It has now become a truth universally acknowledged that the origin of the ‘revolution’ in Irish historiography which began in the mid-1930s must be sought in the experiences of the founding editors, Theodore Moody and Robin Dudley Edwards, as postgraduate students at the Institute of Historical Research (I.H.R.) in London. On their return to Ireland, Moody and Edwards endeavoured to reproduce what they had seen and had come to regard as the most significant features of English academic history; supportive structures which would encourage the emergence of an Irish historical profession, that standard cultural feature of the modern nation-state. Ireland already had its own national archive, held at the Public Record Office and the State Paper Office in Dublin, albeit an archive drastically reduced in size by the fire at the Four Courts in 1922; a record society, the Catholic Record Society, founded at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth in 1911, ‘for the publication of Irish historical documents’; and the Irish Manuscripts Commission, established by the government of the Free State in 1928, which had started a programme of reporting on documentary materials and publishing scholarly editions of original sources.Footnote 1 But these were scattered foundations, and a great deal remained to be built up from scratch. Pre-eminent among the new structures that Moody and Edwards established were the two academic societies, the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies and the Irish Historical Society, equivalents of the Royal Historical Society, the Scottish History Society, and the larger English regional societies, and the scholarly journal these two Irish societies combined to produce, Irish Historical Studies, which not only printed articles on Irish history, but recorded publications, theses, and archival acquisitions, and, not least, through its ‘Rules for contributors’, provided a detailed and authoritative template for the style that Irish historians could use in presenting their work.Footnote 2
Because the I.H.R. appeared at the fountainhead of the project developed by Moody and Edwards to professionalise history-writing in Ireland, it has also become closely associated with the methodological elements of their ‘revolution’. With professionalisation came a commitment to history written on the basis of extensive research in primary sources, undertaken according to the principles of modern ‘scientific history’. This is not to say that those who preceded Moody and Edwards were ignorant of the ‘scientific’ method; Irish medievalists, in particular, based their work firmly on documentary analysis, whatever unreconstructed political notions some may have brought to the study of their subjects. For example, James McCaffrey, the founding secretary of the Catholic Record Society, had himself undergone training in historical research in Germany, the home of ‘scientific history’, having completed a doctorate at Freiburg in 1906 (on the Black Book of Limerick). But the ‘historiographical revolution’ of the 1930s and 1940s institutionalised these practices across the modern as well as the medieval period. This commitment to rigorous, document-based historical writing was specifically intended to rid Ireland of the politically-coloured, even sectarian, history that dominated public understandings of the past, both unionist and nationalist, and was embodied in school curricula, north and south.Footnote 3
Some modern critics, however, have found in the technical rigour of ‘scientific’ historical scholarship a political edge of its own. The aspiration of Moody and Edwards to remove political bias from the writing of Irish history was, they argue, designed to create an Irish history that was purely objective, or, to use a loaded term, ‘value-free’. But since historians cannot rid themselves entirely of the intellectual and emotional baggage that comes with living in a particular historical moment, any attempt at a true objectivity, such as that preached by early advocates of the social sciences, must be doomed to failure. All ostentatiously ‘value-free’ history will be vitiated by prejudices embedded in the mind of the author. In this formulation the self-consciously objective history of the 1930s and 1940s naturally spawned an aggressively ‘revisionist’ critique, directed principally at nationalist interpretations of key episodes in the Irish past. ‘Revisionist’ writing subverted previously accepted paradigms of explanation which satisfied the social and political needs of the Irish nation, and in effect removed the ‘pain’ from Irish history in a way that served an explicitly anti-nationalist purpose.Footnote 4 Here again we find the I.H.R. holding centre-stage. In an interview in 1993 Dr Brendan Bradshaw stated that:
Irish historiography took a wrong turn in the 1930s. At that point it assimilated a view of history as a science, with the historian akin to the natural scientist peering down his microscope at a range of data about the natural world, simply viewing it in a detached way … The young Irish scholars who went to London in the 1930s assimilated a view of history that was then fashionable and took this to be an orthodoxy as if there was no other possibility.Footnote 5
