Gone Medieval - Medieval Ireland: Death & Politics

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Court records of naked, murderous monks, tavern brawls, robberies gone wrong, tragic accidents and criminal gangs reveal how the English in medieval Ireland governed and politicised death. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis meets Dr. Joanna MacGugan, whose research focuses on how the English legal system in Ireland relied on collective memory, customary law, oral histories, common fame and social networks to collectively decide what was the ‘truth’.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. For this episode, we're taking a trip across to Ireland, specifically from the middle of the 13th to the middle of the 14th centuries. Joanna McGuigan's book, Social Memory, Reputation and the Politics of Death in the Medieval Irish Lordship explores how and why the English sought to rule Ireland by harnessing intangible notions like custom, collective memory and common fame to help them define legal truths. I'm delighted Joanna's joining us to get under the skin of how the law worked as tradition began to fuse with an increasingly written law code. Welcome to God Medieval Joanna. Thank you so much. Pleasure to have

you here. It's a really interesting topic. I did my degree in law rather than history, so legal stuff is vaguely interesting to me anyway. An island is somewhere we don't get to as often as we'd like. So to get Irish law and to talk about some of the stuff we've got lined up in terms of death, is fascinating to me. It's a great combination. Yeah. So to start us off with, why was there a tension between the kind of oral traditions that had lasted for generations and the written records in Ireland?

And perhaps that's not unusual to Ireland as records became increasingly written down. Adopting literate practices, like signing contracts, archiving personal documents, those sorts of things. They involved a massive shift in mentality because oral classes. Cultures tend to prioritize social practices and collective memory, whereas illiterate or text-centered culture might value information from written records more highly. So naturally, tensions emerged as the shift unfolded. But this wasn't necessarily a negative thing, because, as I see it, it encouraged experimentation.

Ireland was not unique in this respect. The shift in mentality happened everywhere. But we see in legal records from medieval Ireland a glimpse of how it played out in local contexts. You often see historians talk about really broad patterns in literacy history, and it's this local dimension that really interested me more. I wanted to see what happened to social memory as literacy became more commonplace. And what I found was it was more of a collaborative relationship between social and literate practices. The English of Ireland recognized that Orality had strategic value in many contexts, and they continued to use it when it best suited their

needs and the growth of literacy just expanded the options available to them. In Ireland, was this continued reliance on an oral collective memory as opposed to the written law? Was that an effort to soften what was effectively colonialism by the English? Or was it more of a necessary step by arriving colonialists amongst an alien culture? It was a little bit of everything. So in short, Ireland's colonial status colored every aspect of lived experience and influenced every decision that the English of Ireland made about strategic communication. This was especially true in the marches where cultural interaction between the Irish and the English was strongest. And their choices show that they valued orality chiefly because it was more malleable and flexible

than the written record. And we see this over and over again in the sources. Experimenting with social and literate practices was one way to assert power during a really troubled period in the colony's history. In the late 13th century, and into the 14th, the English government fought wars to subdue the hostile Irish and the rebellious English, as they called them in the records, the crowns enemies. And in the same period, we see the population decline in the colony, absentee landlords, endemic violence became massive problems. And a Scottish invasion in the early 14th century just added to the chaos. And since the 1290s, Edward I had been channeling funds and resources away from the Irish colony to support his war in Scotland. So the colonial government had

very limited resources to deal with these problems. So this turbulence shaped the legal culture at the center of the book in so many ways. Violence always hovers in the background and influences the choices that they made. So for example, it led Dublin's civil civil. civic officers to record the city's ancient customs, the usages, the way things had always been done in writing for the first time. And that was in direct response to citizens' anxieties about the threats that they faced. And collectively, the sources show that there was plenty of space for oral culture to flourish, even in a tech-centered environment, civic government like Dublin's. So how does oral traditions survive in the presence of the written law when everything is

becoming written down and firmed up. As you said, oral tradition will tend to be more malleable. How does it survive against hard-written law? The English of Ireland intentionally wrote oral tradition into their written laws because they knew that the laws would be stronger if they were rooted in ancient custom, the older, the custom, the more authority they had. So they would explicitly acknowledge those roots. So for example, the authors of Dublin's laws and usages stressed that the city's customs were established in ancient times. Prince John's 1192 Charter to the city likewise states, Dubliners shall have their boundaries as they were perambulated by the oath of upright men of the city at the command of his father, Henry II, which reminds us the charter was a socially produced

