Documents from the Thomond Papers at Petworth House Archive1 ...

Archivium Hibernicum
seals. The manuscripts are available for public consultation only at the
West Sussex Record Office in Chichester. 4
This article pays particular attention to four documents from the
Thomond papers at Petworth House Archive. As will be seen, they demonstrate
the utility of the collection in understanding the critical juncture of
1581–1624 when the earldom of Thomond was held by Donough O’Brien,
fourth earl. Donough, a loyalist and a principal architect of the transformation
of Thomond from a Gaelic feudal polity to a shired county, was
a scion of the ruling O’Brien (Uí Bhriain) dynasty which had renounced
its claim to kinship under Henry VIII’s so-called ‘Surrender and Regrant’
scheme in 1543. The anglicisation process in Thomond has been explained
primarily by exogenous factors such as the incorporation of market towns
and settlement of English and Dutch planters. 5 The value of the Thomond
Papers at Petworth is that the transition process which accelerated after
the death of Connor O’Brien, third earl in 1581, can be elucidated by rare
documentation issuing from both sidelined Gaelic septs and the small
clique of Gaelic magnates who adjusted to the new political realities. 6
The corpus of material that relates to the lesser Gaelic families of
Thomond is particularly deserving of publication, not least on account
of the social and economic information it contains. For example, the
presence of specialist learned families such as the Uí Mhaoilchonaire,
Mhic Bhruaideadha and Mhic Fhlannchadha is documented in various
legal papers where they appear as witnesses and local officials of the earl
of Thomond. Documents with unique references to landholding arrangements,
kinship ties and local authority are reproduced here in full.
Excerpted references from various documents are also presented.
Thomond Papers at Petworth
The Thomond papers deposited in the Petworth Archive originate from the
senior lineage of the O’Brien family (who claimed descent from high king
4 Documents in the Petworth Archive are available only by prior arrangement (two weeks in
advance) with the archivist at the West Sussex Record Office in Chichester. Lord Egremont’s
permission is needed for publication of all PHA documents
5 See, for example, Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Newcomers in the Thomond Lordship, c.1580c.1625’
in Dal gCais, xi (1993), pp 103–111. In 1606 the earl of Thomond was commended by
English officials for entertaining and receiving ‘as many English as he can any way draw
unto him, and uses them so well that many resort thither’. Rev. C.W. Russell (ed.) Calendar
of the State Papers Relating Ireland of the Reign of James I: 1606–1608, (London, 1874), p. 34
6 The issue of Gaelic magnates successfully adjusting to the increasingly fluid land market
of the 1620s and 1630s vis-à-vis lesser sept-lineages is taken up by Patrick Nugent. Nugent
labels lesser sept-lineages as ‘tradition-bound’ and characterized by communal land holding
arrangements and generally located not in the ‘domain core’ of the Shannon estuarine lands
from Ennis to Donass, but in the peripheral areas north of the domain. Patrick Nugent,
‘The interface between the Gaelic clan system of Co. Clare and the emerging centralising
English nation-state in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century’ in Irish Geography,
xl, 1 (2007), pp 79–98, pp 88, 95.
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