It is by no means clear that Moody and Edwards ever intended to create an entirely ‘value-free’ history, in the way in which that term has come to be understood in the debates between practitioners and opponents of ‘revisionism’. Although Edwards’s first book, Church and state in Tudor Ireland (1935), was firmly based on documentary research and adhered closely to the evidence of his sources, its language expressed a clearly Catholic nationalist prejudice, even if in his later career he abandoned these confessional tones.Footnote 6 Moody, for his part, while always producing works that were dispassionate and explicitly free of partisanship, saw this enterprise as part of a wider educational, and indeed political, mission. A second, broader, question is whether it makes historical sense to conflate the ‘scientific’ method of writing history based on a close study of surviving documents, with notions of emotional and political ‘detachment’. Some historians in Britain and Europe certainly aspired to the objectivity of the social scientists, but by no means all, and in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries the techniques of ‘scientific history’ were put to uses which were sometimes far from politically neutral, for example in bolstering an essentially Whiggish view of English constitutional development.Footnote 7
A third issue, which has not yet been teased out, is the precise influence of the I.H.R. on the Irish ‘historiographical revolution’. The personal testimony of Moody and Edwards as to their experiences in London has been taken on trust. However, sufficient contemporary documentary sources survive to permit this evidence to be tested. Even if the correspondence files in Moody’s papers at Trinity College Dublin remain unsorted and thus firmly closed to researchers,Footnote 8 the Edwards papers are available in the archives department that he himself founded at University College Dublin, including a long run of letters from Moody to Edwards. Much can also be gleaned from the archive of the I.H.R., its admission and seminar attendance registers, and the correspondence of successive secretary-librarians. When these materials are examined closely, more qualified conclusions emerge; not, in some postmodern exercise in paradox, a ‘revisionist’ account of the origins of ‘revisionism’, which would argue that the I.H.R. was an irrelevance, but a much clearer picture of what these young Irishmen actually drew from their time in what the Institute’s own historians have called the University of London’s ‘history laboratory’.Footnote 9
I
In the early 1930s the Institute, which had been founded in 1921 by the formidable historian of early Tudor England, Albert Pollard, was still housed in what were called ‘the huts’ or the ‘Tudor cottages’ in Malet Street in Bloomsbury – actually a mock Tudor, single-story set of buildings. This was before the construction of the great pseudo-Stalinist edifice of Senate House, which now dominates the skyline of Russell Square. It lay close by the north entrance of the British Museum, and a relatively short walk away from the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. The intention behind the founding of the Institute had been to create a postgraduate school of history – the first in Britain – on the German model, bringing together the resources of the various colleges of the University of London, and this was still the emphasis in the early 1930s. Beneath lay Pollard’s vision for the propagation of rigorous standards in research methods – the proper investigation and evaluation of sources – and also for the dissemination of ‘scientific’ historical research to a broader public. He had been a prime mover in the foundation of the Historical Association in 1906, which put university academics into contact with history teachers in schools, and had edited its journal, History, from 1916 until he became director of the Institute. He had also been heavily involved with the Dictionary of National Biography (D.N.B.), which not only sought to establish authoritative accounts of the lives of its subjects in the manner of ‘scientific history’ but was intended to reach a wider, educated public.Footnote 10
The Institute embodied these ideas most obviously through the provision of training in research methods, and not merely for apprentice academics, since its postgraduate students were not all destined for university posts: some became schoolteachers, while others joined the staff of the record offices then springing up across English counties. Second, and equally important, it served to bring historians together to exchange information and ideas. This function was reinforced by the Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, which appeared for the first time in 1923, and alongside scholarly articles published bibliographies, abstracts of theses, and historical news, including details of what was termed the ‘acquisition’ and ‘transmission’ of manuscripts. Co-operation in research came to be seen as an essential requirement