PORTS
his Anglo Norman allies. It was walled in the four-
teenth century, but little is recorded of its ships or trade
before the seventeenth century.
Around 1210 William Marshal, earl of Pembroke,
established New Ross, which was to become the chief
port of the lordship of Leinster, but despite its pow-
erful lord it never managed to break the monopoly of
the royal port of Waterford. Throughout the later Mid-
dle Ages all ships entering Waterford Harbour were
by law obliged to disembark first at Waterford and,
having paid customs there, were free to proceed to
New Ross.
Ports of the South and West Coast
On the south coast, the mouth of the river Blackwater
where Youghal now stands appears to have been settled
by Vikings in the ninth century. The town’s founder
may have been Maurice fitz Gerald in the early thir-
teenth century. Youghal was walled after 1275 and
remained under Geraldine influence throughout the
medieval period. At the other end of their huge earl-
dom was the port of Dingle, which appears to have
been walled during the medieval period, but a murage
grant and decree of incorporation was only issued in
- The town was an embarkation point for the
pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, but the citi-
zens and the fitz Geralds benefited most from the
revival of the herring fisheries in the late fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries.
The port of Kinsale, County Cork developed from
a Viking trading post to being settled by the Anglo-
Normans around 1200. Its first charter dates to 1333,
and there is a murage grant of 1348. In the fifteenth
century it grew to be a prosperous port, and its ships
are recorded as trading with Bristol and with France.
However, its relatively isolated position and excellent
harbor made it attractive to pirates and freebooters in
the later Middle Ages.
The town of Galway grew around a castle built
by Richard de Burgh in the thirteenth century. The
prosperity of the families who controlled the town,
later known as the “tribes of Galway” (Athy, Blake,
Bodkin, Browne, D’Arcy, Deane, Flont, Joyce, Kirwin,
Lynch, Martin, Morris, and Skerret), is evident in the
building of St Nicholas’s church in 1320. Galway’s
loyalty to the language and traditions of England
made it increasingly isolated as the influence of the
Crown waned in the west of Ireland. By 1396 it
attained the status of a royal borough, relatively free
from the control of the de Burghs. In the same year
St Nicholas’s church was granted collegiate status,
separating it from the local Irish bishop of
Annaghadown and empowering the citizens to elect
a warden responsible for ecclesiastical affairs in the
city. Galway was destroyed by fire in 1473 and again
in 1500, but continuing prosperity enabled rebuild-
ing in stone, and pictorial maps of the early seven-
teenth century show a city of elegant buildings of
unified style.
The medieval port had links not only with England,
from where Bristol merchants leased the Corrib salmon
and eel fisheries, but also with Flanders, France, Spain,
and Portugal importing wine in exchange for cattle
hides and fish procured from local magnates in
exchange for salt and luxury goods. Wills of members
of the Blake family dated 1420 and 1468 indicate that
a barter system was in operation with numbers of hides
being owed for wine, cloth, and salt. This contrasts
with Limerick where surviving wills of the Arthur
merchants record money transactions with the local
Irish. The opening up of the Atlantic seaways in the
fifteenth century benefited Galway. Henry the Navigator
had an agent in the city, and according to a letter in
the Portuguese Archives dated 1447, he promised to
send a lion on board his next ship to Galway as he
thought the people of that city had never seen a lion!
Some of the more adventurous merchants such as
Germanus Lynch (fl. 1441-1483) sailed frequently to
England, Spain and, like an enterprising consortium
from Drogheda at the end of the fifteenth century, made
the hazardous trip to Iceland to service the developing
fishery there.
Merchants from Bristol also sailed as far as Sligo
having secured permits to bring wine, salt, and cloth
to trade with the king’s lieges there for salmon. Sligo,
like Galway, had come to prominence during the de
Burgh invasion of Connacht in the thirteenth century.
It was originally granted to Maurice fitz Gerald, ances-
tor of the earls of Kildare, who built a castle there in
1245 and founded a Dominican friary close by in 1253.
Richard de Burgh built a new castle and laid out a
town in 1310, but the town passed into the control of
the O’Conors of Sligo and remained in Irish hands
until the end of the sixteenth century.References and Further Reading
Bradley, John. “The Topography and Layout of Medieval
Drogheda.” Journal of the County Louth Archaeological and
Historical Society. 19, no. 2 (1978): 98–127.
Mac Niocaill, Gearóid. Na Buirgéisí, XII-XV aois1 vol. In 2.
Dublin: Cló Morainn, 1964.
O’ Neill, Timothy. Merchants and Mariners in Medieval Ireland.
Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1987.See alsoCork; Dublin; Limerick; Trade;
Urban Administration; Waterford; Walled
Towns