CONCHUBHAR Ó CRUALAOICH and KEVIN WHELAN
Cork University Press
€59
ISBN 9781782050827
Reviewed by
Michael Potterton
Michael Potterton is a Lecturer and Director of the MA in Local History in the Department of History at Maynooth University.
County Wexford has long occupied an ambiguous place in Irish historical imagination. To many, it appears as a county marked principally by the Anglo-Norman invasion, the borough towns of the south-east, the plantations of the seventeenth century and, above all, the rebellion of 1798. In such narratives, the ‘Gaelic’ often seems peripheral, residual or eclipsed. In Gaelic Wexford 1400–1660: culture, landscape, settlement, Conchubhar Ó Crualaoich and Kevin Whelan set out to overturn that assumption. Their central contention is both simple and far-reaching: for most of the period covered by written records, Wexford was lived and understood substantially through the Irish language and through Gaelic social forms. As the authors note in the preface, at least three quarters of Wexford’s recorded history was lived through Irish, yet that reality has been obscured by later Anglophone historiography. This richly produced and meticulously researched volume is an ambitious attempt to restore that lost world to view.
The scale of the undertaking is immediately evident. Running to 450 pages, lavishly illustrated and underpinned by some 4,000 endnotes and a dozen substantial appendices, this is no conventional county history. It is the product of decades of archival work, linguistic expertise, cartographic recovery, genealogical reconstruction and historical interpretation. The result is one of the most substantial regional studies to appear in Irish historiography in recent years. What makes the book distinctive is not simply that it treats Gaelic Wexford as a subject but that it treats it as the organising framework of the county’s history.
The volume is wide-ranging. It moves from environmental history and historical geography to legal culture, religion, settlement history and the aftershocks of plantation. Chapters on landscape and the historical evolution of the county establish the ecological and territorial settings within which social life developed. Others examine colonialism, law and landholding, showing Wexford as a frontier laboratory in which competing legal and political orders interacted. Still others turn to the learned classes—lawyers, physicians, poets and others. A substantial chapter on place-names draws on Ó Crualaoich’s formidable expertise in onomastics, while the inclusion of the 1608 freeholders list offers material of value to genealogists and local historians. The project itself was catalysed by the decipherment of the 1608 ‘Grand panel of the County of Wexford’, described as a kind of Rosetta Stone for reconstructing Gaelic Wexford (p. iv).
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its refusal to separate culture from landscape. Wexford emerges less as an abstract administrative county than as a lived environment of woods, estuaries, rabbit warrens, windmills, fisheries, farmlands and shifting settlement zones. The chapter on the Duffry woodlands is especially suggestive in demonstrating how ecological realities shaped political and cultural endurance. Rather than being passive backdrops, forest, marsh and upland were active historical agents: zones of refuge, resistance, resource extraction and identity. The book thus participates in broader trends in environmental and spatial history while remaining grounded in local evidence. As the authors memorably put it, place-names are ‘the rivets that attach us to our surroundings’ (p. 237).
The treatment of language is equally significant. Irish was no antiquarian relic but the medium through which social memory, legal custom, territorial naming and learned culture were transmitted. The place-name material is powerful because it reveals just how deeply embedded Irish linguistic structures remained across the county, including in areas often assumed to have been mostly or wholly Anglicised at an early date. Here the authors make an implicit methodological point: if historians ignore language evidence, they risk misunderstanding the very landscape they describe.
Historians of Gaelic Ireland have long recognised the importance of hereditary legal, medical and poetic lineages, but such groups are often studied at a national level or within better-known regions. By reconstructing their presence in Wexford, the authors demonstrate the county’s integration into wider Gaelic intellectual networks, challenging any lingering assumption that the south-east lay outside the cultural infrastructure of Gaelic Ireland. Yes, Wexford was a contested marchland between Gaelic and colonial worlds, but it was also a site of learned production and professional continuity throughout.
The genealogical dimension of the volume will ensure a readership beyond academia. Families such as the Bolgers, Breens, Dorans, Doyles, Kavanaghs, Keoghs, Kinsellas and Murphys are treated not as static surnames but as historically situated communities moving through changing legal and territorial contexts. The detailed lists and townland-level recoveries from the seventeenth century will be mined for years by local researchers. The material has broader significance too: surname geography and kinship networks offer a means of tracing social persistence through conquest, plantation and confessional change.
