The Irish Manuscripts Commission continues to lead in promoting awareness of primary sources for Irish history, and this special issue embodies that tradition. Issue 53 marks the centenary of the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland (P.R.O.I.) in 1922 during the Irish Civil War. This single incident left an indelible blight upon the study of Irish history. However, records do not exist in a vacuum, and duplicates, copies and surrogates of lost documents continue to be unearthed across the globe, including those that were simply overlooked or miscatalogued, or are held by historical societies or other national archives. This issue comprises 12 essays contributed by staff working on the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (V.R.T.I.) project and contains a selection of previously unseen and unexamined documents from across Irish history. The purpose of the V.R.T.I. is to re-imagine and reconstruct through digital technologies some of the lost records destroyed by the fire.
Academics, archivists, conservators and Information Technology specialists have all contributed to the outworkings of the V.R.T.I., and it is a testament to the expertise of all their disciplines that the many inter-dependencies come together seamlessly to produce a final product. These themes resonate through the essays, which gallop across seven centuries of record keeping, noting cultural observations such as an indifference to Irish language documents by the Dublin administration, of which only five were known to have existed in the P.R.O.I. We know this and the contents of the P.R.O.I. because, shortly before its destruction, Herbert Wood produced a definitive Guide to the records deposited in the Public Record Office of Ireland (1919). There may have been a paucity of Irish language material; however, the authors highlight a key connecting theme that the P.R.O.I. records offered a window of ‘history from below’ and glimpses of ‘hidden Irelands’.
Apart from one example, the majority of documents highlighted in the essays are those that survived in repositories other than in Dublin. Each chapter is complemented by complete translations of the documents discussed. Four chapters consider items held by the National Archives U.K. (T.N.A.). Elizabeth Biggs and Paul Dryburgh examine a set of grievances about Stephen de Fulbourn, the corrupt bishop of Waterford and justiciar of Ireland, c.1284, using a medieval roll which had undergone conservation in order for lost text to become legible. Peter Crooks and Lynn Kilgallen explore the Talbot-Ormond struggle to control the Irish administration using two exchequer records: the first a petition supported by Ormond addressed to Henry VI, the second accusing the duke of Ormond of being too weak to resist the king’s Irish enemies. Sarah Hendriks’s selected membership lists from the Carpenter’s Guild, 1514–20 provide insights into non-elite experiences in Dublin. Neil Johnston chose a privy council document that relates to the general convention of 1660. Political factions often bypassed the Dublin administration and petitioned directly at Whitehall. He highlights difficulties surrounding the registers not being arranged geographically, which resulted in Irish material appearing in the miscellany of other business, but notes that privy council registers often provide the ‘how’ and ‘why’ decisions were made that were later relayed to Dublin.
Brid McGrath highlights a document from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., comprising a purported list of attendants at the funeral of Catherine Boyle’s husband, Richard Boyle, 1st earl of Cork, which under closer scrutiny proved to be the guest list for an earlier event. David Brown identifies a document in private possession, a ledger, 1797–9, from the Bank of Ireland archive, which acted as a surrogate for records relating to the Irish government’s debt. He notes a high rate (14%) of female participation amongst the bondholders. Tim Murtagh selects a letter from Edward Cooke to George Hill in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, one of many surviving records that act as surrogates for the Chief Secretary’s Office. Cooke, an under-secretary, acted as ‘spymaster’, and his letters provide both foreign and Irish intelligence about potential insurgents.
Brian Gurrin focuses on substitutes for one of the biggest casualties of the Four Courts fire: census material. He identifies a document published in William Shaw Mason’s A statistical account, or parochial survey of Ireland (Dublin, 1814–19, iii, xxxii–xxxix) which reproduces an extract recording the complete population return for the census of Longford barony, County Galway, from the reputed ‘failed’ census survey of 1813–15. Ciaran Wallace looks at the letter books held by the P.R.O.I., 1867–1922, which survived the 1922 fire by fortuitously being based in the administrative offices rather than the repository.
One of the less publicised legacy challenges is that some salvaged material survived the fire of 1922 and was boxed and preserved until a time when it could be conserved and made available. All the salved records are listed in this special issue, including those conserved before 2017 and around 370 bundles assessed for conservation after that date. The volume concludes with a photographic essay comprising nineteen colour illustrations of original records and transcriptions that survived the blaze, and an account of the techniques used to protect and conserve these indomitable records. As Pierre-Auguste Renoir memorably wrote: ‘The Pain passes but the beauty remains’.
