 I hope everyone can see my screen and apologies for not being there in person, I was very much looking forward to it, but unfortunately can't be here. So thank you particularly to the organisers for putting together such an interesting programme and to Jen for chairing this session. What I want to do today is to think about the limits of English colonial governments are really pushing political culture to absolute limits in Ireland at the height of the pre 16th century, the woodchuck of Ireland, and to think about the distance between the English administration's attempted projection of power and the experience of those who lived under that English government, both English and Irish. On this paper, we could also talk about the flammings, the French, the Italians, and many more, if you can be found in medieval Ireland. And I want to use the vacus of the Irish Uxtaka that I'm editing with Dr Linco Gallin, as Jen said, as part of the UN 2022 project at Trinity College Dublin. So let's get started. First slide. This is Irish Uxtaka 1300 at the absolute height of English control of Ireland in the medieval woodchuck. As you can see from this map, the settler woodchuck of Ireland, circa 1300, claimed control over most of the Ireland from an administrative base in Dublin, but with significant Irish woodchips present in the north, just to the south of Dublin, that's the McMorra on the map, in the west, and particularly in the north, that absolute conglomeration of smaller Irish woodchips to the north. And today, what I really want to think about, taking my title as The Margins, is the western coast, particularly Canarch, that all of Gaelic province of Ireland, which has not yet been divided into English Shires. The Irish government does treat it as a shire in this period, which is hotly contested between Irish and English lords in the area, and Kerry, just to the south there. And all of these areas are inevitably much more distant than the areas around Dublin, the areas that would become the pale in the 14th and 15th century. In the 13th century, the English administration based in Dublin can and does treat the entire island as part of the English Lordship, with results that we will see momentarily. But it is inevitably much more messy than this, because despite what the English administration in Dublin wants to think, there is significant resistance to it. Let's first think about the institution that I'm concerned with today, and the records that it produced. This is the Irish extractor work from a facsimile of the now destroyed Redbroke of the extractor. And like the English extractor, the Irish extractor has responsibility for the finances of its territory in its case the Lordship of Ireland. The English extractor is divided into two parts, the upper extractor responsible for audit and acts and acting as a court, and the lower extractor, which takes in and pays out money. So what you can see on the screen is that process of audit at the very bottom of the screen. You can see the sheriff here sitting anxiously waiting to know if his accounts have been accepted. You can see all around the other sides, the clerks count the money, write the records and check the accounts. And so this is, you know, a fairly standard English administrative practice that has been imported wholesale by 1200 to Ireland and by 1300 is a well established part of the bureaucracy of English power in Ireland. It's more complicated than that because, as many of you may know, the records of the Irish public, the Irish public records were destroyed in 1922 in the Four Courts fire at that year at the start of the Irish Civil War. So all of the medieval roles that had survived to the 19th century were destroyed then. Because of a series of accounting scandals in the 1270s to the 1290s, in 1293, the English King Edward I ordered that all the accounts of the Irish treasurer should be ordered at Westminster. And from the 1290s to 1446, every few years the Irish treasurers crossed the sea carrying the records with them to be checked and ordered at Westminster. And some of those records are then kept so they can be checked again at Westminster and enter the records of the English state and thus come down to the National Archives at Q where they remain today, a body of about 400 bowls. So it's really substantial, surviving collection of material, and it's those that Lin and I are editing these contemporaneous accounts written in Dublin for the use of the Dublin Exchequer bought to London to be ordered at Westminster and then posited into the records of the English state. And this replicates what we see across Ireland in this period where the, in theory, the institutions of Irish government, the justice here, the chance to read the common law courts, the Exchequer are modeled on English models, but self-contained are very self-sufficient for the literature. But in actuality can always be appealed to London and that there's this really uneasy tension between how you move between these institutions at the settler government in Ireland and then the government at Westminster. So what do we find in the sea trials? Well, we can, and how do they tell us about political culture? Well, the routine business of the Exchequer is payments to and from for things like judicial fines, the payments for making a false claim in court, for falsely prosecuting someone for making, you know, for not turning up when you're summoned to court, all of the kinds of things that are the intersection of English power with very local society. But what's really interesting for our purposes today, thinking about the margins and how far English government reaches, is