1641 Depositions

The collection of '1641 depositions' in Trinity College Dublin comprises some 3,100 personal statements, in which mainly protestant men and women of all classes told of their experiences at the outbreak of the rebellion by the catholic Irish in 1641. This material, collected by government-appointed commissioners over the course of a decade, runs to approximately 19,000 pages. It was systematically used in the subsequent trials of rebel leaders, and to inform decisions relating to the treatment of catholic landholders under Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate regime. During the early decades of the seventeenth-century Scottish and English planters (who increasingly identified themselves as 'British') colonised the province, often dispossessing the native catholic population. The depositions vividly document these colonial and 'civilizing' processes, which included the spread of Protestantism in one of the remotest regions of the Stuart kingdoms and the introduction of lowland agricultural and commercial practices, together with the native response to these developments. The depositions also constituted the chief evidence for the sharply contested allegation that the 1641 rebellion began with a general massacre of protestant settlers, and as a result they have been central to the most protracted and bitter of Irish historical controversies, which has never been satisfactorily resolved. In fact, the 1641 'massacres', like King William's victory at the Boyne (1690), and the battle of the Somme (1916), have played a key role in creating and sustaining a collective Protestant/British identity in Ulster. This body of material, unparalleled elsewhere in early modern Europe, provides a unique source of information on the 1641 rebellion and for the social, economic, cultural, religious, and political history of seventeenth-century Ireland, England and Scotland. However, it is difficult to read, and access is limited because of the fragility of the manuscripts.

The aim of this project is to transcribe and digitise the '1641 Depositions', creating a unique research tool of interest to both the academic community and the general public. Web site publication would give users full access to all images and transcripts, with free text search, while the construction of a database (described in the technical appendix) will facilitate more detailed research projects in a variety of disciplines, and provide an ideal tool for use in the teaching environment. The project will provide material for postgraduate research, enhance the research and publication outputs of the principal applicants, and give valuable training and work experience to four research staff. It will also deliver a working methodology for the transcription and digitisation of manuscript collections, which can be applied to other unique historical collections. There will be a number of other specific outcomes, including an article for a popular journal describing the project, a refereed article for a scholarly journal, a major international conference on 1641, the papers of which will be published in an edited volume, and an exhibition (including a published catalogue) in the TCD Library. By exploiting existing international research networks the project will also address key historiographical debates, as well as cross-border issues of identity in Ireland. Preliminary discussions have also revealed a wide level of interdisciplinary interest from literature, linguistics, gender studies, anthropology and historical geography. This AHRC application is part of a joint initiative, involving the University of Aberdeen, Cambridge University and TCD, which will develop exisiting institutional links between all three. TCD has agreed to commit €582,866 to this project (see attached letter from the provost Dr John Hegarty), which will focus on key strategic aims, particularly for Irish-ScottishStudies, and the digitisation of manuscript sources at both the University of Aberdeen and TCD.