Buried in the papers of Elizabeth I's chief counselor and minister, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, there exists a “compendium” of eight distinct documents related to the lordship (and later kingdom) of Ireland. Unearthed by Christopher Maginn, the compendium is here presented in print for the first time, complete with an editorial commentary on each of its component parts, and an extensive discussion of the Tudor approach to the reformation of the island, which had to begin with the “discovery” of what was a terrain more foreign than France, despite the presence of an Old English aristocracy for nearly four centuries.

The design of this book is a little unusual. The text of the compendium itself, complete with footnotes, occupies only forty pages of the entire volume. It is a miscellany of short (in some cases very short) tracts or documents compiled by many hands. It begins a “breviate of the gettying of Ireland and of the decay of the same” (pages 69–79); this was the work of a County Dublin lawyer named Sir Patrick Finglas, chief baron of the exchequer, and was probably finished shortly before Finglas's death in 1537. It is followed by an anonymous description of the military power of the Irish as evaluated by the ability of lords or families to raise forces (pages 80–89). Following that are a list of Irish harbors or “havens”; and an early Tudor recension of the articles submitted by Sir William Darcy of Platten, County Meath to Henry VIII's council in 1515, a document previously known through Elizabethan copies. The balance of the compendium consists of the sole surviving article from a longer list of several intended for the reformation of Ireland, some proposals for raising further revenues, a set of genealogies of the Burke or de Burgh family, and, finally, a series of ordinances or provisions for Ireland, attributed by the present authors to Sir William Darcy once again.

The third and final section of the book offers a more general discussion of the “discovery” of Ireland by a Tudor regime that knew little of its conquered territory across the Irish Sea. Henry VII had good reason to pay attention to Ireland, not least as it veered Yorkist in sympathy and provided a wellspring of rebellion through the early part of his reign. Simply obtaining reliable information about the island and its people was to prove a challenge. The king put some effort both into this and into forming relationships with the Irish and Anglo-Irish aristocracy, most notably the earl of Kildare. Henry even contemplated leading an expedition into his lordship to suppress rebellion. (Perhaps recalling that such an expedition had preceded the downfall of Richard II a century earlier, he wisely changed his mind). During the reign of Henry VIII, perhaps under the influence of Renaissance humanism, the discourse began to shift from the sheer practicalities of ruling to a more ambitious program of reform. This, in turn, generated the assorted documents in the compendium. Typically of Henry VIII, it is unlikely that he had much patience for the reading of extended documentation, but he did, in 1519, succumb to what Steven Ellis aptly describes (here and elsewhere) as a “spasmodic fit” (144) of reforming energy. In practice, however, the king's attentions were always focused eastward toward the continent and, later in the reign, on the more pressing domestic issues of securing the order of succession and establishing the royal supremacy in religion. It took major events such as the Kildare rebellion of 1534 to provoke the crown into a prolonged engagement with the soon-to-be kingdom.

Although the organization of this book is a little eccentric (nonspecialist readers would be advised to read the third section first, and only then the description of the compendium text), it is a useful volume. I would have welcomed a fuller discussion of the medieval and early sixteenth-century sources of knowledge of Ireland (from Giraldus Cambrensis to Polydore Vergil) than is provided here, weak and derivative though most of those were. The compendium document itself is good to have in print, and provides a context for the later and better known writings about Ireland by Edmund Spenser, Sir John Davies, and others. Finally, Maginn and Ellis demonstrate that in Ireland, as in England, attempts at a “reform” along perceived ancient (in this case twelfth-century) lines would lead the Tudor regime, not to the past, but to an entirely new set of arrangements.