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Authors: Tim Robinson
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of Charles I, Sir Stephen Fox granted leases of the islands of Aran to John and Richard Fitzpatrick, at £500 per annum; and afterwards made them abatements in the rent, for losses sustained on account of the frequent landing of the enemy’s privateers on those islands, and committing depredations there. In A.D . 1713, Sir Stephen, in consideration of £ 8200, conveyed the islands to Patrick French of Monivea and Edmund Fitzpatrick, of Aran, one moiety to the former, and the other to the latter, their heirs and assigns, for ever. Patrick French was trustee for Simon Digby, Lord Bishop of Elphin, whose moiety was granted, by lease for ever, to Edmond Fitzpatrick, at £ 280 per annum. On 15th February, 1744, Rickard Fitzpatrick, in consideration of £ 2050, released his moiety of the three islands to Robert French, in trust for Robert Digby of Landenstown, his heirs and assigns, for ever.
Identification of the various places, persons and times mentioned in this skeletal history will add some flesh and much blood to it, even if the resonant title “Seneschal of Ibrickan” may lose some of its spectral glamour. First, the surname Fitzpatrick: this is a pseudo-Norman anglicization of the Irish Mac Giolla Phádraic , son of the devotee of Patrick, and the ancient sept of that name was particularly associated with Ossory, in what is now County Laois. Fitzpatricks were prominent in Galway in the seventeenth century, and Hardiman’s History of Galway lists several of that name among the sheriffs and mayors of the city. Nevertheless the above implies that the Aran Fitzpatricks derive not from Galway but from Clare, where in 1642 it appears that a Richard Fitzpatrick was seneschal of Ibrickan and receiver for the Earl of Thomond. (Thomond, from Tuadh-Mhumhain, north Munster, included County Clare, of which Ibrickan was a barony situatedon the coast a little south of Inis Oírr. The Earl of Thomond would have owned most of Ibrickan, and the intermediary between him and his tenants would have been his seneschal or steward and receiver of rents.) And this fact “appears” out of the fog of slaughter , for in 1642 there was civil war in England, and Ireland was in rebellion. The Catholic gentlemen who had taken up arms against the King’s Dublin government in 1641 had claimed to be protecting him and themselves against the ferociously anti-Catholic Parliament he was struggling with in England. By October 1642 Parliament had gone to war with Charles I, and had decided upon the final subjection of Ireland; the “Confederate Catholics” had met in Kilkenny to concert the rebellion, but were themselves divided between those who were ready to treat with the King’s forces in Ireland and those who cared nothing for King or Parliament but only for the Catholic cause. Barnaby, the Sixth Earl of Thomond, was a descendant of the O’Briens who had ruled Munster for centuries before the imposition of the English feudal system from which his title derived its legitimacy. But in the native hierarchy of the O’Briens he was not the mightiest, and in the rip-tides of rebellion he had to handle the ship of his own state very carefully, for, according to a contemporary account,
… the Brians in the county of Clare (not withstandinge the crubbing of the earle of Tomond to the contrary) observing the cause of comotion in the whole Kingdome to be one, and the oathe sworn by the Irish now in armies to be just and lawfull, thought it a blemish in their honors not to be conformable therto in defence of religion, Kinge and Kingdome joining hands together, whither Tomond would or not, took all the forts and castles that belonged to Protestants or puritans in all the countie …
It was Barnaby’s ancestor the Fourth Earl, loyal to his upbringing in Elizabeth’s court, who had brought in English settlers to his estates, creating a lasting fear among his Catholic neighbours of a Protestant plantation, at their expense, on the Ulster model. Some of
Identification of the various places, persons and times mentioned in this skeletal history will add some flesh and much blood to it, even if the resonant title “Seneschal of Ibrickan” may lose some of its spectral glamour. First, the surname Fitzpatrick: this is a pseudo-Norman anglicization of the Irish Mac Giolla Phádraic , son of the devotee of Patrick, and the ancient sept of that name was particularly associated with Ossory, in what is now County Laois. Fitzpatricks were prominent in Galway in the seventeenth century, and Hardiman’s History of Galway lists several of that name among the sheriffs and mayors of the city. Nevertheless the above implies that the Aran Fitzpatricks derive not from Galway but from Clare, where in 1642 it appears that a Richard Fitzpatrick was seneschal of Ibrickan and receiver for the Earl of Thomond. (Thomond, from Tuadh-Mhumhain, north Munster, included County Clare, of which Ibrickan was a barony situatedon the coast a little south of Inis Oírr. The Earl of Thomond would have owned most of Ibrickan, and the intermediary between him and his tenants would have been his seneschal or steward and receiver of rents.) And this fact “appears” out of the fog of slaughter , for in 1642 there was civil war in England, and Ireland was in rebellion. The Catholic gentlemen who had taken up arms against the King’s Dublin government in 1641 had claimed to be protecting him and themselves against the ferociously anti-Catholic Parliament he was struggling with in England. By October 1642 Parliament had gone to war with Charles I, and had decided upon the final subjection of Ireland; the “Confederate Catholics” had met in Kilkenny to concert the rebellion, but were themselves divided between those who were ready to treat with the King’s forces in Ireland and those who cared nothing for King or Parliament but only for the Catholic cause. Barnaby, the Sixth Earl of Thomond, was a descendant of the O’Briens who had ruled Munster for centuries before the imposition of the English feudal system from which his title derived its legitimacy. But in the native hierarchy of the O’Briens he was not the mightiest, and in the rip-tides of rebellion he had to handle the ship of his own state very carefully, for, according to a contemporary account,
… the Brians in the county of Clare (not withstandinge the crubbing of the earle of Tomond to the contrary) observing the cause of comotion in the whole Kingdome to be one, and the oathe sworn by the Irish now in armies to be just and lawfull, thought it a blemish in their honors not to be conformable therto in defence of religion, Kinge and Kingdome joining hands together, whither Tomond would or not, took all the forts and castles that belonged to Protestants or puritans in all the countie …
It was Barnaby’s ancestor the Fourth Earl, loyal to his upbringing in Elizabeth’s court, who had brought in English settlers to his estates, creating a lasting fear among his Catholic neighbours of a Protestant plantation, at their expense, on the Ulster model. Some of
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