of ‘scientific history’, as the range of available documents increased with the development of local archives alongside the great national repositories and the opening up of country house muniment rooms. It was taken for granted that no single historian could possibly investigate, let alone master, all the available sources. Great collaborative projects like the Victoria County History, or the D.N.B. illustrated the same principle. The Institute embraced both, giving house-room to the Victoria County History, and providing space in its Bulletin to print corrections and additions to the D.N.B. Pollard also became closely involved in the various attempts from 1928 onwards to set up a collaborative ‘History of Parliament’, serving on the Treasury committee appointed to investigate whether such a history was practicable, and subsequently acting as an informal adviser to the Labour M.P. Colonel Josiah Wedgwood in his personal crusade to launch the project through private donations.Footnote 11
When Moody and Edwards were admitted to the Institute it was still essentially a teaching institution. The membership comprised teaching staff and postgraduate students in the various colleges of the University of London, augmented by occasional visitors from other British universities. Seminars were the primary activity. Most began in the early evening and these were of two kinds: classes in historical method and ‘seminars’ proper, in which students would present papers for discussion or simply report research findings in a relatively unstructured way. Each seminar was supported by a small library collection – the origin of the great open access library which still survives – and served by a librarian who would fetch from the shelves appropriate reference works and primary texts when required.Footnote 12 This was quite different from the extensive seminar programme which the Institute runs today, involving staff, students and visiting academics: in the 1930s seminars were almost entirely restricted to London University students. On Thursday evenings in term-time the director would play host to a conference for lecturing staff, both members and visitors, and sometimes assistant keepers from the British Museum and Public Record Office. These occasions, described memorably by one secretary, Guy Parsloe, in his ‘Recollections at the Institute’ published in the Bulletin to mark the 50th anniversary, were preceded by a formal and not very good dinner, and were out of bounds to students.Footnote 13 The prevailing atmosphere in the Malet Street buildings was austere: there was little money to spend, and the atmosphere did not at all resemble an Oxbridge senior common room. The highlight was afternoon tea. According to Parsloe, ‘The Institute came alive in the late afternoon. Between four and five the small common room was filled up with students and teachers and the supply of tea trays (pot of tea, two slices of bread and butter and a cake, 6d.) was apt to run out’.Footnote 14
Nor could it be truly said that the Institute stood at the cutting edge of historical thinking in the early 1930s, even in England. The leading figures were scholars of Pollard’s vintage, such as the colonial and imperial historian A. P. Newton, and R. W. Seton-Watson at King’s, whose seminars on diplomatic history were attended by a handful of students.Footnote 15 There were a few livelier minds: the seventeenth-century economic historian A. V. Judges, along with a colleague at the London School of Economics, the medievalist Eileen Power, had begun to explore the ways in which the methods and insights of anthropologists could be used by historians;Footnote 16 and in 1931 Judges was joined in his Institute seminar by the socialist R. H. Tawney, who in 1926 had published his great study of the rise of economic individualism as a consequence of the Reformation, Religion and the rise of capitalism.Footnote 17 The Elizabethan specialist J. E. Neale had also moved from Manchester to University College, London, in 1928, and assisted his erstwhile supervisor Pollard in the seminar on ‘English constitutional history in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’, that is to say 1485–1603.Footnote 18 But these were exceptions. It would not be unfair to say that the intellectual climate of the Institute in 1930 was earnest rather than challenging. A glance at the titles of articles published in the Bulletin in 1930–1 aptly conveys the flavour: ‘The treasurer’s issue roll and the clerk of the treasurer, Edward I–Edward III’; ‘Manorial accounts of the priory of Canterbury, 1260–1420’; ‘The parliaments of Edward III’; ‘The marginalia of the treasurer’s receipt rolls, 1349–99 (concluded)’; and ‘The arrangement of diocesan records’. This was still redolent of the age of T. F. Tout and the Manchester school of a generation earlier, rather than the new Manchester school which was arising with the appointment in 1930 of Lewis Namier, in the wake of his transformative studies of eighteenth-century politics.Footnote 19
II
