Byrne's Dictionary of Irish Local History (7 page)

bettimore
. (Ir.,
beiteáil
) The paring and burning of sods in marginal areas to increase the fertility of the soil. This practice resulted in temporary improvements in yield but the land quickly returned to infertility.
See
paring and burning.

bill
.
See
civil bill.

birnie, byrnie
. An early version of the chain mail shirt, forerunner to the hauberk.

Birrell's Act
(1909).
See
Irish Land Act (1909).

Births, Deaths and Marriages, Registry of
. Although non-Catholic marriages were registered by the state from 1845, official registration of all births, deaths and marriages for the entire population began in 1864 with the establishment of the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages (26 & 27 Vict., c. 11). Births, deaths and marriages were registered in the dispensary district of the
poor law union
in which they occurred, the registrar usually being the medical officer for the district. A superintendent registrar gathered in the returns for the entire union and these were collated and indexed at the General Register Office in Dublin. Only the master indexes are available for public scrutiny at the General Register Office. A small payment is made for a copy of the full entry. (Kinealy,
Tracing
, pp. 13–16.)

black oath
. An oath imposed on all Presbyterians in Ulster in 1639 by Lord Deputy Wentworth requiring them to abjure the
Solemn League and Covenant
and swear allegiance to Charles I.

Black Rod
. Chief usher of the
house of lords
, so called after the ebony rod carried as symbol of his office. Black Rod's function was to keep order within the house, a role not dissimilar to that performed by Sergeant-at-Arms in the commons. At the opening of
parliament
he was dispatched (as he is today at Westminster) to summon the members of the commons to the house of lords for the opening address.

blackrent
. Rent or tribute illegally extorted most commonly by Gaelic chiefs on English marchers in return for protection or agreement to desist from plunder.

blazon
. 1: In heraldry, a shield 2: A verbal description of heraldic arms.

Blood's Conspiracy
(1663). The plot conceived by disgruntled Protestants (including at least seven members of parliament) to seize Dublin Castle and ignite an uprising throughout the country. The source of their disaffection lay in the
Act of Settlement
(1662) which provided for the restoration to their former estates of Catholics innocent of complicity in the 1641 rebellion. Alarmed at the numbers being restored by the
court of claims
and fearing the loss of their own newly-acquired estates, the conspirators, led by Thomas Blood, assembled in Dublin in March 1663. The administration appears to have been forewarned of the plan which fizzled out when an innkeeper's wife became suspicious of the gathering in Thomas Street. A small number were executed and the parliamentarians were expelled from the house of commons. Blood's later lack of success as an assassin (the Duke of Ormond, 1670) and as a jewel thief (the crown jewels, 1671) appear not to have damaged him in the eyes of the crown. The pardon and grant of land he received from Charles II fuelled suspicions that he had been a spy for many years.

blimp
. An airship. The term derives from its designation as type B-limp dirigible. Blimps were employed along Ireland's east coast from 1918 as anti-submarine escorts for cross-channel shipping.

blue books
. The official British
parliamentary papers
which include house of commons sessional papers, select committee reports and royal commissions, so called because so many of them, particularly the larger ones, were bound in dark blue covers. Many, in fact, were bound in buff.

bluesay
. A light, delicate woollen or serge cloth. Also known as ‘say'.

bó-aire.
(Ir., cow nobleman?) 1: A prosperous farmer. 2: The head of a
creaght
.