text. It was the written record of Dubliners' oral negotiations with the Crown. So we see these little reminders throughout the sources. We see the purposeful integration of oral tradition and social practices into written records rather than written law undermining the oral tradition. The signs are everywhere. It's in the script for the coroner's inquest and jurors' collective memories and proof of age proceedings in the custom for authenticating wills and in the community policing practices. So unwritten customary lie didn't just survive. It actually thrived and continued to be a powerful force for law enforcement, even as literacy took root. I guess they must have to some extent accepted, though, that over time,

that malleability would be lost a little bit as even if it started off as oral custom, it becomes law, it then becomes set in stone a little bit more. It does. It becomes static. That's the big difference. But in some cases, the Dubliners, they pushed back. They didn't necessarily record everything in writing right away. Like you see in the late 15th century, the custom for authenticating wills. That was the first time it was written down. So they didn't see a need to write everything down.

They remained oral tradition, customary law for hundreds of years before they saw the need. I was going to ask how socially constructed truths, that oral tradition, differ from rules that are written down. And does it really rest in that malleability or is there more to it than that? The way I see it's socially constructed truths are authoritative because they represent historical reality from their perspective of those who lived it. They're flexible, they're imperfect, and they can be contested and negotiated. and that's exactly why it worked so well for the Lordship's criminal justice system. Memories, flaws in the Middle Ages were never seen as a problem because lived experience was regarded as truthful and accurate. It was the guarantee of certainty. So there was an authority to it there.

So, for example, in the Inquisitions into customary law on the Archbishop of Dublin's manners in the mid-13th century, justices asked jurors who investigated unnatural deaths on the Archbishop's lands and whether they infringed on the royal corners, jurisdiction. In their reports, drivers drawing from family histories, their social networks, collective memories, and shared experiences as primary sources for their oral histories of local notable deaths. Because deaths, especially violent or unexpected deaths, they served as milestones from measuring time. And if you read their oral histories, there is detailed as any that might come from researching written records. They were empowered to make deliberate choices about the collective truth that they wanted to tell. So that

That was a major strength of oral tradition. It also allowed the English of Ireland to continuously adapt customary law to respond to their needs in the present. As you said, once a custom was recorded in writing, it became much harder to reshape it to fit the community's present and future needs. It's interesting how prominent the idea of lived experience was centuries ago and then it seemed to have been lost and it's only fairly recently that the idea of lived experience as proof of something is coming back to the fore. It's interesting how we're moving back to the way things were kind of six or seven hundred years ago. Yes, and it's becoming a buzzword again, lived experience, outside of academic circles and scholarship, which is really interesting.

How do you go about reconstructing an oral history, which to some extent is necessarily lost in the written law? That's always been the challenge from medieval historians, right? Our sources are only surviving in written form, but we can find oral histories and sources that rely on social memory in collective decision-making because they're the foundation of Dubliners' decisions about which customs to record and how to record them or jurors' impressions of whether a felon deserved the hangman's noose for their crimes. We have to visualize jurors collaborating, negotiating, debating as they composed their testimony. Just like modern trial jurors sometimes have to use persuasion when they collectively work out the truth as they knew and understood

from the facts presented to them in court. So composing testimonies demanded a really keen sense of local history, and we see this whenever jurors reported the truth. They were thinking historically, even if they didn't realize they were doing the work of historians, I think it's really important as a social historian to consider the social context that produced written records. So thinking about the broader environments, for example,

mapping the locations of the Inquisitions into the Archbishop of Dublin really helped me to better grasp how the environment, informed jurors' oral histories. Most jurors reported customary law from the perspective of the Archbishop's tenants. One inquisition took place at the manor of Castle Kevin, which was located in a heavily Irish-influenced Marche region and the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains. In Castle Kevin, jurors have more Irish surnames than Inquisition jurors from the other manners.

