Byrne's Dictionary of Irish Local History (28 page)

guilds, religious
. Organisations of lay men and women established by royal charter in the middle ages to promote the spiritual welfare of their members. Also known as sodalities or confraternities, the guilds were governed by a master and two wardens and structured like trade guilds. The chief function of a religious guild was to maintain a
chantry
(or endowment) for the celebration of mass for deceased members. The chantry was supported by bequests, endowments and the income accruing from land investments. Unlike their English counterparts which were abolished in 1547, Irish religious guilds survived the Reformation, remained almost completely within the Catholic fold and continued to support their chantry chapels in Anglican parish churches into the eighteenth century. Catholic confraternities or sodalities began to appear again from the middle of the nineteenth century following the establishment of the Archconfraternity of the Holy Family in Limerick in 1844 by the Dutchman Henry Belletable and the preaching Redemptorists. Within decades there were confraternities throughout the island. Individual confraternities or ‘divisions' were divided into sections of up to 20 men. They were led by a secretary and advised by a chaplain. On the feast of Corpus Christi they paraded through towns behind banners dedicated to their patron saint. (Buckley and Anderson,
Brotherhoods
; Clark and Refaussé,
Directory
; Ronan, ‘Religious customs', pp. 225–247, 364–385.)

gules
. In heraldry, denotes the colour red.

gunmoney
. Money coined from melted-down cannon, ordnance, bells and copper and brass objects by order of James II to ameliorate the desperate scarcity of specie during the Williamite War.

habeas corpus,
writ of
. Originally a writ by which a court summoned before it a person or persons whose presence was essential for the conduct of its affairs. Later it was used to secure the release of a person improperly incarcerated or the production in court of a detained person. Essentially it acted as a constraint upon the exercise of a capricious arbitrary power. Although
habeas corpus
was legislated for in England no such legislation was enacted for Ireland and this was an issue on which the eighteenth-century
‘patriot' party
campaigned. In 1782 they achieved their goal with the passing of Sir Samuel Bradstreet's Liberty of the Subject Act (22 Geo. III, c. 11). However, the chief governor and privy council retained the power to suspend the act by proclamation during an invasion or rebellion and in times of crisis the right of
habeas corpus
was regularly suspended and detention without trial or internment permitted.

hagbush
. An arquebus or a portable firearm that rested on a support or tripod when in use.

ha-ha
. An eighteenth-century landscape feature, a ha-ha was a sunken ditch which kept livestock from the environs of the big house and, unlike a wall, fence or hedge, ensured an uninterrupted view of the demesne.

halfendale
. A half part.

halbert
. A weapon that is both a spear and an axe. A pike.

Hanmer, Meredith
(1543–1604). An English clergyman, historian and author who came to Ireland in 1591 and served successively as archdeacon of Ross, treasurer of Waterford cathedral, vicar choral at Christ Church and chancellor of St Canice's, Kilkenny. During his twelve-year stint in Ireland Hanmer researched Irish history and consulted contemporary and earlier writers and chronicles, the fruit of which was his
Chronicle of Ireland
. This annalistic compilation commences with the arrival of the Partholonians and includes an Irish-English vocabulary. It was published by Sir James Ware in 1633. (
Ancient Irish histories
, i, pp. 1–410.)

hanaper, clerk of the
. In full, the clerk of the crown and the hanaper, he was an official in
chancery
who received the payments for sealing writs and issued patents and commissions. The hanaper itself was originally a hamper into which writs were thrown by the clerk of the hanaper.

hank
. Of linen yarn, 3,600 yards.

harp
. Officially known as ‘coin of the harp', a coinage struck for Ireland in 1534 in less than sterling silver, so called because it bore on the reverse a crowned harp, the arms of the kingdom of Ireland. (Dolley, ‘Irish coinage', pp. 408–410.)

hastiuell
. Probably a fast-growing variety of barley.

hauberk
. A chain-mail tunic.

Hawarden kite
. A kite-flying exercise initiated in December 1885 in a letter to the press by Gladstone's son, Herbert, suggesting that Gladstone was in favour of the introduction of home rule in Ireland.

hayboote, hedgeboote
. The right without payment to procure wood from the manorial woods for the purpose of fence-making or enclosing a plot of land.

hayward
. Manorial official who oversaw the making of hay and harvesting.

headland
. Land left unploughed at the end of a field to enable the plough to be turned.

heads of bills
.
See
statute.

