Asset-stripping fire sales, negotiations for wine, the price of premium pigs and the fate of Jews in Cork – it’s all part of the immense archive of the Blarney Castle Estate, where no deal or correspondence was too small to go unmentioned
WHAT, IT MIGHT well be asked, does the building of Blarney Castle in the 15th century have to do with the price of pigs? The question is prompted by the juxtaposition of more than 4,000 items that make up the Blarney Castle Estate archive, now donated to the Cork City and County Archive Centre by Sir Charles Colthurst of Blarney.
Within this collection, a list giving details of the descent of the Colthurst baronets from the MacCarthy lords of Muskerry lies adjacent to 20th-century dealings with the Royal Dublin Society on the subject of Large Whites, a breed of pig. A litter book for the Muskerry Foxhounds from 1922 is boxed with details of the transport of 15 dozen bottles of Château Haut-Breton (totalling £14.12 shillings sterling) from France to Blarney in 1878.
Such domestic notes are a hint of both the archive’s lighter moments and of its comprehensive scope. An enormous two-way traffic of correspondence with banks, solicitors, agents, tenants and military authorities in Cork, Dublin and London over many centuries makes up the body of the collection. There are deeds and affidavits, leases, disentailments, commissions of enquiry (not least into teachers at the national school in Ballyvourney in 1878), 17th- and 18th-century trusts, bank drafts and bonds, cash books, stock lists and forestry accounts among examples of every transaction that would have concerned a landed family.
While an initial survey of papers at Blarney Castle House was carried out by historian Dr Alicia St Leger after the death of Sir Richard la Touche Colthurst in 2003, it was not until information consultant Margaret Lantry was engaged to catalogue his library that the contents and extent of the family archive were discovered in scattered batches from attic to cellar. “Even in the window-seats, for example,” remembers Charles Colthurst, “but as these were covered by squabs we never looked there until Margaret began to search. Once things were brought together, we had to decide what to do with them, especially as it was obvious that some of the material would need restoration and we had to prevent any further deterioration.”
Committed to the upkeep and improvement of Blarney Castle itself, Colthurst could have offered the archive for sale but felt that his relationship to it was similar to that with the old castle. “I’m just a steward, a custodian for my lifetime. And we’ve been in Cork so long it seemed to me that Cork deserved the archive, so it was an easy decision.”
The cultural importance as well as the generosity of this gift is emphasised by John A Murphy, emeritus professor of history at UCC, who notes the ancient MacCarthy support for the bardic schools of poetry: “As long as any remnants of native culture survived, even in the tenuous link between the poets and the native aristocracy, it was at Blarney.” But Murphy also feels that the Colthurst donation, while enormously important, reflects the need for local bodies to become more centralised in their approach to archive acquisition, rather than letting collections arrive as if by accident.
Even the corrective value of the archive is already obvious: from rapidly decomposing envelopes come dealings with names still current in Cork’s mercantile, legal and commercial life. Riggs Falkiner may have been recently demoted in the city’s heritage by the decision of the local authority to rename the laneway called after his bank to the more developer-friendly Opera Lane; however, this archive shows Falkiner’s centrality to the 18th-century city. It also provides a cultural atlas, its precise territorial geography asserting place names and byways in town and country through their long relationships with farmers, merchants, traders and landlords.
The MacCarthys of Muskerry married into the local aristocracy, linking themselves with families that still resound in Irish history, from the earls of Kildare, the Barrymores of Buttevant and the viscounts of Waterford, and with Thomasina, grand-daughter of Sir Nicholas Browne. Then in 1719, Alice Conway of Cloghane, Co Kerry, married John Colthurst of Ardrum, Co Cork. Sir John Conway Colthurst, a son of that marriage, was the first baronet. A further record dating from 1892 joins the Colthursts of Ardrum to the Jeffreyes, then presiding at Blarney, through the marriage of Louisa Jane Jeffreyes to sir George Conway Colthurst, an MP for Kinsale, in 1846. Having served king John III Sobieskie of Poland, Brigadier General James Jeffreyes took up his residence in Ireland in 1685. As governor of Cork he purchased the castle and estate of Blarney from the asset-stripping Hollow Sword Blade Company.
The great castle had been the chief residence of the MacCarthy earls of Clancarty until, as the record here states, “forfeited by the adherence of Donogh, 4th Earl, to the fortunes of King James II in 1688”. It must have been through this MacCarthy line that the oldest documents – five of them from the 14th century, four more from the 16th – were handed on. True to the nature of this archive, they refer to property: “Know all men by these presents that I Thomas de Indea have given, granted etc to Patrick son of Jordan de Kerdyffe one messuage with the appurtenances of Shandon . . . my seal given at Shandon, Thursday next before the feast of St Mark the Evangelist in the eight year of the reign of King Edward the Third.”
Translating the full Latin text in 1884 historian Richard Caulfield explains that: “The Jew could find no abiding place in the city, but the Danes, liberal-minded people, embraced him and he exercised his full rights.” At this distance, the “said ville” is a foreign city, spliced by “the King’s High Way”, its named churches and canonries long banished to these documents, weighted with their heavy wax seals, their unfading inks and their scrolled, embellished signatures.
The Jeffreyes built a Georgian-Gothic mansion adjacent to the old castle keep while also allying themselves with prominent Irish landowners and amassing through marriage the muniments of a succession of interlaced families. Although the Blarney demesne has now contracted to about 1,000 acres, these papers offer a country-wide sequence of acquisition, maintenance and disposal, recording wills and death duties and dealings with the Land Commission and the Encumbered Estates Act. The Jeffreyes built much of Blarney village in 1765, and the famous Blarney Woollen Mills stems from that development, which was followed in 1872 by the building of the “new” castle nearby, replacing the Georgian mansion that was destroyed by a fire in 1820. What seems to be a complete collection of drawings from architect John Lanyon of Belfast is in the archive, along with contracts, progress reports and what would now be called snag-lists.
These lie with the honours and armorial bearings, with the charges of saddlers, solicitors and dispensary districts, with the gardening catalogues and photographs of pets, picnics, yachting regattas and race meetings taken with the earliest cameras and filed in padlocked albums.
Described by archivist Brian McGee as of very high quality, the scope of this accumulation of documentation is a reminder of the saying that such families “owned half the world, and married the other half”. In this case, they kept the receipts.