder, both centred on the 1850s, and in that of Hacketstown landholding over the course of three centuries. In Sligo, a reluctance to credit paupers’ complaints about the irregular behaviour of workhouse officials, along with resentment at perceived over-spending on bacon to flavour the workhouse inmates’ soup, reflected ratepayers’ suspicions as to the honesty of paupers. In the very different context of the Kirwan murder case, contemporary middle class values of domesticity and respectability helped to mask violence within marriage while equally class-centred attitudes shaped the reluctance of both press and court to take seriously the evidence of working-class witnesses at the trial.
Status issues, so powerful in the local context, played still another role in the Kirwan case, throwing light on the marginalised position inhabited by those individuals who were sandwiched between a higher and a lower class, between probity and disreputability. Such was the case of Kirwan's mistress, Theresa Kenny, caught between an apparently respectable but precarious existence as mother of Kirwan's seven children and her eventual vilification in the public press as a ‘fallen woman’. Kirwan himself, even before his conviction, inhabited something of a twilight position: he was a prosperous illustrator of medical works, rubbing shoulders with Dublin's growing medical elite, but also involved in other sexual adventures – and perhaps murders – before the death of his wife.
These studies also illustrate the nightmares facing administrators at every level, from provincial Poor Law boards (in Sligo) to local harbour authorities (in Waterford) to the Court of Bankruptcy (in relation to insolvent Carlow landholders). There were ongoing tensions between centre and periphery, between metropolis and province, between central authority and the hard-fought claims of local autonomy. Then there was the constant issue of the undermining of local and central administrative efficiency by non-attendance on local boards: Clonmel members of the Waterford Harbour Commissioners were taken to task in 1823 for repeated failure to attend city-based meetings of the commission while four decades later regular non-attendance at meetings of the Poor Law Board of Guardians in Sligo thwarted decisions, the absentees complaining vociferously about decisions made in their absence. Financial headaches also stymied local decision making: how could the expenses of running the workhouse be met while juggling the interests of central Poor Law Commission, local ratepayers and (certainly lowest on the list) pauper inmates? And how could port improvements be financed without alienating business and public interests through increasing tonnage duties on coal?
One of the most valuable contributions of local historical research to the discipline as a whole is its dual capacity to elucidate and yet challenge existing interpretations of the past. Ó Luain's work on Rathcoole and Leeson's study of the Kirwan murder both tease out sectarian attitudes and tensions at local level, concluding that very real denominationally-based animosities (the harsh treatment of Fr James Harold following the 1798 rebellion, and the press obsession with the religious persuasion of the Kirwans in the 1850s) were very powerful, but were frequently secondary to economic grievance, individual enmities and ambitions, and matters of status. But different forces intersect, as shown in Whelan's study of changing landholding and social patterns in Hacketstown. Here the capacity to shake off the past runs alongside the continued influence of that past. On the one hand is evident the resilience of the small settler community in the aftermath of the 1641 rebellion, as well as the slow but steady progress of wealthy Catholics towards landholding status over the course of the eighteenth century. But on the other is the past's long economic shadow in the shape of continued preferential treatment of Protestants in the distribution of leases into the nineteenth century.
Each of these very varied studies is marked by a sharp awareness of existing scholarship, meshed with meticulous research in sources ranging from government and official documents through contemporary press reports to maps and memoirs. Each – as is the case with every volume in the whole series – presents its analysis in fewer than seventy pages, proving that succinctness and insight can indeed go hand in hand. Each is marked by clear organisation and lucid writing, making the work accessible to both the specialist and general reader. One American scholar in 1914 dismissed the average local history study as ‘so much dead weight on library shelves… lacking most of what histories should contain, and containing much that histories should omit’ (quoted in R. C. Richardson (ed.), The changing face of English local history (London, 2000), p. 115). If he had the good fortune to return and read these latest volumes in the Maynooth Studies in Local History series, he would surely revise his assessment in favour of the definition of local history presented by Lawrence J. Taylor almost a century later – big questions about small places.
