performance was scarcely worthy of the magnitude of his conceptions, Irish archæology owes him a debt which has scarcely been sufficiently acknowledged. For although he was one of those men who are debarred either by an exaggerated fastidiousness or by constitutional indolence from doing justice to their capacity, he knew how to stimulate others to activity. It is interesting to recall the fact, honourable alike to the author who designed and the legislature which encouraged a scheme of research much in front of its age, that Harris was endowed by the Irish Parliament in 1755 with a pension to aid and assist him in his historical researches. Moreover a petition from him praying assistance for a projected history of Ireland was approved by a committee of the House of Commons, which reported in favour of the publication of the materials he had accumulated, and was willing to devote a sum of 2,2601. to that object-perhaps the earliest instance in the Three Kingdoms of state endowment of historical research. Yet although the history of the county Down was intended to be the first of a series of County Histories, the scope and plan of which were very deliberately formulated, and notwithstanding that an association known as the Physico-Historical Society was actually formed for the purpose of editing and publishing a complete set of County Histories, only a very few of the works thus designed ever saw the light. To Charles Smith, the energetic Secretary of the Society just mentioned, who may well be termed the pioneer of systematic local history in this country, we owe the admirable Histories of the Counties of Cork, Kerry, and Waterford, which, with all the limitations and defects of their design, are and will ever remain of the utmost value, not only as authentic pictures of those districts at the time when Smith wrote, but as preserving for us much traditional history which but for him must long ago have perished.

It is true indeed that the scheme of which Harris and

Smith were the principal supporters was not itself original, and that a project of a very similar kind had been conceived nearly three quarters of a century earlier. Connaught is scarcely the province which we should expect to find in the van in such inquiries. Yet it is to Galway and to a Galway writer that we owe the earliest known endeavours, if not towards a County History, at any rate towards a detailed description of a considerable section of an Irish County. That quaint but attractive blend of fact and fancy, history and romance, accurate topography and fabled story, Roderic O'Flaherty's 'Chorographical Description of West (H-Iar) Connaught,' was written as early as 1684, and is one of the few results of an intended undertaking designed to illustrate Sir William Petty's 'Down Survey' by a series of descriptive treatises. Besides O'Flaherty's work, however, only one other, the 'Description of the County of Westmeath,' has ever been separately produced, though a few of them survive in manuscript in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.

These considerable and indeed ambitious programmes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not followed, as might have been expected, by any serious endeavour in the same direction. One side indeed of the work has been executed in a solid, yet scarcely satisfactory manner in the series of Statistical and Agricultural Surveys of the various counties of Ireland which were undertaken exactly a century ago under the auspices of the Royal Dublin Society. But the volumes of this series, though careful and often excellent as a record of economic facts, are, with few exceptions, sadly deficient on the side of history and archæology; and although the design was very systematically pursued through nearly a generation, from 1801 to 1832, as many as eight counties remained unnoticed when the last completed volume was issued. Since the date of these Surveys no really consider

able systematic attempt has been undertaken in the sphere of Irish local history.

The contributions of the nineteenth century to Irish County History have not been unimportant; but they have been occasional and spasmodic. We have had such sumptuous and elaborate works as Mr. Evelyn Shirley's History of the County Monaghan '; such memorials of archæological industry and antiquarian zeal as D'Alton's History of the County Dublin'; and we have had histories of varying merit of sundry other Counties, such as those of Carlow and Waterford, Limerick and Clare. But with, perhaps, the exception of Mr. Hore's exhaustive History of the County of Wexford' now in course of publication, and of the learned 'History of the County of Dublin' which Mr. Elrington Ball has recently undertaken, there has been as yet no serious attempt to utilise the immense stores of information which, with the growth of systematic research, have become available in recent years for the illustration of local history. It has been reserved for the twentieth century to give effect to the ideals which O'Flaherty in the seventeenth and Harris and Smith in the eighteenth, with miserably inadequate resources, vainly strove to realise.

It is primarily with the object of calling attention to the inadequacy of the notice hitherto bestowed upon the local and social history of modern Ireland in the general histories of the country that the papers in this volume have been written, and that the narratives which are here reprinted have been collected together. Mr. Lecky, indeed, in the Irish chapters of his chief work, has dealt more fully than other writers have done with these topics, and has emphasised and illustrated their importance to a great extent. But no writer has hitherto provided us with anything in the nature of a detailed survey of this side of Irish history for a period earlier than the eighteenth century; and the lack of it is especially to be lamented in relation to the eventful

chronicle of seventeenth-century Ireland. It is a favourite fashion with historians, though one of doubtful wisdom, to take some great landmark in the story of the period or the people under their review, and to label it as the point from which modern history begins. But, if such a practice can ever be justified, it is true to say of the seventeenth century that with it the history of Ireland as we know it to-day must start. Not merely is it from that point and from that only that the materials for a detailed analysis of the course of events are forthcoming, but it is from that period that we must date the original of the framework or anatomy of the social and political organisation of Ireland as we now know it. All the problems that Ireland presents, social and economic, religious and political, date from that period. And the problems present themselves in much the same aspects. In the reign of Elizabeth the great battle for supremacy between English and Irish ideas had been fought to a finish, which for at least three centuries was to be accepted as decisive. The tenure of land upon the basis of the feudal law of England, the supremacy of the reformed faith in the relations of the state to religion, the model of a dependent Parliament drawn in the main from the English elements in Irish society-all these are features which were to characterise Ireland for centuries, and which had not characterised her in anything like the same degree before the accession of James I. This volume has nothing to do with any such vexed questions; nor are those elements of Irish history into which questions of religion or politics are so easily and, indeed, so inevitably imported the matters with which this book is concerned. But the fact that these great and far-reaching changes in the constitutional and administrative structure of Ireland synchronise with the opening of the seventeenth century gives to the non-contentious aspects of the period a special interest and attraction, and justifies a greater degree of attention than has yet been

bestowed upon the social condition of the country at the time.

The editorial paragraphs prefixed to the descriptions sufficiently explain both the authorship of each and the sources to which I have been indebted for information and assistance. But I must not omit to repeat here the expression of my particular obligation to Mr. Charles Hughes, the editor, and to Messrs. Sherratt and Hughes, the publishers of 'Shakespeare's Europe,' for permission to utilise the portions of the Fourth Part of Fynes Moryson's 'Itinerary,' first printed in that work. In the same connection my thanks are due to the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who have allowed me to print from the original manuscript some portions of the 'Itinerary,' not included in 'Shakespeare's Europe,' which appear to me to have special relevance to the topics with which this volume is chiefly concerned. Vol. I. of the publications of the Chetham Society is no longer copyright. But the Irish portions of Sir William Brereton's "Travels in Holland, the United Provinces, England, Scotland, and Ireland,' have not been utilised without the courteous acquiescence of the Secretary of the Society. In the same way, although the translation of 'Bodley's Visit to Lecale' by the late Bishop Reeves was published as far back as 1854, I have not felt warranted in making use of it without the concurrence of the present conductor of the periodical in which it appeared. The frequent references in the notes indicate the extent of my indebtedness to the 'Ulster Journal of Archæology,' and my sense of the great value of its volumes to all who are interested in Irish historical topography.

For permission to use the map of Ireland in the middle of the Sixteenth Century,' which forms Plate XXX. in Dr. Lane Poole's 'Historical Atlas of Modern Europe,' I have to thank the Delegates of the Clarendon Press. This map, which is reproduced here mainly for the purpose of