Moody arrived at the I.H.R from Queen’s University, Belfast in October 1930, having registered for a Ph.D. at University College under the supervision of Miss Eliza Jeffries Davis. Presumably he went to London at the direction of his professor in Belfast, J. E. Todd, who would have been aware of the Institute through a previous star pupil, H. A. Cronne. Sent originally to Oxford by Todd (himself an undergraduate at Balliol before the First World War), Cronne had then moved on to the Institute of his own volition.Footnote 20 Moody entered the subject of his research in his application form as ‘The Londonderry plantation and its influence on the relations between the early Stuarts and the City of London’.Footnote 21 It may have been the lack of interest in Irish history at the Institute that induced him to emphasise the relevance of his projected work to early seventeenth-century English history and to the history of London in particular. More likely, he saw the thrust of his research as studying a neglected Irish episode in order to contribute to understanding the decline and fall of Stuart kingship. At any rate, he was provided with a supervisor with little or no interest in Irish history. Eliza Jeffries Davis held the post of reader in the history and records of London, and was by training and preference drawn to the late middle ages. She had been a close collaborator of Pollard in the foundation of the Institute, serving as honorary librarian in its earliest years, and then succeeding Pollard to the editorship of History. Some glimpse of her character is provided in Parsloe’s memoir of the early days of the Institute, where he observed that in an era of short commons and forced economies, she was cheese-parer in chief: Eliza ‘was generally inclined to mistrust the seriousness of those who showed too much concern for their own material comfort’.Footnote 22
The Institute’s class registers show that Moody regularly attended C. H. Williams’s class on ‘Introduction to sources in English history, 16th and 17th centuries’, and ‘Practical introduction to work in archives’, taken by Hilary Jenkinson of the Public Record Office, though he seems to have thrown in the towel after one week of Canon Claude Jenkins on Latin palaeography.Footnote 23 He also attended two research seminars: Jeffries Davis’s on the history of London in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and Judges’s on ‘English economic history in the 17th century’, which in his second year received an injection of intellectual energy when Tawney joined as co-convenor.Footnote 24 He did not, however, attend Pollard and Neale’s Tudor seminar; indeed, in 1939, when seeking a testimonial from the Institute in support of his candidature for a fellowship at Trinity College, Dublin, he first targeted the secretary, Parsloe, and only at Parsloe’s suggestion approached Pollard, whom he admitted he had never met.Footnote 25
Edwards arrived the following year. He had completed an M.A. thesis at University College, Dublin, on ‘The history of the laws against the nonconforming churches in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, and from this produced a shorter dissertation on ‘The history of the laws against Protestant nonconformity in Ireland from the Restoration (1660) to the Declaration of Indulgence (1687)’ which earned a travelling studentship which he used to continue his studies in London.Footnote 26 His own recollection was that he had first encountered Moody in the National Library of Ireland in the summer of 1931 and
when I decided to go to London to extend my researches, I wrote to Moody seeking advice as to where to stay. He got me a room in the house where he himself was staying in Bloomsbury, and for nearly a year we had a most pleasant exchange of historical views when we met in the evenings … Moody had been engaged in research in London archives for a year before my arrival and had come to be aware of the complexities of historical research which were increasingly revealed at the seminars at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research.Footnote 27
Edwards was admitted to the Institute in November 1931, giving the same address as Moody’s, 24 Coram Street, and his subject as ‘Anglo–Irish relations in the seventeenth century’, which may have been where he intended to start but was not where he finished up, the thesis completed in 1934 bearing the title ‘The history of penal laws against Catholics in Ireland from 1534 to the Treaty of Limerick (1691)’.Footnote 28
By this time two other young Irish historians had arrived at the Institute: David Quinn, who came from Queen’s to work on ‘The connexion between Irish experience and colonial policy in the 16th and 17th centuries’ and was passed to Newton, at King’s; and Seamus Pender from Cork, who also enjoyed a travelling studentship, and was admitted (as ‘James Pender’) to study ‘early Irish history’ at King’s and sent off to talk to the fogeyish Canon Claude Jenkins, professor of ecclesiastical history, librarian at Lambeth and a canon of Canterbury.Footnote 29 Pender quickly moved on, but for some reason Edwards was also sent to Jenkins, who took Edwards as a research student even though his own interests were in the centuries preceding the seventeenth.
