as an unfinished motte, and there is no evidence of a
castle of the earl of Ulster in Down; the bishop was
the lord of the town. It developed the characteristics
of an English town: trade, with some evidence of use
as a port and a mint under John de Courcy; industry,
with a pottery kiln of the earlier thirteenth century;
and institutions, such as a mayor by 1260. It continued
to be strongly ecclesiastical in nature, with a friary
and other churches founded around it. How far it was
physically enclosed is unclear. In the fifteenth century
it was probably overshadowed by the trading success
of the port of Ardglass, but remained the administra-
tive head of the area. The century after 1550 treated
it harshly, with the burning (and failure to rebuild) of
the cathedral and the dissolution of other monasteries.
T. E. MCNEILL
References and Further Reading
Buchanan, R. H. and A. Wilson. Downpatrick. Irish Historic
Towns Atlas, no. 8. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1997.
McCorry, M. The Medieval Pottery Kiln at Downpatrick.
Oxford: British Archaeological Reports (British series), 2001.
McNeill, T. E. Anglo-Norman Ulster. Edinburgh: John Donald,
1980.
Wilson, A. M. Saint Patrick’s Town. A History of Downpatrick
and the Barony of Lecale.Belfast: The Isabella Press, 1995.
See alsoCourcey, John de; Ecclesiastical
Settlements; Ecclesiastical Sites; Patrick; Ulaid;
Ulster, Earldom of; Walled Towns
DOWRY
SeeMarriage
DUANAIRÍ
The earliest reference to a duanaireas an anthology of
bardic poetry, instead of the older meaning of “songster”
or “poet,” comes in a note by Find Ua Gormáin, Bishop
of Kildare from 1148 to 1160, to the scribe of the Book
of Leinster,asking for the duanaireof Flann mac Lonáin
(d. 896, or 918). Scattered texts of poems by Flann still
survive, but the anthology the bishop mentioned seems
lost. Surviving anthologies by particular poets or groups
of poets include the fifteenth-century Ua hUiginn dua-
naire, which was bound up in the collection of frag-
ments styled “the so-called Yellow Book of Lecan,” and
Trinity College MS 1363, containing poems by a certain
Seifín (no surname) and his two sons, and composed in
the looser metrical style of bruilingeachtassociated with
less-highly trained professional poets. Both collections
may have served as textbooks for the bardic schools,
since extracts from the poems found in them are quoted
in later medieval grammatical treatises used in the train-
ing of professional poets.
However, our earliest surviving duanaire is the
fourteenth-centuryBook of Magauran, praising the
rulers of a barony in northwest County Cavan, with
their wives and other relatives. Such anthologies of
especially treasured poems composed for a chief, or
his family, are the commonest class of duanaire. Since
these texts were chosen for their personal associations
rather than their aesthetic merit, they give a better
impression of the range of bardic poetry available to
medieval aristocrats, from simple ógláchas meters
used by half-educated local bards, to the elaborate and
expensive dán díreach meters of the top practitioners.
Such a collection can also show interesting historical
developments in a single chief’s career. Published aris-
tocraticduanairíinclude the Book of O'Hara, the
Leabhar Branach, the Duanaire Mhéig Uidhir, and a
number of fragmentary collections edited by James
Carney as Poems on the ButlersandPoems on the
O’Reillys. Important unpublished collections include
poems on the Roche family, in the fifteenth-century
Book of Fermoy, and poems to the seventeenth-century
Theobald Viscount Dillon and his descendants in
Royal Irish Academy MS 744 (A.v.2).
A further type of duanaireconsisted of miscella-
neous poems collected for their literary merit. One of
the earliest surviving miscellanies is the Nugent MS,
National Library G 992, produced by the Ua
Cobhthaigh school of Meath poets in the late sixteenth
century. It contains not only Ua Cobhthaigh poems,
but religious and secular works by admired authors
from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, normally
ones cited in the grammatical treatises. By the seven-
teenth century, Irish aristocrats themselves had become
more highly educated. The Nugents acquired the Ua
Cobhthaigh volume, and other nobles commissioned
similar miscellaneous anthologies for their leisure read-
ing. The largest such collection is the Book of O’Conor
Don, originally compiled in the Netherlands around
1631 for the exiled Captain Somhairle MacDonnell
from Antrim. It is these seventeenth-century miscella-
neous anthologies that have preserved for us the bulk
of the bardic poetry that survives today.
KATHARINE SIMMSReferences and Further Reading
McKenna, Lambert, ed. Aithdioghluim Dána, A Miscellany of
Irish Bardic Poetry, Historical and Religious, Including the
Historical Poems of the Duanaire in the Yellow Book of
Lecan(2 vols). London: Irish Texts Society, 1939, 1940.
McKenna, Lambert, ed. The Book of Magauran.Dublin: Dublin
Institute for Advanced Studies, 1947.
McManus, Damian. “The Irish Grammatical and Syntactical
Tracts: A Concordance of Duplicated and Identified Cita-
tions.” Ériu48 (1997): 83–102.
ÓCuív, Brian. The Irish Bardic Duanaire or Poem-Book.
Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1974.DOWNPATRICK