WATER CHARGES in Ireland have a long and colourful history dating back to the 13th century, according to documents being published online for the first time today.
Critics of Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan will have to concede his approach to water charges is positively enlightened compared to the approach adopted by Maurice FitzGerald, chief governor of Ireland back in 1244.
In a letter dated April 29th of that year, FitzGerald ordered the sheriff to summon a jury of 12 men, who would consider “where water can be best and most conveniently taken from its course and conducted to the king’s city of Dublin”. The project “for the improvement of the city” was crucially to be carried out at “the cost of the citizens”.
The governor told the sheriff that anyone who opposed the scheme should “be suppressed by force”. Those who went a step further and “resist” the water scheme, presumably the anti-household charge protesters of their day, were “to be arrested and held until further order”.
The letter is one of 20,000 government documents from the Middle Ages being made available online following 40 years of work by historians at Trinity College Dublin.
The documents re-create some of the archives destroyed when the Public Record Office in Dublin went up in flames in the Civil War in 1922.
The Public Records Office, a victim of the shelling of the Four Courts, was home to the rolls of the medieval chancery. The chancery was the secretariat of the British administration in Ireland and was established shortly after the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169.
Letters it issued in the king’s name, which carried the great seal of Ireland, were copied by medieval chancery clerks on to long rolls of parchment known as “chancery rolls”. All of the chancery rolls were destroyed in the 1922 fire.
The historians at Trinity have tracked down alternative sources for the documents in collections in Ireland, England and the US, with the national archives in Britain proving a particularly fruitful source.
Launched today, Circle: A Calendar of Irish Chancery Letters, c.1244–1509 ( chancery.tcd.ie) is a free website which provides English copies of the original Latin documents.
“This digitisation resource involving four decades of research by Trinity historians is a triumph of historical detective work that will revolutionise our understanding of Irish medieval history,” said Dr Patrick Prendergast, provost of Trinity.
“The material will also prove invaluable for Irish families nationally and internationally interested in tracing their roots back to the Middle Ages.”