Health, General (or Central) Board of
. An unsalaried body established by the lord lieutenant in 1820 to advise on the institution of local boards of health and to supervise and examine their expenditure. During periods of distress in the 1820s the board confined its reporting to government on areas in the neighbourhood of Dublin. It metamorphosed into the Cholera Board in 1832 (2 & 3 Will. IV, c. 9) in response to the cholera epidemic of that year and played a significant role in shaping government action. The board co-ordinated the collection and distribution of information concerning precautionary and preventive measures and kept in touch with conditions on the ground by insisting on detailed reports from the localities. It instituted local boards of health and appointed health officers, set up dispensaries and small hospitals, provided grants and employed additional doctors where necessary. The fact that the board had no rate-levying capacity and the inordinate demands for medical relief precipitated by the Great Famine led to the piecemeal transfer of its responsibilities to the
poor law unions
and (from 1872) to the Local Government Board.
See
Poor Law Commission.

hearth-lobby house
. A house whose entrance lies directly adjacent to the hearth which is separated from the entrance (lobby) by a jamb, screen wall or partition. Hearth-lobby houses have centrally-located hearths and are typically found in eastern areas.
See
jamb, direct-entry house. (Danaher, ‘Hearth and chimney, pp. 91–104; O'Neill,
Life
, p. 13.)

hearth tax
. A tax of two shillings on every hearth, fireplace or chimney imposed at the Restoration to defray the loss to the crown incurred by the extinction of the
feudal incidents
. Schedules of householders liable for the tax were compiled. Known as hearth money rolls, they do not constitute a complete listing of householders in any given area for the Hearth Tax Act of 1662 (14 & 15 Chas. II, c. 17) exempted persons living on alms or unable to work or those whose houses were too wretched to be assessed. The tax was abolished by the Irish parliament in 1793 at the prompting of Henry Grattan. The hearth money rolls contain a parish by parish record of those who paid the tax and how much they paid. Only a few have survived. John Grenham's
Tracing your Irish Ancestors
(Dublin, 1992) provides a county by county listing of repositories and journals which contain details of the hearth money rolls. (Carleton,
Heads
.)

Hearts of Steel
.
See
Steelboys

hedgeboote
.
See
hayboote.

hedge school
. Fee-paying Catholic schools operating in hedgerows, ditches, sod cabins, barns and church sacristies which emerged (though prohibited) during the penal years of the eighteenth century and persisted in great numbers into the 1820s when they were providing a rudimentary education in the ‘three Rs' to an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 children. With the establishment of the national system of education in 1831 their number diminished dramatically. The appendix to the second report of the royal commission on Irish education contains highly-localised detail on a vast number of hedge schools throughout the country.
(Second report of the commissioners of Irish education inquiry,
HC 1826–7 (12) XII. 1.)

helier
. A tiler.

herald
. A royal messenger and proclaimer. To the herald was entrusted the duties of arranging and ordering precedence in the matter of processions, funerals and state ceremonies. He also regulated the use of arms and recorded the pedigrees of those entitled to bear them. Commissions were issued to the heralds to ascertain, inspect and record the arms in use in a particular county and the records of these visitations contain important genealogical and heraldic detail. Heraldic visitations were undertaken in several eastern counties in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland to control the use of heraldic arms along the lines established by the English College of Arms. Under the supervision of
Ulster king of arms
(created in 1552) the visitations were intended to establish what arms were in use and by what right they were borne. The visitation records are preserved in the Genealogical Office (since 1943 the successor to Ulster) and on microfilm in the National Library.
See
funeral entries.

hereditament
. Inheritance. Corporeal hereditaments consist of the material or physical inheritance such as land, buildings or minerals. Incorporeal hereditaments comprise certain rights or
easements
such as light, right of way, support or water.

heriot
. A payment owed to the lord upon the death of a freehold tenant, usually the best living animal of the deceased or a cash payment.
See
mortuary, relief.

Hiberno-Romanesque
. A late nineteenth-century architectural style which emerged in reaction to neo-gothicism, the predominant ecclesiastical style of that century. Characterised by round-headed windows and doorways modelled on earlier monastic churches, Hiberno-Romanesque was a simpler and less pretentious form than the ornate Gothic and was felt to be a more appropriate style for Ireland. It was a fashion that gave expression to the upsurge in national feeling and, from an ecclesiastical perspective, emphasised continuity from the early Celtic church.

high commission, court of
. An ecclesiastical court comprising clerical and lay members and equipped with special powers to compel adherence to the Reformation, the court of high commission was established in October 1564 at the behest of Elizabeth who made religious conformity a key objective of the Irish administration. Its introduction followed the issuing of a number of regional ecclesiastical commissions to the midlands, the south, the west and Armagh to enforce the religious settlement. The commissioners discovered that the settlement was being ignored throughout the Pale. Catholic priests were receiving support and shelter from the gentry. Political unrest, the heavy involvement of Anglican bishops in central and local administration, the hostility of the increasingly recusant Catholic Old English and the reluctance of Elizabeth to sanction draconian measures to ensure conformity rendered the work of the commission largely ineffective. Fines were rarely paid and where external conformity was achieved, there were not enough preachers to effect a thorough conversion. In all, five commissions were issued between 1561 and 1635 but only the last was in any way effective. Conducted by Wentworth, the 1635 court established uniformity within the Church of Ireland by expelling Presbyterian ministers and successfully recovered alienated church property.

high court of justice
. (1652). The court established to try those suspected of complicity in atrocities committed during the 1641 Confederate Rebellion. Evidence gathered to build a case against suspects is contained in the detailed and highly-localised collection of documents known as the
depositions of 1641
.