And the tenants there lived with endemic crime and violence, constant raiding until the crown's enemies destroy the manor. So their shared experience was very different from jurors at Castle Dermit, who were members of ruling Norman families. They were just visiting. They were gathering to attend Parliament there when they took part in this Inquisition. So I just always stay mindful of the social realities that influenced people as they reported the truth, as they recorded in writing in these legal settings. What kind of challenges do you face in trying to reconstruct that oral history? I mean, I guess one of them is that what becomes written law is most often one version of an oral tradition which may vary around the country. Yes, yes.

In medieval Ireland specifically, any kind of detailed sources are relatively scarce compared to England. In 1922, an explosion rocked Dublin's four courts building and destroyed the public record office. It's one of the first engagements of the Irish Civil War. So the government's medieval manuscript collection was almost completely decimated in fire. So much of what we have left and what I worked from the most part were calendared sources that 19th century antiquarians published, and they provide minimal detail. They're just bare-bound accounts of the cases that came before the just-issure's court. Antiquarians, they recorded what they thought was most important at the time, not the whole story.

And we don't have the originals any longer to fill in those gaps. So historians using these sources have to be really creative to help fill in the gaps and supplement the calendar sources. Thinking about space and locale, material history, how that all informed live experience is one way to do this. Medieval orality is not freely accessible to us as modern history archives, oral history archives, like the Shoah Foundation, for instance. But we have to use our imaginations. We have to see how jurors' social realities and networks shape their testimonies, and the clues are there. This gives us some sense of the conversations they may have had with each other about their shared pasts, and that's sometimes the best we can hope for when the written sources only exist in calendar form.

We owe so much to 19th century antiquarians who translated and published just so much medieval material, but they did so with 19th century goggles on, didn't they? They published what they thought was important and extracted and edited it in a way that reflected probably an age of empire and all of that kind of thing. Yes. They made some odd choices. sometimes. What benefits are there in chasing down these oral histories, given the difficulty of reconstructing them? Why do it? I think reconstructing social context gives us a more authentic history. That's the short answer. It leads us to better understand everyday lives of the English of Ireland rather than the privileged lives of the colonial elites. Records from the

Justice Court especially give us far more than evidence for social control from the top down. Their records of empowered jurors whose oral histories were critical to preserving law and order throughout the lordship. The justices were itinerant justices. They depended on jurors' firsthand knowledge of the people and events in question because, as outsiders, they weren't privy to this information. So jurors lived experience. They also fueled the government's perceptions about the king's enemies, which meant they influenced the justice year's ability to govern that went far beyond their immediate communities. And that dimension distinguishes the Irish jurors from their English counterparts. They have that hostile Irish and rebellious English population to deal with.

The Irish are not hostile. That's how the sources record them. So customs was likewise so much more than just unwritten law. It was a social experience. It was the coroner's scripted dialogue, the party that gathered to ride and record Dublin's boundaries, the reading of Dubliners' wills and the noisy marketplace. These are real moments and people rehearsed and performed and lived custom. exploring how the English of Ireland experienced and adapted oral culture and response to literacy

just tells us so much more about medieval social reality than just studying the written records alone. There was one case in the book that jumped out at me because it's as dramatic as it is horrible, I think. And that was the case of William Kedner. Could you tell us what happened in that instance and what that case tells us about law in Ireland at the time? Yes, the naked mad monk is. fascinating and it's one of the rare instances where we have a lot of detail about the murder. So Brother William Kedonore was a monk who lived and worshipped in the Abbey of St. Mary's in Dublin. He had a reputation for carrying himself rightly and devoutly until 1320 when he fell sick for two

months and was reported to have gone insane. And William proved the rumors true one night. He secretly entered the Abbey's choir as his fellow monks arrived for Vespers. He stripped off all his clothes. He'd charged at the monks with a knife, and he fatally wounded two of them. The Abbey's Sacriston, Thomas the Bounder, died immediately. William's second victim, Robert of Wrath, died later that night. William was caught and taken to Dublin Castle's prison until the abbot of St. Mary came and requested that he be moved to the Abbey's own prison. So he was released, and he lived in chains at St. Mary's until he died. Dublin's bailiffs and civic coroner arrived at the Abbey the day after the murders and requested to view the victim's bodies,

