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SPENSER'S LIFE IN IRELAND (1580-9) xxv
year, he had been appointed Clerk of Decrees and Recognizances in the
Irish Court of Chancery, and had obtained the lease of the Abbey and
Manor of Enniscorthy, in Wexford County But the Abbey was not long
his home, if indeed he ever lived there, for in December 1581, he had
relinquished it in favour of one Richard Synot, and in the following
month was granted for six years a house in Dublin, valued at five pounds
Later in 1582 the House of Friars, called New Abbey, Co Kildare,
was granted to him to be held on a twenty-one years' lease at a rent of
three pounds In May 1583 ' Edmund Spenser of New Abbey' is
nominated with some others ' to be a commissioner of musters in the
County of Kildare, its crosses and marches, to summon all the subjects
of each barony, and there so mustered to assess in warlike apparel, arms,
horse, horsemen, and footmen, according to the quantity of their lands
and goods, according to the ancient customs and laws of the kingdom and
the instructions of the Lords Justices ' * In the following two years he
performs a similar office In 1586 he dates a sonnet to Harvey from
Dublin , in 1589 he succeeds his friend Ludovick Bryskett as Clerk of the
Council of Munster This Council, with Sir John Norreys as its president,
was actively engaged in ' planting' Munster with English colonists,
dividing the province into different seigniories to be assigned to different
gentlemen undertakers whom the crown was anxious to enrich, and by
whose influence the barbarism and destitution of the country should be
civilized and turned to prosperity Prominent among these was Sir
Walter Ralegh, who obtained various grants, amounting in all to some
forty thousand acres Spenser himself received the more modest grant
of the manor and castle of Kilcolman in the county of Cork It consisted
of 3,028 acres, with six English householders settled under him as cultivators
of the land The date at which he took up his residence at
Kilcolman cannot be exactly determined, but his resignation in 1587 of
his Clerkship in Dublin, the same year that the lease of his Dublin house
ran out, points to that time The grant was not ratified until 1591, but
he was certainly in possession two years before
Spenser's life during these nine years was not entirely occupied with
official business He had leisure for literary work, and he had now completed
the first three books of that great poem on which he had embarked
before leaving England And though he must often have been lonely,
and thrown entirely upon his own resources, he was not altogether cut off
from the stimulus of congenial society In Dublin, holding various
offices under the crown, was a coterie of Englishmen who loved learning
and held Spenser in high repute as scholar and as poet No biographer
of Spenser can leave unquoted the account given by Bryskett, in his
Discourse of Civil Life, of a gathering of friends at his cottage near
Dublin Touched with the dignity and courtly grace of the Renaissance
1 Vide Reports of Deputy Keeper of Public Records in Ireland, quoted by Buck
New Facts concerning the Life of Spenser (Mod Lang Notes, December 1904)