LOCAL HISTORY: PATRICK BOWEreviews The Knights of Glin: Seven Centuries of Change,Edited by Tom Donovan, Glin Historial Society, 463pp, €50
THE FITZGERALDS came to Ireland with the Anglo-Norman invasion in 1169. Since then, they have made many various and significant contributions to Irish life. One branch – the Fitzgeralds, Knights of Glin – have been recorded as resident in the same place in West Limerick for 700 years. Such an unusual circumstance is bound to arouse our curiosity, a curiosity that is well satisfied in the publication of this book. A second stimulus to our curiosity is the name – the Knight of Glin – by which the head of the branch is known. What is its origin and validity? The excellent opening chapters in the book explain that it is one of three titles – the others are the Knight of Kerry and the White Knight – that were probably conferred by one of the great Kildare Geraldine magnates on three of their vassals in the 13th century. They became inherited titles by prescriptive right in the second half of the 14th century.
What is the point of the maintenance of a title of medieval origin in the 21st century, it is often asked, especially when the original purpose of a knighthood, the requirement to bear arms on behalf of an overlord granting the title, is no longer relevant? The answer may be that it helps to connect us in a unique and very vivid way with Ireland’s ancient history.
For this reason, if Ireland were Japan, the present and 29th Knight of Glin might be classified as “a living national monument”. The use of the title may also have a wider validity in that an example of a family, of whatever nationality, of such recorded longevity and of such long residence in one place, serves as a beacon of stability in what we see, otherwise, as a quick-moving and unstable world.
The chapters on the late medieval Knights are peppered with picaresque details that bring the world of medieval Ireland alive for the reader. Amidst the Knightly possessions was “an eyrie of goshawks in the woods of Kyllyney Teigdowney”. Among the knightly entitlements were “billeting rights for a large number of gallowglass and kern from all of Kerry” (gallowglasses and kerns were seasonal mercenary warriors, the former being heavy infantry, the latter light infantry). A character of a minor branch of the family was named “Tibbot Roe McTibbott Mc Reynet of Ballycasey”.
A significant fact mentioned in the second chapter is that the first Knight’s wife was not an Anglo-Norman but the daughter of an ancient Irish family, the Culhanes. Thus began a centuries-long association of the family with Irish Gaelic culture. The Glin family are said to have practiced the ancient Irish custom of fosterage until as late as the 1850s, and by the same family who fostered all the Knights from 1500 onwards, the Costellos of Killeany. The sister of Edmund, Knight of Glin, together with her husband, commissioned for the Franciscan friary of Lislaughtin in 1521 the beautiful Lislaughtin Crucifix, now one of the treasures of the National Museum.
Thomas, Knight of Glin, graduated in 1613 from the Royal College of the Noble Irish in the University of Santiago de Compostela, in Spain, as a result of which he was later known, in Irish, as Tomás Spáinneach.
One of the book's most interesting chapters contains a scholarly account of the family's association with 18th- and 19th-century poetry in the Irish language, detailing 11 poems, among them a series of laments for various Knights, a love song and one in praise of the then Knight's boat, The Farmer.Another chapter contains a scholarly account of an 18th-century Irish language manuscript that is among the treasures of Glin Castle. It is a manuscript version of Foras Feasa ar Eirinn,a comprehensive and authoritative treatment of Irish legend and history up to the time of the Norman invasion.
This book would not have seen the light of day without the encouragement and enthusiasm of the present Knight of Glin, whose remarkable cultural patriotism has resulted in the increasing incorporation of Anglo-Irish visual culture in the mainstream of Irish culture. Although the Knights have been seen more recently in the context of their better-known Anglo-Irish inheritance, this book repositions them within an older Irish context. The revelation of this book is the extent of this latter heritage and the fact that the Glin family has today fully recognised and reclaimed it.
Patrick Bowe, whose latest book, Gardens of the Roman World, is about the gardens of ancient Rome, has written many books and articles on Irish gardens and is currently writing on the gardens of Ancient Greece
