lordship with the chief governor, but then (like its
English counterpart, the court of King’s Bench) came
to be stationary in a single place (Dublin). When Rich-
ard II visited Ireland in 1395 it became for a while his
own itinerant court, and thereafter it retained the name
of King’s Bench. One other royal court emerged in
Ireland in the last quarter of the fifteenth century: the
Irish court of chancery. Like its English counterpart
(which had emerged almost a century earlier), this was
a court of equity with only a single judge (the Irish
chancellor), and it heard business on the basis of bills
submitted to it.
The communal courts of the lordship were local
courts serving specific areas of the lordship. Like their
English counterparts, the running of these courts was
shared by local officials who presided over their pro-
ceedings, and by local landowners with an obligation
to attend the court on a regular basis as one of its
“suitors” and who were responsible for making judg-
ments in them. They also shared with their English
counterparts the practice of meeting only on an occa-
sional basis and for fixed intervals of time. At the upper
level of these communal courts were the county courts,
presided over by sheriffs, which served the individual
counties of the lordship, whether in royal hands or part
of the greater liberties. These possessed a mainly civil
jurisdiction, but were also the venue for all outlawries.
At the more local level were the courts of the individual
cantreds (later baronies), which corresponded to the
English hundred, or wapentake, courts. These seem to
have possessed a minor civil jurisdiction, but it was
also at these courts that the local sheriff held twice
each year the sheriff’s tourn, to enquire into various
misdemeanours and more serious criminal offences
committed locally. Towns within the lordship also gen-
erally had their own courts, often described as hundred
courts, and which came under the control of the town
authorities. They normally met rather more often than
other types of communal court and were the main courts
for the enforcement of town custom. They also claimed
an exclusive jurisdiction over civil litigation in the town.
The lordship possessed various different types of
private court. In the earliest days of the lordship the
great private courts of the lords of Leinster and Meath
enjoyed a virtual independence. Between 1200 and
1208 these courts came under attack from the Crown,
and the outcome was that henceforth major criminal
pleas in these liberties were reserved to the lord of
Ireland; that it became possible to appeal from the
liberty courts to the king; and that lands belonging to
the church within the liberties henceforward fell
directly under royal jurisdiction. By the middle of the
thirteenth century the major liberties possessed what
seem to have been their own versions of the Dublin
Bench, with a wide civil jurisdiction and run by justices
appointed by the lord of the liberty. They also pos-
sessed private county courts that functioned like their
royal counterparts, but whose profits went to the lord
of the liberty. There also existed in the feudalized parts
of Ireland manorial courts, with a civil and disciplinary
jurisdiction roughly equivalent to that of their English
counterparts.
Separate from this variegated network of lay courts
were the courts run by the Catholic Church in Ireland
as part of its European network of ecclesiastical
courts at a diocesan and provincial level. The law
enforced and applied in these courts was the Church’s
canon law, but with some local modifications. They
possessed jurisdiction over matrimonial and testa-
mentary matters, over various types of moral offense,
and over the internal running of the Church, except
where the lay courts managed to make good their
claim to determine certain matters, such as those
involving property rights.
PAUL BRANDReferences and Further Reading
Brand, Paul. “The Birth and Development of a Colonial Judi-
ciary: The Judges of the Lordship of Ireland, 1210–1377.”
InExplorations in Law and History: Irish Legal History
Discourses, 1988–1994, edited by W. N. Osborough, 1–48.
Blackrock, County Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995.
Hand, Geoffrey J. English Law in Ireland, 1290–1324. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
See alsoBrehon Law; Canon Law; Common Law;
Law Texts; March LawCOYNE AND LIVERY
As it is usually understood, coyne and livery was the
single most important tax in later medieval Ireland. It
comprised the key element in the system of tributes and
exactions used in the native lordships whereby the lords
and chieftains required their subjects to give free entertain-
ment (food, lodging, etc.) to their servants and followers.
Often used as a tax to meet the maintenance of a lord’s
army, the extent to which it could be imposed determined
the military strength of a lordship; conversely, a strong
military lord could impose it as often as he liked, once
he had the troops to enforce it. Oppression and racketeer-
ing were the bedfellows of coyne and livery.
It is important to avoid giving too precise a defini-
tion of the tax. The term “coyne and livery” is a hybrid
one, used by English writers to describe a range of
taxes in use in the Gaelic and gaelicized lordships, all
of which revolved around the taking of free entertain-
ment in some form or other. For instance, the cuddy
(coid oidche) was specifically the taking of a night’s
entertainment, but was sometimes dubbed coyne and
livery by English observers. Similarly, the bishops inCOURTS