Board of Works
(1831). The Board of Works was constituted out of an eighteenth century institution, ‘the Barrack Board and Board of Works', whose military division was responsible for quartering the army in Ireland. It also had a civil division which maintained Dublin Castle, the Viceregal Lodge and the
Four Courts
. In the early years of the nineteenth century public money under the supervision of the
lord lieutenant
was voted for the improvement of inland navigation, fisheries and public works such as roads or bridges and to provide employment during periods of hardship.
See
Inland Navigation, Directors General of
. From 1831 the new Board of Works, staffed with a national inspectorate of engineers, retained these functions but was also given the remit to oversee relief works, drainage, and to maintain public buildings, ports and harbours. The board supplied the majority of members and influenced the conclusions of many committees and commissions established to consider the state's role in infrastructural development. In turn it was charged with the regulation of land use and granted the power to levy those who benefited from drainage schemes. By 1845 it had spent over £1 million in grants and loans. During the famine the board supervised massive public works schemes, employing in excess of 600,000 people daily on road construction and drainage in the winter of 1846–7. These works were shut down when soup kitchens were opened to relieve the distressed who, in any case, were often too debilitated to work on the roads. Under the 1870
Landlord and Tenant Act
the Board of Works was mandated a role in Gladstone's tenant-purchase scheme, providing loans of up to two-thirds of the price of the holding conditional upon the payment over 35 years of the sale price plus an annuity of 5%. In 1881 the tenant-purchase scheme was transferred to the
Irish Land Commission
. Late in the nineteenth century the Board of Works loaned money for the construction of farm buildings and labourers' cottages and for land improvement. It arbitrated between landlords and the railway companies over the acquisition of land for tracks, was responsible for the maintenance of national monuments and constructed harbours and piers. The Board of Works was re-styled the Office of Public Works after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. (Griffith,
The Irish board
; Lohan,
Guide to the archives
; McParland,
Public architecture
.)

bobbin
. Tightly-bound twists of straw arranged in a decorative row along the ridge of a thatched roof.

bog
. Irish bogs are broadly classified as either raised bogs or blanket bogs. Raised bogs developed in lowland areas and are raised above the level of the surrounding countryside. They were formed between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago as a result of fen growth on the periphery of post-glacial lakes, through silting and the accumulated deposition of debris from water-living plants. As the fen expanded the lakes gradually shrank and a layer of peat was built up. Sphagnum moss, which thrives on the small amounts of nutrients in peaty soils and rainwater, colonised the surface of the peat in hummocks thus creating a raised effect. Blanket bogs, which appeared about 5,000 years ago largely in upland areas in the west, are believed to have formed because of a deterioration in climate, the clearance of woods and agricultural activity. The impact of natural forces and human intervention resulted in leaching and the creation of a layer of iron pan just below the soil surface. This impeded drainage and the resultant waterlogging encouraged an invasion by rushes, the creation of peat and, later, colonisation by sphagnum moss. Continued waterlogging triggered the spread of the bog so that, in time, wide areas of land were blanketed in a layer of peat. (Mitchell,
The Shell guide
, pp. 122–29.)

bonaght
.
See buannacht
.

bona notabilia.
In testamentary matters, the case of a person who died possessing goods to the value of £5 or more in a second diocese. In such cases jurisdiction lay not with the diocesan
consistorial court
but with the
prerogative court
of the archbishop of Armagh.

bondsmen
. Unfree tenants such as villeins, serfs or
betaghs
.

bonnyclabber
. (Ir.,
bainne clabair
) Sour, curdled milk which constituted part of the native Irish diet. It was made by adding rennet from the stomach of a calf to milk, causing it to coagulate.

booley
. (Ir.,
buaile
, a temporary milking place) An enclosure on the summer pasture lands where cattle were milked. Also known as a shieling or bothy. Booley, bothy or shieling huts were constructed to accommodate the herdsmen and women who accompanied the herds. Booleying (transhumance) was a feature of the
rundale
system.

boon work
. Unpaid manorial labour service such as ploughing or harvesting owed to the lord by tenants.

bord alexander
. A kind of striped silk fabric used for altar cloths and vestments.

bordure
. In heraldry, a border round an
escutcheon
. A bordure is a mark of cadency (descent of a younger or cadet branch from the main family line) or, anciently, a mark of bastardy.

borers
. Narrow flint flakes, chipped on one or both edges and brought to a sharp point, probably serving to make stitch-holes in leather.

