About the Project

The Late Medieval Legal Deeds in Irish project of the Department of Modern Irish, University College Cork, draws its inspiration from and seeks to build on the work of two great scholars: the late Gearóid Mac Niocaill (1932-2004), and Kenneth W. Nicholls (School of History, UCC), who is an active participant in the LMLDI research seminar. Both seminar and project are directed by Prof. Pádraig Ó Macháin.

The MN reference system employed by the project refers to the number accorded the deeds in Prof. Mac Niocaill's unpublished doctoral dissertation. We gratefully acknowledge the permission granted us by the Mac Niocaill family to make use of that dissertation in our work. The roughly 100 surviving deeds were categorized by Mac Niocaill as follows: (1) Lists of debts and complaints; (2) Judicial decisions and settlements of disputes; (3) Wills and testaments; (4) Simple Agreements; (5) Multiple agreements; (6) Acknowledgements.

A handful of these documents survives from the fifteenth century, and also from the early seventeenth century; most, however, belong to the sixteenth century. In addition to being key sources for Irish law and custom, these documents are important sources for functional, non-literary Early Modern Irish language, and for dialectal evidence.The deeds are typically found as single items, written on what often appear to be cast-off pieces of vellum (only a small few survive on paper), or occasionally filling blank spaces in manuscripts otherwise occupied by more formal literary or historical material. This serves to underline the fact that most of these documents are notitiae, or records of agreements, rather than the actual contracts or agreements themselves.

In addition to the previously unpublished material, which is at the core of this project, revised editions of published material are also presented, Hardiman's deeds in particular.

Select bibliography:

James Hardiman, Ancient Irish deeds and writings chiefly relating to landed property from the twelfth to the seventeenth century Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 15 (Dublin 1826) 3-95 [available on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/ancientirishdeed15harduoft]

Gearóid Mac Niocaill, Notitiae as Leabhar Cheanannais 1033-1161 ([Dublin] 1961)

--------------------, 'Seven Irish documents from the Inchiquin archives', Analecta Hibernica 26 (1970) 45-69

--------------------, 'A propos du vocabulaire social irlandais du bas moyen âge', Études Celtiques 12 (1970–71) 512–46

--------------------, 'Land-transfer in sixteenth-century Thomond: the case of Domhnall Óg Ó Cearnaigh', North Munster Antiquarian Journal 17 (1975) 434-5

Kenneth Nicholls, 'Some documents on Irish law and custom in the sixteenth century', Analecta Hibernica, 26 (1970), 27–33

----------------------, 'Gaelic landownership in Tipperary in the light of the surviving Irish deeds', in William Nolan (ed.), Tipperary history and society (Dublin 1985) 92-103

----------------------, 'Irishwomen and property in the sixteenth century', in Margaret McCurtain and Mary O'Dowd (ed.), Women in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin 1991) 19-31

----------------------, Gaelic and Gaelicised Ireland in the Middle Ages (revised edition, Dublin 2003)

Pádraig Ó Macháin, 'Two documents relating to Ó Conchubhair Donn', Ériu 57 (2007) 113-19

----------------------, 'Dhá théacs dlí', in John Carey et al. (ed.), Cín Chille Cúile: texts, saints and places: essays in honour of Pádraig Ó Riain (Aberystwyth 2004) 309-15