County office and county society in Dublin and Meath, c.1399 - c.1513

Abstract

This thesis consists of a study of office-holding across two of the 'four obedient shires' of the Dublin hinterland. To attempt to compensate for the paucity of information on any individual office-holder or office-holding family, it was decided to undertake as broad a study as possible, taking in a range of offices over a long period. As a result the study embraces a very large number of individuals. Having identified those who held office, it was necessary to try and establish their status, both individually and as a group. Individual officers were examined to see if their connections, lands, titles, or other marks of social status converged to give a consistent picture of the ranks of society that took part in office, and at what levels. Evidence for the restriction of particular offices to certain ranks of society, should it appear, would then provide a means of determining the status of the many obscure individuals who appear in the records of the fifteenth-century lordship of Ireland. Participation in office at certain ranks is used, despite some reservations, as a marker of gentry status by most historians of the English gentry; if it should prove possible, the ability to determine status, even roughly, by office-holding would be especially valuable in Ireland, where many of the other means of identifying the local elite (such as tax returns) are extremely scarce or non-existent, but records for office-holding are comparatively well-preserved. To this end, a great deal of information, much of it in itself trivial, was gathered on the men who held office, in the hope of transforming lists of sheriffs and lists of subserjeants into a coherent narrative of social class.