but the abbot turned them away. He denied that the Abbey was within their jurisdiction. And the next day, Thomas Kent, the coroner for the county of Fingall, showed up with a group of men to view the victim's bodies instead. So this double homicide was an important piece in the ongoing rivalry between the city of Dublin and St. Mary's six years after the murders. And I don't know why they waited six years. But in 1326, Dublin's bailiff. Success. successfully sued the foreign coroner, as they call him, Thomas Kent, for viewing the bodies of the murdered monks. They appealed to both written charters and unwritten customs to define the city's territory and prove their jurisdiction over deaths on Abbeylands. And Dublin's coroners really jealously guarding their jurisdiction in at least two other cases that I've found that are very similar to this one.

And this led me to the two questions at the heart of these conflicts. So who had control over unnatural deaths? And why was this a coveted power? That's what kind of drove the first half of my book. And in this period, the colonial government was occupied with wars against the Irish. And defending the coroner's jurisdiction seemed to be one way to reinforce the city's growing independence and its power over rival authorities. So it cedes the opportunity to do that.

It was a shocking story when I read it. But, you know, it's interesting how it then leads to this dispute between, various places about who has jurisdiction where because that's where jurisdiction had traditionally lain and all that kind of thing. It was a really interesting case. What does the acquittals in murder cases that you mentioned in the book as well on the basis of the reputation of the deceased tell us about what was going on? It seemed like quite often if the murdered person was a criminal, then it was deemed not to be a crime because it actually benefited the community to have this person gone. Yes, that's the crux of it. The victim's reputation

mattered for two reasons. One, if local jurors confirmed the victim was Irish and there was no evidence that their family possessed royal charter that gave them access to English law, then the consequences for the killer would be much less harsh than if the victim was English. And two, if the victim was known to be one of the king's Irish or English enemies, their deaths were not only welcomed, but they were also rewarded. But with most homicides, the killer's reputation mattered more than the victims. If a person killed out of self-defense, but was otherwise a respectable citizen, jurors would usually acquit them. If the killer was a common criminal who persistently endangered the community or harbored other dangerous criminals, then the jurors would send them to get to the gallows. It all

depended on the truth that they presented in court. But what I found most interesting was that they had the power to manipulate the facts to their advantage. So they might claim an English homicide victim was Irish. For example, in order to protect a well-connected member of their community. In this period, the justice was achieved when the court's sentences aligned with the community's expectations. Social harmony, public safety were definitely priorities, but these cases also tell us that everyday people had more influence over criminal justice than a top-down approach to history might convey. And that's a central message of my book, because it's all about who controls the story. It was the people who lived and worked alongside both the killers and the victims,

the neighbours who knew every feud they were involved in, they were the most trusted sources for the justices decisions, and this was their superpower. Their social memories and lived experience influenced government to agree that I think doesn't get recognised enough in the historiography. Yeah, I thought that was really interesting because it's almost like a different definition of justice to what we would expect today.

We expect all of that kind of reputation to some extent to be stripped out of criminal proceedings, and it doesn't matter who you are, you get justice in a kind of impartial, disconnected way, whereas in this period it's clear that the idea of justice is wrapped up in a whole pile of social considerations around whether this person is good for the community as well. Yes, it's very different the way we see justice today, a jury by an impartial jury of strangers who purposely are divorced from the people in the events in question. Yeah, maybe leave people to think which one they think is right and which one they think

wrong. Did forms of words, which crop up in the book as well quite a lot, did they fuse together the written and oral traditions to create something that was stronger than the sum of those two parts? So the forms of words are an oral form of law, but laid out almost in a written tradition. So it kind of brings both of those elements together. Did that strengthen the idea of a form of words. Yes, that's spot on, actually. That's a really great way to express one of the book's central themes. That's the essence that spoken language still held a great deal of power in this period when the English of Ireland were actively working out the best way to balance social and literate practices. And again, this was happening all over medieval Europe, but the local

