Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition
Of the Lawes of Irelande (Author: Sir John Davies)

SIR JOHN DAVIES, LAWES OF IRELANDE (1609).

This tract was not ascribed to a particular author either in the Huntington Library's catalogue or in Analecta Hibernica VIII (1938) which contains an inventory of the Irish material in Huntington's Ellesmere collection. When it was first published in extenso in the Irish Jurist (1995-6), I established that the author was Sir John Davies, the Attorney-General of Ireland, and dated it to 1609/10. This attribution was straightforward because numerous sentences and passages recurred in Davies' important book A Discovery of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued or brought under obedience of the Crowne of England untill the beginninge of His Maiesties happie reigne (London, 1612). Since then I have come across a letter from Davies, who was in London dealing with proposals for a plantation of Ulster, written to Robert Cecil, the earl of Salisbury, dated 21 January 1609. This note, now deposited amongst the Irish State Papers, is clearly an original covering letter and as such establishes the context in which the tract was written. The conception of the document had its origins in a discussion between Cecil and Davies about the policy of surrender and regrant in Ireland whereby Irish lords surrendered territories held under native tenure to the crown and received them back in the form of royal grants as feudatories of the crown. This policy had been pursued on and off in Ireland since 1541 and had recently gathered finishing momentum with the completion of the Elizabethan conquest. There was also a specific context which brought the policy to Cecil's attention because in December 1608 and January 1609 Brian Kelly, who had served with the English army in the Netherlands, was at court petitioning to surrender and have a regrant of his late father's lands in Connacht. On the day prior to this letter of Davies' to Cecil, the English Privy Council headed by Cecil had written to Sir Arthur Chichester, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, to have Kelly's claim investigated and settled.1 As a result Sir John Davies took the opportunity to write a note on Irish law, which included the matter of tenures, to Cecil. It was an opportunity to ingratiate himself with Cecil, the Lord Treasurer of England, and to show off his knowledge about a relatively obscure subject. He further sought to ingratiate himself by making him a gift of books—works by continental authors on commercial and civil law and also the medieval writings of Giraldus Cambrensis on Ireland which had recently been put into print by the antiquary William Camden.2 In this last regard Davies made the claim that Cecil, with Giraldus Cambrensis and his own note on Irish laws to hand, would know everything he needed to know about Ireland. This is quite a claim on Davies's part. Not only does he to reckon his own importance as an analyst but he also implies that little had changed since the first attempt at an English conquest of Ireland in the late twelfth century! It is not known what impact this tract had on Cecil. At any rate it did not survive amongst his papers but amongst those of Thomas Egerton, Baron Ellesmere and Lord Keeper of England. Either the tract was passed onto the latter by Cecil or else Davies sent him a copy of the 'Laws' as well in a similar attempt at ingratiation.

Some passages in the Lawes of Ireland were incorporated anonymously into the Irish section of William Camden's Britain (London, 1610).3 This interest on Camden's part may have been an encouragement for Davies to publish on his own account. In this way Lawes of Ireland may be considered a prototype for the Discovery, though the information is used to support a different argument on the second occasion. As it stands, the Lawes of Ireland has two related themes—the development of the common law in Ireland (and by proxy the constitutional status of the kingdom of Ireland, especially its parliament, in relation to England) and the peculiar nature of the legal system used by the Gaelic inhabitants of Ireland. This second aspect is of great value because of what it tells us about the workings of Gaelic society. Much of this had been gleaned by Davies from his judgements as the chief Irish law officer and from his travels round Ireland on various judicial commissions to establish English law in Irish areas following the defeat of the great lords in the Nine Years War.4 The tract also shows how Davies' views on the subject developed between the cases of gavelkind and tanistry of 1606 and 1608 respectively and his book of 1612.5 Ellesmere 7042 deserves wider circulation because Davies was the most important commentator on Gaelic society in his day and had the influence to translate his views into policy. It also serves in a general fashion to justify the arguments advanced by Hans S. Pawlisch's award-winning Sir John Davies and the conquest of Ireland: a study in legal imperialism (Cambridge, 1985).

Hiram Morgan, University College, Cork, 2005.