Trials at Ennis January 1848 (Special Commission report)

[Paddy Casey]

The Internet Archive ( http://www.archive.org )* has published an extensive (231 page) document entitled A REPORT OF TRIALS UNDER A SPECIAL COMMISSION FOR THE COUNTY OF CLARE held at Ennis, January 1848.

The report can be found at http://www.archive.org/details/3793090 and can be downloaded as PDF or read directly with DejaVu or the Internet Archive's excellent Read Online facility. It can also be read and copied as plain text but the OCR-ing of the pages is not perfect and much of the text is garbled.

It seems that there had been so much malfeasance or alleged malfeasance going on in Ireland at the time that “.....those to whom the executive authority of this country has been entrusted have deemed it right to anticipate the ordinary visitation of the law at the Assizes, by issuing this Special Commission for the trial of offenders in certain districts in Ireland, including the county of Clare. Proceedings of this nature have become necessary from time to time. They are rendered necessary either by the multitude of offences, or by the magnitude and the atrocity of the crimes which are found to prevail.”

This report documents in detail (I have added the placenames):

- The Trial of James Hayes and Patrick Ryan, for the Murder of James Watson (at Ballycorney)
- The Trial of Patrick Cusack for Appearing in Arms (at Cranaher) .. ..
- The Trial of John Liddy and three others, for Attacking a Dwelling-house (at Truagh)
- The Trial of Owen Liddy and Timothy O'Brien, for Felony (at Broadford)
- The Trial of Patrick Dunne and four others, for Carrying away Arms (at Caloor)
- The Trial of Michael Butler and Mathew Hourigan, for the Murder of Patrick Cleary (at Gurtnaglough)
- The Trial of William Liddy, for Robbery of a Gun (at Kilnacrandy)
- The Trial of James Hearse and three others, for Posting a Threatening Notice (at Kilrush)
- The Trial of John Crowe, for Conspiracy to Murder James Watson (at Ballycorney)
- The Trial of Thomas McInerney, for the Murder of Martin M'Mahon (at Carhumore)
- The Trial of Michael M'Mahon, for Conspiracy to Murder Mathew Boland (at Claremount)
- The Trial of Michael Kennedy and six others, for Attacking a Habitation (at Ballyboy)
- The Trial of Thomas King and two others, for Attacking a Habitation (in the parish of Tulla)

There is no point in my summarising the report here. You have to read it yourself. It is crammed full of names of persons and places in Clare. Anyone who was anyone in the underworld or the legal profession in Clare at the time is mentioned here together with hundreds of names of jury members, witnesses, bystanders, house servants, cowherds, local worthies, you name it. In fact some of the depositions and interrogations of witnesses more or less amount to partial censuses of the villages where the crimes occurred. The report makes fascinating reading. I'm still at it.

* I found my way to this document after reading an interesting newspaper report about mass scanning of books (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8200624.stm ). I was amazed to read that "The Internet Archive scans around 1000 books a day at 10 cents a page" and "orphan works.....are works whose rights-holders are unknown, and are believed to make up an estimated 50-70% of books published after 1923. " and "The non-profit Internet Archive..........is also in the business of scanning books and has digitised over half a million of them to date." This prompted me to go back to the Internet Archive and see whether anything new about Clare had appeared. It had.

Paddy

[smcarberry]

Paddy, your description of this report is so much more full and memorable than my bare-bones one back in July. It reminds us that once upon a time people had the leisure to sit and mull over the vagaries of life, like other people's deviations from
a virtuous lifestyle. Thank goodness there was no hoarding of paper for British publications of that era, so now we can inherit these bountiful accounts.

I am still in the Washington, D.C. area on a trip. Yesterday my visit to the National Archives not only resulted in a good crop
of new info on some Civil War soldiers via their pension files, but I also saw the Footnote.com people in action as they
captured images of documents, per the contract with the Archives, so that more of the vast federal reservoir of data can
come online. This genealogy compulsion of ours is such a good driving force to cause the past to stay vivid and not fade
into total obscurity.

Here's to ever more light and clarity. Excelsior.

Sharon C.,