PARLIAMENT
and while all those for the medieval period were
destroyed in 1922, a great deal of the legislation sur-
vives in transcripts. It has been said, however, that much
of the legislation was trivial or ephemeral, intended to
deal with immediate and often personal problems.
There were exceptions, of course, and perhaps the most
famous legislation of an Irish parliament is the body of
statutes passed by the assembly summoned by Lionel
of Clarence to meet in Kilkenny in 1366.
No other corpus of legislation passed in Ireland
during the Middle Ages is accorded a status equivalent
to that of the Statutes of Kilkenny. The preamble to
the legislation identifies a special preoccupation with
the problem of “degeneracy” and one group of statutes
is concerned with regularizing relations between the
Irish and English communities. In particular, the
English are forbidden to adopt Irish language, dress,
and culture or to form alliances with the Irish through
marriage or fosterage, while the Irish are to be
excluded from appointment to certain church offices.
Other statutes deal with economic matters, such as
price and wage fixing, with the reform of central gov-
ernment, and with the relationship between church and
state. It is now generally acknowledged that while
some of this legislation was new, most can be traced
back to 1350 and some to 1297. However, in the Stat-
utes can be seen an attempt to combine a whole series
of enactments whose purpose was to deal with the
problems of the lordship.
The Statutes of Kilkenny demonstrate the extent to
which Irish parliaments and great councils had became
concerned with issues caused by the growing problems
of absenteeism and “degeneracy.” As time went on
parliamentary assemblies were increasingly used by
the Anglo-Irish as occasions to formulate appeals to
the king and send messengers to the English court. For
example, in 1385, meetings in Dublin and Kilkenny
were used to draw up arguments to convince Richard II
to personally intervene in the colony.
Parliament in the Fifteenth Century
The role of the parliament as a high court where
legislation particular to Ireland was enacted and where
petitions from the lords, gentry, and communities of
the lordship were dealt with continued in the fifteenth
century. However during this century there also
emerged an enhanced sense of parliament’s status.
This was exploited in 1460 by Richard, duke of York,
when the Drogheda parliament (in its own way
exploiting Richard’s vulnerability) issued its declara-
tion asserting Ireland’s jurisdictional identity under
the crown, and denying the validity of English statutes
unless these were accepted “by the lords spiritual and
temporal and the commons of Ireland in a great coun-
cil or parliament.” The legislation of this parliament
was truly revolutionary in nature but its real signifi-
cance has been much debated. Some have character-
ized it as an aberration, a reaction to the particular
circumstances of the time which had no historical
precedent. Another school of thought sees the decla-
ration as having a certain amount of historical justi-
fication and interprets it as an important expression
of Anglo-Irish separatism.
The support in Ireland for Yorkish pretenders to
Henry VII’s throne helped prompt the enactment of
Poynings’s Law by the parliament that met in
Drogheda in 1494–1495. Henceforth, no parliament
could be summoned to meet in Ireland without the
king’s explicit license and no legislation could be
enacted until it had been inspected and approved by
the king and his council in England. Thus the English
government gained unprecedented control over the
business of the Irish parliament and the medieval phase
of Irish parliamentary history was brought to a close.
The similarities between the parliaments of medi-
eval Ireland and England have been correctly acknowl-
edged by parliamentary historians but so too have the
differences. All English institutions were to some
extent modified and adapted to the Irish situation and
parliament was no exception. Among the distinctive
characteristics of the Irish parliament was the regular
inclusion from the late fourteenth century of the proc-
tors of the lower clergy who in England met in separate
convocations. Another respect in which the Irish par-
liament differed from its English counterpart was the
practice of financially penalizing those who were
absent from parliament when summoned. However,
the greatest difference between the two institutions
was surely that whereas in England those summoned
to parliament were expected to represent all parts of
the country, if not all sections of society, in medieval
Ireland the parliament was representative of only one
of the two nations within the country—the English
nation. In 1395 Richard II made an attempt to include
Gaelic Irish leaders within parliament. This attempt
failed and it was not until the reign of Henry VIII that
some Gaelic lords were allowed to take their place in
the ranks of the peerage. The medieval Irish parliament
therefore was an institution that represented only the
colonial section of the Irish population.
MARGARET MURPHYReferences and Further Reading
Cosgrove, Art. “Parliament and the Anglo-Irish Community: the
Declaration of 1460.” In. Parliament and Community. His-
torical Studies XIV, edited by Art Cosgrove and J.I. McGuire.
Dublin: Appletree Press, 1983.