As has always been the case in administration since at least medieval times, the usage of paper or parchment to inform and also to record directions from authority to those being directed was an essential element in government. Both as a way of recording a precise directive superior to an oral message, and also by way of verifying it as a genuine order from authority, the warrant (or some variant of it) was an essential part of the bureaucracy of most Western states. Empey has gathered in excess of six hundred warrants relating to the Wentworth and Falkland vice-royalties in Ireland and has presented them in a smartly edited volume for the Irish Manuscripts Commission. These warrants were found in Marsh’s Library, Dublin, in the Bodleian at Oxford, and in the East Riding Archives and Local Studies Service in Yorkshire.

Warrants are quite familiar to the historian of bureaucracy and statecraft, and as the editor points out, there are collections elsewhere in Ireland and Britain, most prominently in the State Papers (SP 60–63) collection at Kew. This collection is particularly useful in terms of appointments to positions in church and state. Some are representative of the more mundane aspects of royal government, such as warrant no. 543, which instructs the vice-treasurer to pay £35 to a bricklayer for building a new mint in Dublin Castle. Others, such as no. 527, appoint Ely, the lord chancellor, and Wandesford, the master of the rolls, to be head of the executive in Wentworth’s absence.

Thus, these warrants can be a useful guide to the historian eager to understand developments in governmental appointments. They are also interesting in that they point to areas that were of particular political activity at the time, such as warrant no. 269 appointing Peter Hill as sergeant at arms in preparation for the soon to be convened parliament. Particularly ominous for all subjects of the kingdom generally might well be no. 461 which was directed to the auditor of the court of exchequer to certify all ‘debts, duties, fines, amercements, homage, respite of homage, sum and sums of money’ due to the crown since Elizabeth’s reign.

Quite interesting, for example, is the light that the warrants shine on the underdeveloped topic that is crime and punishment in early modern Ireland. Warrant no. 500 part-suspended sentence of the court of castle chamber for the placing of the unidentified convict into the pillory every market day of that term on the basis that removal of his ear the previous market day had left him in danger of his life. He had been sentenced on conviction of using counterfeit begging passes in Dublin. Warrant no. 185 instructs Richard Blaney, with assistance from the local soldiery, to apprehend and prosecute those responsible for ‘divers robberies, felonies and other insolences daily committed … Monaghan, Cavan, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Armagh, and Louth’.

Perhaps some of the more interesting warrants in this selection are those that represent issues that are not as prevalent amongst government papers as has already been described. They do, however, show a side of executive decisions and directives that can illustrate life in seventeenth-century Ireland that is not always of interest to those who study governmental bureaucracy. For example, warrant no. 509 licenses a company of players to ‘use and exercise their said quality and acting of any tragedies, comedies or histories … with music, drums, and trumpets … Sabbath days, solemn feasts and time of divine service only excepted’. No. 538, in a similar fashion, relates to a rope-dancer and his wife. No. 618 licensed a butcher to ‘kill, dress and sell meats in Lent as beeves, muttons, veals, lambs, kids’ as long as he did not ‘make sale of any other meat then such as shall be wholesome, sweet and merchantable’.

Approximately 220 of the total 629 are undated (mostly between 1634–7) and there are a considerable number of persons, be they subjects of examination or apprehension, awardees, officers, or petitioners, who remain unidentified. This is unfortunate but largely acceptable. Initials were regularly used in these warrants, but were identified by the author where such initials developed into names later in the warrant, or where these are obvious from the office or with the assistance of J. L. J. Hughes’s Patentee officers or Lodge’s Liber munerum publicorum Hiberniae. This task becomes more difficult when the warrant refers to service providers, as opposed to more easily identified prominent beneficiaries, such as a warrant directing the appointment of a judge. As is usually the case with the flow of publications from the Irish Manuscripts Commission, the physical specimen of the book is lavishly impressive and matches the high standard of collating, editing, and presenting the rich source material therein contained.