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Christ Church Deeds. Edited by M.J. McEnery and Raymond Refaussé (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001) 562pp hbk, 3 pls., €50, IR£39.38, $45, ISBN 1-85182-470-7
This is the eighth and final volume in the excellent 'History of Christ Church, Dublin' series which, under the general editorship of Raymond Gillespie, has made available in print the full range of historical documents pertaining to one of the most important [p. 130] churches in Ireland. Christ Church Deeds is a particularly noteworthy collection since the original material on which is is based was entirely destroyed in the Four Courts conflagration of 1922. Since that date medieval historians have had to rely on the calendared version of the deeds compiled by McEnery and published in the report of the deputy keeper of Irish public records in 1888. It is timely to have this calendar reissued, the more so since Dr Philomena Connelly has provided a useful appendix which redates some of the thirteenth-century documents. The new edition also contains a previously unpublished part of the nineteenth-century calendar which brings the collection to the end of the seventeenth century.
In a brief and helpful introduction Raymond Refaussé emphasises the importance of the Christ Church collection by placing it in the context of Ireland's surviving medieval ecclesiastical archivfe. In chronological range and content it is incomparably rich. Refaussé also provides a detailed account of the history of the Christ Church collection, and the process by which it reached its last form at the end of the nineteenth century. Much had already been lost by the end of the Middle Ages, and more was to disappear before McEnery's calendar appeared. Almost all the deeds record land transfers and yield, as a result, a great deal of information about the tenurial geography of the parts of Ireland in which Christ Church held property, and in particular the situation in Dublin. Their value for increasing understanding of the social and economic history of medieval Ireland is immense. The deeds have regularly been consulted by scholars working on medieval and early modern Irish history, but their usefulness has certainly not been exhausted, and it can be expected that their reappearance in an accessible and affordable form will encourage further research on a neglected aspect of Ireland's past.
Reproduced with the kind permission of the reviewer, Dr Brendan Smith, University of Bristol,
and the reviews editor, Dr Raymond Gillespie from Irish Economic and Social History, xxix (2002), pp 129-30.
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