Why Edwards was not sent to Pollard or Neale is a mystery, since both were closer to his stated field of research and either would probably have been more use to the research he actually undertook, but within a month of registering as a member of the Institute he did meet the director. Unfortunately, the encounter was not a happy one. Institute folklore has treasured a story in which Pollard, who was not especially popular among his staff, was said to have accosted a young Irish historian lounging in the ‘British room’ one evening with his feet on the table, and had been rewarded for his prim remonstrations with a particularly fruity riposte.Footnote 30 Whatever the truth of the detail, Pollard’s private papers contain the following letter from Edwards, dated 9 December 1931:
Dear Professor Pollard,
I am writing this letter to you, to offer a sincere apology for the unfortunate occurrence in the British Room of the Institute a fortnight ago. It was to me a particular matter of regret, as I always have a strong objection to putting any difficulties in the ways of administrators of institutions. If you will allow me to add something personal, I may say, I shall ever regret that my first contact with the man whose name had attracted me to the Institute, should have been made so unpleasant by myself. I sincerely hope, sir, you will accept this in the spirit in which it is offered and that you will permit me on some future occasion to meet you under the happier conditions to which I had looked forward since I first came to London.Footnote 31 Pollard’s reply was pithy:
Dear Mr Edwards,
Forget it as far as I am concerned, but remember it for the sake of the Institute.Footnote 32
One can read too much into this unfortunate exchange, and on his side Pollard evidently did forget what had happened on the evening in question, for he sent Edwards a note of congratulation on the publication of Church and state in Tudor Ireland and wrote a generous review of the book in the Times Literary Supplement.Footnote 33 But there are other indications that Edwards’s stay in Bloomsbury was not entirely happy. Unlike Moody and Quinn, who were assiduous in attending classes and seminars (with the exception of Moody and Latin palaeography), Edwards was more erratic. He did struggle to his supervisor’s classes, but did not register for Hilary Jenkinson, and after one session as a relatively infrequent presence at A. P. Newton’s ‘Colonial history’ seminars, to which Quinn turned up almost every week, more or less abandoned them entirely in his second year.Footnote 34 And his relations with Moody, over which in retrospect both cast a rosy glow, were evidently not without stresses and strains: when the two men were back in Ireland, in May 1933, Moody wrote: ‘I trust you are very well and that you sometimes recall the days of our common life together in Bloomsbury. I pray you to forget the little distressing incidents and remember what good companions we were in all the great things.’Footnote 35
There was also a clear difference in the way in which they subsequently maintained relations with the Institute. Moody kept up a correspondence with fellow students, like S. T. Bindoff, who were still working on their theses (or, as Moody put it, were still ‘in the toils’), and wrote frequently on business matters to the secretary, Parsloe: he submitted an article for publication, promised corrections to the D.N.B., and showed a lively concern with receiving the Institute’s annual report. As a reward he found himself issued with a standing invitation to attend the director’s Thursday conferences whenever he was in London.Footnote 36 By contrast Edwards does not seem to have continued any contact, aside from donating a book to the library in 1935, and there are no letters from him in the I.H.R. archive until 1945, when he inquired of the new secretary, Taylor Milne, as to when the British Museum intended to reopen its doors to scholars following the wartime closure.Footnote 37 None the less, he did not publicly disavow his loyalty, and was happy to agree with all that Moody wanted to say in Irish Historical Studies in praise of the Institute and its work.
III
What did Moody and Edwards derive from their experience at the Institute? Inspiration it was, particularly in Moody’s case, but inspiration of a particular kind; not an intellectual discipleship, certainly. Both Moody and Edwards noted dutifully in the prefaces to their first books the conventional pious obligation to their research supervisors.Footnote 38 But it is hard to see what advice Jeffries Davis can have offered Moody beyond technical assistance with London records. Moreover, while at the outset Moody’s work was heavily English-oriented, by the time the thesis was completed, five years later, this aspect of his work had come to be overbalanced by Irish considerations. Ireland occupied at least two-thirds, and nearer three-quarters, of his text. A lengthy preliminary section provided the history of plantations before the seventeenth century, and the conclusion, after a nod in the direction of London politics, was largely given over to the nature, extent and impact of the plantation in Ulster.
The influence of Jenkins is even harder to track in Edwards’s work, other than, perhaps, in the shift in focus in Edwards’s doctoral project back to the religious basis and ecclesiastical policies of the Tudor and Stuart kingdoms in Ireland, but this probably originated with Edwards himself rather than supervisory direction. Jenkins’s occasional glances into sixteenth-century ecclesiastical history did not qualify him for inclusion in the bibliography to Church and state in Tudor Ireland,Footnote 39 while Edwards himself – unlike Cronne, who continued writing to Jenkins after their official connexion had ended – has left no trace in his supervisor’s correspondence.Footnote 40
Further than their immediate supervisors, Moody acknowledged the benefit of attending the seminar that R. H. Tawney joined as joint convenor in his second year, and included Tawney among those he thanked in the preface to The Londonderry plantation,Footnote 41 though there is no evidence that the connexion persisted beyond his time in London, and no letter to or from him can be found in Tawney’s surviving personal archive.Footnote 42 As for Edwards, the colonial history seminar presided over by Newton was of little use to his research. More relevant would have been the ‘Tudor seminar’, presided over by Pollard, whose works Edwards owned and cited,Footnote 43 but ‘the unfortunate occurrence in the British Room’ seems to have deterred him from attending. Thus the febrile warnings published in 1935 by Fr Timothy Corcoran, S.J., professor of the theory and practice of education at U.C.D., against the potentially malign influence on young Irish students of the ‘anti-Catholic’ Pollard and his secularist ‘school of historical studies at London’, were misplaced.Footnote 44 In fact, what is particularly striking in the correspondence between Moody and Edwards in the 1930s, particularly extensive on Moody’s side, is the utter absence of references to English historians, whether at the Institute or elsewhere.Footnote 45 They were helping each other with references and ideas, but beyond this mutual assistance seem to have been working in isolation.
