A new study of historical records provides detailed information about how Irish society changed after the Cromwellian invasion, writes Dick Ahlstrom.
To the victor goes the spoils, and among these is the opportunity to write the historical record as suits. But sometimes a researcher can get behind the official history to understand what the past was really like.
So it was for Prof William Smyth, professor of geography at University College Cork. He used a number of primary sources from the 1600s that allowed him to better understand the impact of the Cromwellian confiscation on the pre-existing Irish society.
Last month he received the NUI Irish Historical Research Prize 2007 for a book on the subject. Map-making, Landscapes and Memory, A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c.1530-1750 uncovers what things were really like before Cromwell, perhaps the most hated man in Ireland, came for his eventful visit.
PROF SMYTH DESCRIBES himself as a "historical geographer", pointing out that the subject is both "an art and a science".
Cromwell's colonisation of Ireland had a tremendous impact on the society of the day and Prof Smyth sought a better understanding of this. Existing records from the time tended to come only from the Cromwell camp. "Much of the mapping was English inspired and clearly they had their own objectives in this," he says.
He began to delve into three primary sources dating from the time to get past the biases imposed by the victors. Primary among them was the 1659 census organised by Sir William Petty.
This was unique because it listed the numbers of people with specific names in each of the 300 or so baronies then existing in Ireland. Petty was attempting to detail the numbers of English family names, but the Irish names are there too to tell their story.
For example it lists the numbers of names with O or Mc in Leinster baronies, but within the next century many of these names have largely vanished. Yet in other areas, for example Ulster, they persisted. "It shows a kind of cultural frontier," Prof Smyth suggests, indicating transfer of populations from one area to another.
Another source is the "1641 Depositions", the testimonies of 3,400 protestant settlers living in Ireland who described their experiences of the 1641 Irish uprising. Trinity College holds 19,000 pages of these documents and Prof Smyth described them as a "phenomenal" record of the time.
He also used the 1654 "Civil Survey" in his analysis. "This documents in narrative the land ownership [ in Ireland] before it was taken over by the Cromwellians," he says.
The Cromwellian survey provided information on the location and type of confiscated lands and allowed the colonial government to honour agreements made with English adventurers who had financed Cromwell's war in Ireland.
Prof Smyth used these sources to understand property ownership before Cromwell campaigned across the island.
"You can map pre-colonial Irish society," he says. "I can use these maps to make a memory of these lost times. I have used them to re-create Irish society before the plantations, before the colonisation."
This provides insights into how society coped with the changes. "One of the big stories in Ireland in the 1690s is the transfer of ownership from an old elite to a new elite. The documents allow us to map the pre-colonial picture.
"You can look at the geographic impact of this new society and can see areas where there was a radical transformation, areas where the changes were mixed and others where society managed to survive as it was," Prof Smyth says.
THE FINE DETAIL provided in the documentation allowed him to "keep the analysis at the scale of the parish" of which there were 3,000 or so at the time. His research into the period that followed the Cromwellian colonisation now enters a new phase with a co-operative venture with geneticists from Trinity College and UCC, he says.
"What does the geography of family names and place names tell us about both the colonisation and the ethnic and cultural diversity of Ireland from 1800 onwards," he asks.
The team will look at five "types" of family names including old Gaelic, new English, Scandinavian, Anglo Norman and Scottish.
The goal is to see if the people with these names are genetically linked to their presumed cultures or if those with the names have a different genetic background.
Prof Smyth believes he will find that the Viking input was more significant than expected and that those with apparently "foreign" names may actually prove genetically to be old Irish.
Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c.1530-1750 is published by Cork University Press