Documents from the Thomond Papers at Petworth House Archive1 ...

Archivium Hibernicum
and Teig McBrodyn’, 140 members of the celebrated Mac Bruaideadha
learned family, court poets to the earl. 141
The employment of learned Gaelic literati speaks volumes about the
social context that the earl operated in during the first decade of the seventeenth
century; the old Gaelic order, while in decline, still constituted
the cultural milieu that even an anglicised Gaelic magnate such as the earl
recognised. The 1606 indenture also stipulated that in the event of the
lands occupied by the Uí Mhaol Dhomhnaigh being offered in mortgage
or any other conveyance, they are to be first offered to the earl. In like
manner, if any of the ‘Malowns shall die without lawful issue and heirs
then all their possessions, lands, tenements…remain to the said Earl and
his heirs’. The Uí Mhaol Dhomhnaigh sept agreed to the same charges
levied on their half of the land as that of the earl. The indenture set down
the sum of £200 sterling for the conveyed lands.
Sir Barnaby refused the offer to transact the lands of ‘Gleanomalun’
and ‘Clonfada’ in Killaloe parish. 142 His gave as his principal reason that
the lands were ‘conveyed [to] me by my father and forsoever the Malownes
complained to your lord’. Sir Barnaby made the point that his father ‘did
deal nobly in what he undertook’ and that he loathed to part from anything
his father, the fourth earl, had left him and hence was ‘forborne to set any
price’ on the lands. Sir Barnaby was conscious that Sir Dermot wanted the
‘plough land as having relation to [his] barony’ and curiously acknowledges
that the Protestant Bishop of Killaloe coveted the lands also, presumably
as they featured as temporal lands of the bishopric. 143
The last document is a copy of the agreement drawn up for the purpose
of Sir Dermot being conveyed the remaining lands of the Uí Mhaol
Dhomhnaigh sept in his capacity as ‘chief and supreme of [the] sept’. 144
The signatories to the deed were the ‘co-heirs’ of the sept 145 (agnatic kin-
140 Teig McBrodyn featured in a land transaction also in 1606, in which he was enfeoffed by
leading members of the Mac Mathghamhna lineage on 3 ½ quarters of land in Clonderalaw.
His residence was given as ‘Corkanalabuna’ (Knockanalban) in Kilmurry Ibrickan parish.
John Ainsworth (ed), The Inchiquin Manuscripts, p. 303. On the Mac Bruaideadha literary
activities see Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The historical annals of Maolin Óg Mac Bruaideadha,
1588–1603’ in The Other Clare, xiii (1989), pp 21–24.
141 Brian Ó Cuív, ‘An elegy on Donnchadh Ó Briain, fourth earl of Thomond’ in Celtica, xvi
(1984), pp 87–105.
142 See his letter, PHA Ms C.6/4
143 Rev. Philip Dwyer, The Diocese of Killaloe from the Reformation to the Eighteenth Century,
p. 137. Gleanomalun was recorded as temporal land belonging to the Bishopric of Killaloe
that were detained by secular patrons in 1622. In Killaloe parish the lands included:
‘Glanamuntermalone, Finleh, Ballinreehy or Balliduffy, Craiglegh, Balliteig, Clonfadda,
Lickinbana’. The Earl of Thomond was recorded as the detainer of ‘Glanamuntermalone’.
144 (PHA Ms C13/34a).
145 This reference implies partible inheritance (Irish ‘gavelkind’) operating amongst Gaelic
freeholders in Co. Clare during the sixteenth century. On a discussion of partible inheritance
in Thomond see Kenneth W. Nicholls, ‘Land, Law and Society in Sixteenth Century Ireland’,
(Dublin, 1976), pp 3–26, p. 18. Other Gaelic land practices such as redemption were practiced
32