Rather than furnishing these young research students with individual exemplars of new genres of history, whose brilliant ideas they might use and whose radical approaches they might follow, the Institute provided inspiration through its ethos and atmosphere; a particular inspiration, one might add, to those who had not encountered anything like it before. Historians produced by the Manchester School, and even by this time graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, would probably not have been so star-struck by the incarnation of the idea of ‘scientific history’. Edwards’s later observation that ‘my lecturers in University College, Dublin, had had little connexion with historical research’ was certainly harsh,Footnote 46 and in any case much less true of Moody’s undergraduate experiences at Queen’s (where F. M. Powicke had been Todd’s predecessor), but to both men the Bloomsbury environment was still something of a culture-shock. The essential function of the Institute was the training of postgraduates in the techniques of historical research, above all in the proper evaluation of archival sources. This relentless process of documentary analysis served to emphasise the vastness of the undertaking, which in turn promoted the conception of research as a grand collaborative enterprise which individuals could not pursue in isolation.
When Moody returned to Belfast as Todd’s assistant, and even more so when appointed as a lecturer in modern Irish history in 1935, he set out to recreate at Queen’s, albeit on a minor scale, the seminar system that prevailed in the Tudor cottages. He was able to write to Guy Parsloe in November 1935:
You may be interested to know that research work in the History Department here is steadily increasing. Nearly a dozen postgraduates working on Irish history, from Sir George Carew to Young Ireland. We had a successful discussion meeting last month and I aim at a similar affair at least once a term. Normally postgraduate people never meet except by accident. I hope to see something like a seminar group develop. Nearly all the students are teachers so it’s hard to gather them but they see that they can help each other and begin to see the point of getting some teaching in the technique of research. I spread the light as I learnt it at Malet Street, for all I am worth.Footnote 47
The same emphasis on collaboration was the first principle enunciated in the ‘Preface’ to the inaugural issue of Irish Historical Studies, in March 1938, which appeared over the names of both Moody and Edwards, though Moody alone had drafted this particular section:
The bulk and diversity of the materials which have now to be handled by the historical investigator are such that he cannot afford to work in isolation. Historical research has become a highly elaborate science, in the practice of which the historian needs the co-operation of his fellow-workers; and if the teaching of history is not to be divorced from the results of historical research, there must be co-operation between the historian and the teacher.Footnote 48
Here indeed was the gospel of Malet Street; more particularly, the gospel according to Pollard: history as a ‘highly elaborate science’ requiring prior training and active co-operation, and the necessary connexion between ‘the historian’ proper, that is to say the academic historian, and schoolteachers, who should have some training themselves in research techniques and appreciate their importance. The Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies, the first fruit of Moody’s Bloomsbury experiences, embodied these points in its first constitution. The general object of the society was ‘to promote in Ulster scientific study of Irish history in all its aspects, from the period when documentary evidence becomes available’. Papers delivered to the society, which were to be deposited with the secretary, had to be ‘adequately documented’; and while full membership was reserved for those who had carried out ‘actual research’; others – presumably schoolteachers and amateurs without research degrees – might be admitted as associates.Footnote 49
The Ulster Society, and the Irish Historical Society which followed soon afterwards, were thus replicating Pollard’s twin-track approach, on the one hand promoting technical excellence in academic research through the Institute, and on the other making the fruits of this research available to schoolteachers and to the public generally, something Pollard had achieved through the Historical Association and its journal History, of which he and Eliza Jeffries Davis had been successive editors, and which was still in the late 1930s being edited from a base in the Institute by C. H. Williams. As Ciaran Brady has observed, some aspects of Irish Historical Studies were modelled on History, not least the publication of ‘Historical Revisions’ (which in their ostentatious ‘objectivity’ and demythologising intent may be taken to constitute the very essence of ‘revisionism’),Footnote 50 and in an editorial two decades later Moody made much of what we would now have to call ‘outreach’ to, even perhaps ‘impact’ on, society at large.