that for the receipt rolls, the money coming in, they're listed by day and by place. So once we have the full corpus next summer, we should be able to do some really interesting things about seeing where exactly English administration is able to get payments that it expects. And impressionistically, I can start to share some of the things that we've been seeing. The first thing that I've noticed is that it really does vary by organisation. So if you think back to that map I showed at the start, just south of Kerry on the south west coast is Cork. Cork has a major mercantile centre and we see far more payments coming in from Cork than we do from Conarch to Cork Kerry. The way is just absolutely incomparably different. So are we seeing an English government which is exerting its power through urban centres and not so much in rural areas? Or what else are we looking at? So let's look now at Kerry in the south west corner just north of Cork. And on the face of it, you would expect to see very little from Kerry. It's far from English power. There are very strong local lords who are able to exert competing influence. Yet we get payments like this one at the top of the screen here from TNA, E-runner one, two, three, one, six, slash one. Where the second of those entries, it says the record the sea from over. Now, the record sea is a payment that English queens struggle to collect anywhere, including in England, because it's the expectation that anything that's washed up on shore belongs to the king and isn't trying to keep us. So to have a payment for a record the sea coming in from Kerry in the 1290s is pretty extraordinary. So for some reason, maybe a particularly effective local official, we get a payment that we barely see in Dublin coming out of the far south west. So immediately jumping to assumptions that the English aren't going to be able to get payments they think they do out of far areas needs to be questioned. And then we also get this interesting pattern that's the second item on your screen TNA 101 to 3016, where you get these really strong clusters and it's there in the 1280s it's there in the 1290s and we'll see if it carries through well into the early 14th century before the collapse of English power 1515, where you get instead of being scattered through a wall, you'll get one or two sort of clusters of in this case 19 payments that all come in together. And I think what we might be seeing here is one local official being particularly on the ball and particularly enforcing the demands of the English extractor because what we have here is payments from the sheriff William uncle for the profit of the country so the standard parents payments the sheriffs are expected to collect. We have payments for trespass and a payment for someone from an Irish name to have peace so to be settled case in court, but otherwise the payments are off a release in the neighborhood court from the court of business, including for a widow of the zilla and it looks to me like what we have here is someone's really made an effort to after a court session or two that has been held and carry to get the payments that they expect so that what we're seeing is intermittent but quite strong extraction of what the English extractor thinks is due to it. And if we go to another document which is more summary, this one here. This is this bears this out this is TNA, you run a one to 3017, which covers the first 13 years of the first up to around 1290. And it's a summary. It's the English extractor's attempt to summarize what the king should be getting each year, noting the profits of the county and the major fixed rents and royal services. And it lists a few years of the profits so it shows us some of the variation in payments. So Kerry and connect in this role are paying similar amounts of profits as cork or limerick, which is interesting because that's not the impression you get from the rest of the receipt rolls. 1279 court could pay 17 pounds in barn, but connect paid 18 two years later, and Kerry pays just five, and these amounts to fluctuate. So, again, I think we're looking at the effectiveness of individuals in enforcing this political, this political expectation, rather than saying anything about the actual economic growth of these areas. And then it gets more interesting, even more interesting in the same role when we get on to what's known as the fixed rents divided to a CISA. Work in our tier is included, but Kerry is not. And the clerks here are extremely skeptical of their ability to collect what is owned. So if we look at the, the first entries from a Englishman Richard de Rupala, who's paying for a single cantrad. Again, cantrads, the Gaelic political division, not the English shire is being used here. We're also claiming for the events held by the Deborah Earl's Ulster, so Walter de Burr is the third entry there. But in between we have an Irish name, Thelymus Maconohore, who ought to pay Solabetch Redire, 300 pounds for the farm of three of the cantrads of Canard. And they know that he has paid nothing on account of the war. So in 1290, the clerks saying this major Gaelic Irish Lord ought to be paying us for this land, but he is not. And we could start to see the inability of the Exchequer to enforce what it thinks it is owed in the far west. In 1290, after 1315 when the Bruce invasion hits in Scotland, this is going to be absolutely impossible to collect. But even at the height of English power, we can see tensions here. And they're trying to keep alive these claims, hoping that one day they will again be able to claim these. And then if we look at the divorce of this document, so we're still