Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

Fitzwilliam Accounts, 1560-65 by A. K. LongfieldReview by: D. B. QuinnIrish Historical Studies, Vol. 15, No. 59 (Mar., 1967), pp. 313-314Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30004972 .

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REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 313

collections in private hands, examined for the commission, will be calendared in a similar way, especially as this volume provides such an admirable model. It may thus, eventually, be possible to write more meaningfully about the fortunes of the Old English gentry than has hitherto been possible. The value of this collection for legal, biographical, topographical and place-name research need scarcely be stressed.

D. B. QUINN

FITZWILLIAM ACCOUNTS, 1560-65. Edited by A. K. Longfield (Mrs. H. G. Leask). Pp. xii, 139. Dublin: Stationery Office for the Irish Manuscripts Commission. i96o.

THEim tenure of the offices of vice-treasurer and treasurer at wars in Ireland by Sir William Fitzwilliam from 1559 to 1571 was an unusually long one which, it so happens, is also unusually well-documented. Part of the documentation is the present volume of accounts, which must originally have been Fitzwilliam's own property and not an official record, and which in some manner ended in the possession of the Annesley family at Castlewellan. Mrs. Leask has published it in full and this is an admirable precedent for future documents of this type which the Irish Manuscripts Commission might well take.

Procedures laid down before Elizabeth's reign for the oversight of the Irish accounts were complex. The vice-treasurer's accounts of the internal revenue were supposed to be checked by the auditor general, passed by commissioners for accounts in Dublin and then certified to England to be rechecked by the English exchequer before being finally cleared. The treasurer at war's accounts, made up of the surplus on the Irish revenue applied to military affairs and the money contributed by the English exchequer for the same purpose, went through, in theory, a parallel course. These manoeuvres were theoretically carried out each year, but in practice only once every two or more years, and sometimes they were repeated when an office-holder finally went out of office and his whole financial activity was again reassessed. In practice many documents were produced under these procedures, and this is fortunate, since otherwise the chance of so much surviving would have been very much less. The vice-treasurer's audited accounts do not seem to have got beyond the Irish exchequer (they were there in 1655, as Ir. Rec. Comm., Rep., I, 329 shows), though it is not certain that the treasurer at war's accounts were retained in Dublin. The final version of the latter went to the English exchequer where there is a partial series preserved. The officers themselves kept their voucher copies of audited accounts and also a considerable volume of interim summaries of receipts and payments. Fitzwilliam's main personal collection, formerly at Milton and now in the Northamptonshire Record Office (Anal. Hib., no. 4, pp. 288-301), is very comprehensive, and it may be that the Annesley volume represents financial documents discarded by Fitzwilliam at some later stage in his Irish career. The only document now in official custody is Fitzwilliam's account as treasurer at war, 1569-73

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314 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

(P.R.O., Declared Accounts, Audit Office, A.O.i/284 (I072), but declarations of his account for the whole period 1559-73, in respect of both offices he held and as finally audited in Ireland, are among the Fitzwilliam Papers (Anal. Hib., no. 4, PP. 299-300). (Fitzwilliam con- tinued to administer both offices after he became lord deputy in 1571 until the new vice-treasurer, Sir Edward Fitton, arrived in 1573.) The two formally completed documents in the present volume are the particulars of the vice-treasurer's account for Easter i558-Michael- mas 1559 (pp. 1-39), and the audited account as treasurer at war 24 May I560-31 December I562 (pp. 54-66, with draft pp. 48-54), the first giving a most valuable conspectus of the internal revenue of Ireland at the opening of Elizabeth's reign, and the latter illustrating the scope of 'a full pay' on the military establishment. Both of these are vouchers returned to the official after audit. The remaining documents are best described as situation reports with trial balances, subsidiary to later auditing processes. Receipts and issues, undifferentiated between the two offices, are on pp. o8-17: subsidiary documents on the vice-treasurer's account are on pp. 44-8, 91-3; while the estimate of the treasurer at war's charges, 1560-4, is a copy of that sent to Sir William Cecil (pp. 72-80), and other partial estimates and summaries, 1560-5, are on pp. 40-4, 67-71, 8I-9o, 94-102. If they are to be of use for a close study of the financial system, they must be taken together with the Fitz- william Papers and the P.R.O. account: for topographical and geo- graphical study they are of considerable value on their own, with interesting sidelights on military and political events.

Mrs Leask has not wholly explained the financial relevance of the individual items, and the contemporary table of contents (pp. xi-xii) is not always fully explanatory. But the texts are given carefully and with full indexes of persons and places. '1578' (p. I, line 27) is probably a misprint for '1558', and there are a few other reservations about the precise form of words in the manuscript, though 'Sir O Surilliman Bore' (p. 92) may indeed be what is written for 'Sir [Owen] O Sullivan Bere'.

D. B. QUINN

THE ELIZABETHANS AND THE IRISH. By David Beers Quinn. Pp. ix, 204. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press (for Folger Shakespeare Library). 1966. $5.oo.

GAELIC Ireland aroused the curiosity of many of the Englishmen who were brought to the country by the sixteenth-century wars and by the extension of English administration to outlying parts of the island. Their observations provide an extraordinary amount of information about Irish life; but the information is given from the point of view of a horrified, but fascinated, outsider who often misunderstood the manners and customs he described. Professor Quinn has drawn on a remarkable number of sources to present his picture of Irish society as seen by Elizabethans. In breadth and variety it goes far beyond E. M. Hinton's Ireland through

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