One of the high points of the volume is its extraordinary visual apparatus. The book is richly adorned with some 300 illustrations, including extracts from early surveys, maps, aerial photographs, antiquarian drawings, engravings and modern interpretative work. Particularly striking are the reconstruction drawings by Uto Hogerzeil, Ian Magahy, J.G. O’Donoghue (p. 79, but O’Donohoe at p. 56) and others, which offer vivid evocations of lost environments. The value of older visual material is also well demonstrated. An eighteenth-century painting preserves possibly the only known image of the fifteenth-century Enniscorthy friary (p. 93), while the identification of Hook Lighthouse on the 1530 Cotton map (p. 26) provides the earliest known depiction of this astonishing structure. Such examples highlight the role that early drawings and maps can play in the reconstruction of past landscapes. At times the treatment of images is uneven. Some captions are exemplary in their detail and contextualisation, while others provide minimal information, omitting artist, date and provenance. Some maps have been (brilliantly) redrawn, but the relationship between original and representation is sometimes unclear. Likewise, some striking reconstruction images, such as Hogerzeil’s depiction of Enniscorthy in 1785 (p. 272), are presented with little or no explanatory context. These relatively minor issues are noticeable given otherwise high editorial standards. The images also reflect the gender imbalance of the surviving record. Males predominate, appearing in a wide range of forms, from tomb sculpture and engravings to portraits of clerics, craftsmen, poets and landowners. Women are less visible, and when they appear they tend to do so fleetingly or anonymously. This is less a criticism of the authors’ choices than an observation on the nature of the evidence.
The interdisciplinary range of the volume is outstanding. The work reflects what the authors describe as a ‘bi-focal vision’, combining linguistic, onomastic and geographical expertise, and drawing together history, archaeology, architecture, genealogy, literature and environmental study. Rich quotations abound, and readers should be prepared to encounter unfamiliar vocabulary, from ‘gabbards’ and ‘marl holes’ to ‘mummers’ and ‘pills’. The prose is brisk and occasionally playful. Flashes of humour are evident in phrases such as ‘Byrned out’ (p. 154), ‘Uroscopy: taking the piss’ (p. 189) and ‘Simply the best: the Turners’ (p. 210). A similar lightness of touch permeates the visual presentation, where small figures appear playfully in the margins. The authors’ affection for Wexford is clear, at one point comparing Wexford town and Venice (p. 50).
This volume is at once an atlas, an archival compendium, an interpretive monograph, a reference work and an act of cultural recovery. Some readers may wish for a more sustained comparison with scholarship on other counties where similar processes of Gaelic endurance and colonial interaction can be observed. The authors convincingly show that Wexford was more Gaelic, more Irish-speaking and culturally more resilient than stereotypes allow, but was it unique or does the county serve as a study in how many supposedly Anglicised regions might look if examined through the same lens? That question is less a criticism than an invitation, since one of the book’s achievements is to encourage similar reassessments elsewhere.
Although the prose is generally clear and eloquent, the density of evidence and the scale of annotation can make the book demanding to read continuously (one chapter has more than 1,000 endnotes). This is probably unavoidable in a work intended to serve multiple audiences. Many readers will use it selectively, as a reference tool, a sourcebook or a guide to particular themes, rather than reading it through. That is not a failure, but it does shape how the book will function in practice. There are, inevitably in a tome of this scale, some minor anomalies and inconsistencies. These range from occasional typographical errors to small discrepancies, including a handful of spelling slips (including the first line of the preface and the last line on the back cover). These do not materially detract from the achievement of the volume, but a tighter editorial pass might have resolved them. One or two chronological inconsistencies arise (the bridge at New Ross was destroyed c. 1270 and rebuilt c. 1131 (p. 395 n16)).
Any reservations are minor beside the accomplishment on display. As the authors acknowledge, this is not the final word on Gaelic Wexford but a ‘conversation-starter’ (p. iv) and it succeeds admirably in that aim. Gaelic Wexford changes the terms of discussion. It insists that county history need not be antiquarian or parochial; in the right hands, it can become a vehicle for major historiographical revision. It reminds us that Anglicisation was neither linear nor total, and that language shift can distort retrospective understandings of the past. Once English became dominant, earlier Irish-speaking worlds could be forgotten, not because they were marginal but because they ceased to be audible.
For Wexford readers, this volume will provoke pride, debate and renewed curiosity about local places and families. For historians more broadly, it offers a methodological lesson in the value of combining archival excavation with linguistic competence and geographical knowledge. It is difficult to call to mind another recent monographic county study that achieves so much. If the standard narrative of Wexford has been one of early Anglicisation and later insurgency, Gaelic Wexford restores the long centuries in between. Monumental in research, generous in documentation and bold in interpretation, this is an important book that will shape discussion of late medieval and early modern Wexford, and of regional history in Ireland more generally, for years to come.
For a book on Wexford, one might expect the cover image to depict that county. Instead, it appears to show part of neighbouring County Carlow. This may be no accident, given Whelan’s Carlovian roots, and indeed the area shown (Clonmullen) formed part of medieval Wexford. Did he realise that the book’s headbands and tailbands are in the blue and white of another neighbour, the Déise?!
Wexford has long been served by distinguished historians such as Hore, Orpen and Colfer. To that list we may now add Ó Crualaoich and Whelan, whose work both builds upon and decisively extends these earlier foundations. The physical production of this large-format and full-colour book is remarkable and visually striking. The design and layout, by Information Graphics, deserve particular praise, allowing a vast quantity of material to be presented with clarity and elegance. Published in the centenary year of Cork University Press, the book stands as a fitting demonstration of what scholarly publishing can achieve at its best. It represents unusually good value for money given its scale, richness and quality.