A distinctive feature of the activity that centres round this journal is co-operation – between workers in Irish history throughout Ireland and beyond, between academic historians and teachers of history in schools, and between all these and others who, whether actively engaged in historical work or not, are devoted to Irish history and seek to promote the study of it by their interest and support.Footnote 51
Of course, there was sometimes a price to pay for the involvement of enthusiastic amateurs in the activities of the professionally-trained historian. The first issue of Irish Historical Studies had included a book review by the treasurer of the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies, the Belfast doctor, bibliophile and local historian Samuel Simms, whose particular interest was in the United Irishmen and the events of 1790s. For the second issue Simms prepared ‘A select bibliography of the United Irishmen, 1791–8’ the editing of which drove Moody to distraction. In a long letter to Edwards he gave vent to his exasperation:
I’m very tired, having been up till 3.30 A.M. this morning working on Simms’s b—y bibliography … The incompetency of Simms’s work defies description. He hasn’t even listed all the stuff in QUB Lib., and he simply doesn’t know of the BM printed cat. NO MORE SIMMS [sic]. Let these damned doctors stick to their own job.Footnote 52
A few months later Simms was at the receiving end again. ‘Thanks very much re Simms’, Moody wrote to Edwards, ‘Doesn’t he give himself away badly? His Hugh Roe O’Donnell sensation was shown by [R. M.] Henry to be complete balls, the result of Simms’s ignorance of Latin.’Footnote 53 These views obviously remained private, since Simms continued in his place as treasurer of the society and joint auditor of the journal, but he was not permitted to make any further contribution to its pages.
Moody’s brisk, and in the second instance almost gleeful, dismissal of the deficiencies of the amateur, expressed very clearly his embrace of the ethos of the I.H.R. Moreover Irish Historical Studies, which was to be the primary vehicle for the professionalisation of Irish history-writing, bore the stamp of the Institute’s Bulletin. As has been suggested with regard to the Historical Association and its journal, History, the Bulletin did not provide the sole pattern. Indeed, the editorial ‘Preface’ to the first issue of I.H.S. acknowledged this fact and named several other examples of journals for which there was no counterpart in Ireland: ‘the English Historical Review, Revue Historique or the American Historical Review’.Footnote 54 Privately Moody made the same point,Footnote 55 and in an almost interminable (and in its own way heroic) correspondence with Edwards in 1937 and 1938 over the editorial conventions to be adopted in I.H.S. he cited practice in History and the E.H.R. as well as the Bulletin.Footnote 56 The ultimate authority, however, as in January 1938 over a particularly troublesome problem concerning the use of ‘ibid.’, was usually the Bulletin.Footnote 57 The contents of the early issues of I.H.S. also resembled the Bulletin more than any other journal: articles that were narrowly focused; the occasional very specific ‘historical revisions’; bibliographical surveys; and ‘notes and news’. The list of theses completed and in progress that appeared first in September 1938 followed the Bulletin directly and after a consultation with the Institute secretary.Footnote 58 Only in the extensive reviews section did I.H.S. depart from the pattern, for by this time the Bulletin was restricting its reviewing to editions of primary sources. Moody was especially keen to associate the new journal with the Institute: he expressed himself delighted with a notice in the Bulletin announcing the first issue, and subsequently negotiated reciprocal advertisements.Footnote 59 Predictably, perhaps, when seeking a testimonial from Pollard for his application for a fellowship at Trinity in 1939, he made a point of referring to his role as co-founder and joint-editor of I.H.S. and requested the director’s imprimatur: ‘an opinion from you on the quality of that journal would be valuable to me.’Footnote 60
The appearance of Irish Historical Studies embodied most clearly the influence of the Institute of Historical Research on the two founders of the journal, and particularly on Moody. The editorial ‘Preface’, for which Moody was primarily responsible, went out of its way to credit this influence. Having cited the Bulletin, History, and the E.H.R. as exemplars of the standard to which the new journal aspired, it added:
It is true that some attention is given to Irish history in the English periodicals which have been mentioned, and that, in particular, the Institute of Historical Research has rendered good service in this field as in so many others. The editors of Irish Historical Studies take special pleasure in acknowledging their own indebtedness to that Institute, which is at once an experimental laboratory of research methods, a clearing house of historical information, and a meeting place of historians from all parts of the world.Footnote 61
The key phrases are all there: ‘laboratory of research methods’; ‘clearing house of ... information’; ‘meeting place of historians’. And Pollard’s testimonial for Moody in 1939 returned the compliment: Irish Historical Studies, he wrote, ‘seems to me to provide the most hopeful prospect for the foundation of a really scientific and impartial school of historical research in Irish history, to be built up, as it should be, by Irish scholars’.Footnote 62