on 237, you've got Miranda written by the clerks to remind themselves of information. So at the top here, we have a note that an obrien, the major Lord in Thomend ought to be paying the Exchequer for the majority of Thomend. But this has now been granted to Thomas De Clare. And what's interesting and Thomas De Clare is also not paying. So we've got here lands that the English government has granted out on speculation to Thomas De Clare because the local Gaelic Lord has stopped acknowledging their authority. And in either case, they are getting absolutely no money and they know this. And then the second element that's interesting here is that there's a wider problem that the Exchequer is aware of in the 1290s at the height of their power. That on the count of the waste of Ireland I'm translating here where individuals are holding land, the king loses much and the tenants have full profit. Again, the financial transactions on the edge of English Ireland, they know about them but they can't enforce them. And the final thing I want to think about today is something that's sort of been woven through this talk is for the English Lordship of Ireland legally, according to the documentation we have things like the Statutes of Kilkenny from the mid 14th century. So there's a sharp legal difference in theory being enforced between the English and the Irish and Ireland. So in theory the common law is only to be used by the English settlers of Ireland and the Irish should be set outside of that political and legal sphere. That's not the picture we get from the seat rolls. And it's not the picture that people have been studying the common law in Ireland in recent years have suggested. And the last thing I want to say before I look at these examples particularly is to note that yes it's extremely difficult to identify ethnic identity from names. So the examples I've chosen here are either quite clear the Irish individuals, or they are very well known individuals. So at the top, this is one that I still find absolutely extraordinary because the more you think about it. What we have here is a payment in Wexford, so from the county just south of Dublin in the 1280s from Alexander McMorrah and Dermot his brother for a fine to have peace for receiving Arch McMorrah. Arch McMorrah is the leader of the Irish King in the area. So he's the leader of the resistance to the English in and around Dublin and this point. And so what we have here is we have two people from their surnames kinsmen of Arch McMorrah accepting English law to the point where they will pay in a fine and they paid in an instalments you can see it over the next few years in these roles. They're paying in for harboring Arch McMorrah. And they're accepting the judgment of English law against them for this, which says interesting things about how the English government is inserting itself into Irish politics in this period, and the ways in which the fluidity between the political alliances of the gay like Irish Lords and the English settler government works and it's interesting that it's a Wexford because the McMorrah is the base between Wexford and Dublin and this point. The second example is from the Dublin area where we have McCodman and more his mother paying in quite a substantial fine 33 shillings for four pence to have judgment money so they're interacting with the English law they've had a judgment brought against them in an English common law court, and then our asking for it to be released from it, which is interesting again in the sense that we see Irish people interacting with English law. And the third example is, I put in to remind us that we are dealing with a militarised settler community in Ireland at this period. This is Alistair Cusack in Canarkt paying to have the King's hostage the sun and air of Magnus O'Connor. So what we have here is a reminder that for all that we see Irish individuals interacting with the English law and the English administration, we're also dealing with world of hostages and of military expeditions against the Irish communities, particularly in the west of Ireland. So what can we say to draw this together. The first thing I think that we need to remember is that the Exchequer is taking a very expansionist view of English power and English political culture and Ireland, that the whole island of Ireland should be seen as the long end to the English King. And of course people like the Obrian in Thomend, Thomas De Clare, and all the others should be paying up, and that the expectation of English financial funds should be met. These people probably do, and indeed in the case of those two, Obrian and De Clare, definitely did disagree. And what we have in Cery, Canarkt and Thomend in particular is a colony of power working on the very edges of territory it can plausibly claim, and that it can't really fully claim. We have a puffed up tat in the English Exchequer, trying to make itself look bigger, trying to project authority across the entire island that isn't really there. But we should be very wary of thinking in the late 13th century at the English Lordship of Ireland as indeed subtle fact that it's already started to show the signs of the tensions and the inability to enforce its authority that will turn into the 14th through 15th century to decline ahead of that Tudor reconquest of Ireland starting in the 1540s. So in terms of political culture then what we're seeing is political culture is something that's moving backwards and forward that we have times when we do see Irish people coming within the English Satellar political culture, but then we also see pressures against it. So thank you very much.