dimension here is really fascinating. The laws that modeled direct speech helped to bridge the gap between oral tradition and written laws during this in-between period. So the authors of Dublin's laws and usages, they recognize the power of scripted speech to aid good government and promote social order and civility. So for example, they provided a script for the coroner and jury to follow during inquests, and this brought order and organization to the proceedings. One of the more interesting examples is the script for a citizen who finds a dead body in his home. It was meant for the male head of household to use when addressing the neighbors he assembled as witnesses. And the goal was to protect his reputation and establish a collective truth before the coroner arrives. Let's establish what

happened, get the story straight, and then the coroner would take it from there. Again, that seems slightly at odds with what we would expect today to get the whole community together and go, right, how are we going to explain this to the police before they arrive? Exactly. I thought that was so weird. It's just not what you do. But is what they did. And another clause after that stresses the importance of avoiding abusive language towards the neighbors that he has assembled. So stressing that there has to be order, it has to be civility, that it has to be cooperation. And this attention to spoken language shows that Dubliners actively thought about oral culture's place in their increasingly literate often could accomplish goals that written records alone could not.

And did public oath taking, and you cover things in the book like compagation and oath helping and a wager of law, did they demonstrate the power that oral tradition retained over and above written record? I would say that by the late medieval period, there were so many contexts when social practices just made more strategic sense. And they were held in such high esteem. It didn't make sense to simply abandon them, which is why civic leaders intentionally preserved them in the laws they wrote. A person's social network was usually the only source to consult when a person's reputation was in question. This information could not be found in written records. In Limerick,

in Dublin and Waterford, public confirmation through oath-taking of a citizen's upstanding reputation was enough to quit them of homicide. So the persistence of social practices like oath-taking sent a message that law and order depended on community policing and cooperative relationships more than literate practices. So this does point to the triumph of oral tradition in many contexts. On the other hand, Ellen's social network might step in to secure royal pardon in exchange for money and a promise for his future good behavior. And in these cases, we see the written record would overrule

his local ill fame and his reputation. So situations like that speak to a more fluid relationship between oral tradition and then the written record. Sometimes one had the advantage, sometimes the other, and sometimes they appeared to be on equal footing. So sorting out this evolving relationship, it really produces a straightforward story.

So my goal was to tease out and highlight some of the nuances in this relationship. And I hope I've achieved that. I think the book was really interesting because I guess we have this idea that the Anglo-Normans go over there and they just smash everything that they find and they impose themselves directly, our law is now your law. But that clearly wasn't happening in Ireland, whether because it wouldn't work, whether because they never had the control of Ireland, they needed to do that. But then they find a way to meld the two together and you get this kind of slowly moving seesaw where the written record

begins to overtake the oral tradition, but the oral tradition is very much still there, and in some instances, it's still senior to any kind of written record. It's still there. It's still respected. But you do see a break with the arrival of the Anglo-Normans. So, for instance, the acquisitions, when they talk about customary law, they're talking about custom as it was practiced since the earliest Anglo-Norman bishops. So whether that pre-existed, whether the customs actually pre-existed, the Anglo-Norman bishops was newly established when they arrived. it's impossible to tell.

But when they talk about ancient custom, they do mean Anglo-Norman in most cases. But it is still its generations. And in England at this time, we've got, as you mentioned, Edward I, the first in the 1290s and the early 14th century, is very much codifying English law. So he's turning everything into statute

that is focused and centred on Parliament, and that is the only font of law for the whole of his kingdom. But that doesn't stretch to Ireland. Ireland bucks against that trend and retains its own individuality in its own oral tradition beyond what Edward is trying to achieve. It does, but you do see that in England as well because you see that the Coal Warranto or proceedings fizzled out

when customary law was held to be legitimate if you could go back so many generations, so many years, and similar things happening in Ireland, similar, not the same. That's been absolutely fascinating. It's been great to get back to Ireland, and it's been great to talk about some legal stuff, which I find really, really interesting. So thank you for joining us, Joanna.

It's been great. Thank you, Matt. It's been lovely. I never thought I would land in legal history, but here we are. It's been interesting. Joanna's book, Social Memory, Reputation and the Politics of Death in the Medieval Irish Lordship is out now if you'd like to get into these stories and issues even further. There are a new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and to tell all of your. friends and family that you've gone medieval. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.