borough
. A town conferred with corporation status by a royal charter which also guaranteed the right to self-government. Prior to 1603 they numbered 55 in Ireland. James I enfranchised a further 46 to further the programme of plantation and to secure a Protestant parliamentary majority. Between them Charles I and Charles II added a further 16. The importance of the boroughs lay not in the civic duties they performed – which beyond providing the senior officials in the quarter-sessions, small debt and misdemeanour courts were negligible – but in their role in the election of members of parliament. From the seventeenth century 117 boroughs sent 234 MPs to an Irish house of commons composed of 300 members, thereby giving rise to the comment that the Irish legislature was a ‘borough parliament'.

Many boroughs were tiny insignificant places, with few or no inhabitants. Harristown, Co. Kildare, for example, had no houses. Others were large and heavily populated but, as McCracken observes, size was irrelevant. It was the nature of the franchise that mattered. A large town like Belfast whose parliamentary representation was determined solely by a corporation of about one dozen burgesses was just as rotten as Harristown. The elective procedure by which members were sent to parliament varied considerably. In the eight
county boroughs
the electorate included the members of the corporation, the (often non-resident) freemen and the (largely fictitious) forty-shilling freeholders. In the 12 ‘
potwalloping' boroughs
the franchise was vested in £5 householders (including Catholics from 1793) who had resided in the constituency for six months (one year from 1782). Tightly controlled by their manorial lord, a tiny electorate of Protestant freeholders and resident householders sent 12 members to parliament from six
manor boroughs
. Each of the remaining 91 boroughs, Londonderry excepted, was controlled by a patron or patrons. The 55 corporation boroughs contained no freemen and the electorate comprised 12 or 13 burgesses. In the 36 freeman boroughs the freemen as well as the members of the corporation voted.

Catholics were excluded from borough membership by law from 1691 and the franchise remained exclusively Protestant until 1793. Protestant dissenters retained the franchise and could sit in parliament but were denied membership of the boroughs between 1704 and 1780 by the provisions of the
Test Ac
t. The
Act of Union
severely curbed the elective power of the boroughs, only 33 of which survived with that right intact. By drastically altering the weighting of Irish representation from the boroughs to the counties, the union also paved the way for the Catholic vote to become effective. Nevertheless, the corporations remained exclusively Anglican until the reforms of 1840.
See
franchise, freeman, Municipal Corporations Reform Act (1840), Newtown Act, rotten borough.

bote
. Literally, compensation, bote was the right of a tenant to procure timber from the manorial woods for a variety of purposes. It was often incorporated into leases.
See
cartbote, estovers, haybote, houbote and ploughbote.

bothach
. (Ir.,
both
, a hut) A
cottier
. The Gaelic equivalent of a
villein
or unfree tenant.

bothy
. (Ir.,
both
, a hut) A rough dwelling or hut on the summer pasture lands, also known as a booley-hut.

‘bottle riot'
. Orange resentment at prohibitions on 12 July demonstrations and the October dressing of King William's statue lay behind the hissing and abuse visited on Arthur Wellesley, the viceroy, when he attended a performance of
She Stoops to Conquer
in the New Theatre Royal in Dublin in December 1822. During the performance a number of objects, including a bottle, were thrown at the viceregal box inducing Wellesley to believe that a conspiracy to murder him was afoot. The miscreants were apprehended and arraigned on a conspiracy charge rather than for riotous behaviour but the Orange grand jury of Dublin threw it out. Wellesley clearly overreacted to the ‘bottle riot' but the episode effectively ended Williamite demonstrations in Dublin. (O'Ferrall,
Catholic emancipation
, pp. 13–15.)

bouchot
. (Fr.) A method of mussel culture consisting of a series of upright poles in the sea on which mussel spat settles and matures.

boulder burial
. A burial site consisting of a large boulder supported by a number of smaller stones. A shallow pit containing cremated remains lies beneath.

boundary cross
. A map symbol used by early cartographers to denote the junction of three properties.