IV
The young Irish historians who came to the Institute of Historical Research in the 1930s, primarily Moody and Edwards, and to a lesser extent D. B. Quinn, could not but be profoundly impressed by the experience. They found themselves in a community of researchers, staff and students, were given systematic training in the techniques of historical research, and were within easy reach of major record repositories – the British Library and the Public Record Office – which in comparison with the ravaged Public Record Office in Dublin offered a treasure-house of unexploited primary material relating to Irish history. Undoubtedly the ethos of the Institute transmitted itself to them, and they returned to Belfast and Dublin determined, especially in Moody’s case, to try and replicate in Ireland what they had known in London. Hence Moody’s determination to create at Queen’s an active community of research students, and through the two societies and its journal to connect academic history with the wider public. Even in the late 1940s Edwards was bringing forward proposals for the establishment of an Institute of Historical Research in Dublin under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Studies.Footnote 63
While the example of Pollard and his institute can be seen clearly in organisational terms, it is much harder to follow a direct intellectual influence on Moody and Edwards beyond a reinforcement of the belief in an historical method based on techniques of systematic documentary analysis. Quinn certainly acknowledged that A. P. Newton had pushed him towards research into Irish history, but the shift in focus in Moody’s Ph.D. thesis from the relations of the City of London with the crown to the effects of the Londonderry plantation on Irish society cannot have been owing to Jeffries Davis, or even R. H. Tawney, and it is equally hard to see the changing trajectory of Edwards’s work as the result of the guidance of Jenkins. Their concern for the development of Irish historical writing to the same professional standards as obtained in England was something which came from within. With few exceptions, neither their teachers nor their fellow students seem to have shown much interest in Irish history, though Pollard naturally welcomed any movement towards greater scrupulosity and professionalisation in the pursuit of historical understanding wherever it might occur.
In a similar way, the importance of writing history free of political bias was something that Moody and Edwards were just as likely to have found for themselves. Moody’s letters to Edwards during the 1930s provide ample evidence of a political outlook that was not only liberal but increasingly exasperated by events both north and south. For his part, Pollard was impressed by the level of objectivity displayed by the new generation of Irish historians, as is evident from his appreciative comments on the early numbers of Irish Historical Studies, as offering ‘the most hopeful prospect for the foundation of a really scientific and impartial school of historical research in Irish history’.Footnote 64 Surprisingly, perhaps, his review of Edwards’s Church and state in Tudor Ireland praised not only the author’s research (the result of ‘training’ in modern methods) but his ‘well-balanced presentation’. Although Edwards’s sympathies were obviously with ‘the Irish Catholic church’ against ‘the English Protestant state’, he had nonetheless succeeded in governing his feelings, exercising a ‘scientific self-restraint’.Footnote 65 But for Pollard the most important thing was the ‘scientific’ method itself: objectivity was a natural concomitant rather than a fundamental principle, and he is likely to have made so much of it in the Irish case because of an assumption that unrestrained and self-indulgent subjectivity had always been the besetting sin of Irish historians, especially Irish Catholic historians.
There was, however, something more specific in the I.H.R. experience that would have advanced what commentators on the ‘historiographical revolution’ presided over by Moody and Edwards have identified as one of its essential features: the eschewal of overt partisanship in Irish historical writing. The most important lessons that Moody and Edwards took away from Malet Street related to the importance of proper research training and of establishing an organisational framework for the pursuit of history as a collaborative enterprise. And if research is seen as necessarily collaborative it requires a common outlook among those involved, or at least the possibility of finding common ground. At the time, an active political consensus was impossible: if historians were to work together they would have to proceed in a different way, putting political commitments to one side and treating historical research as a dispassionate pursuit of the truth in an atmosphere devoid of partisanship. Thus it was not the result of ideological indoctrination at the I.H.R., however ‘scientific’ Pollard and his colleagues considered themselves to be, or however malevolently secularist their Irish Catholic critics imagined them; rather, it was a direct consequence of the ambitious attempt to replicate the structures and practices of the Institute in the troubled political context of interwar Ireland.Footnote 66
