Byrne's Dictionary of Irish Local History (12 page)

chapter-house
. The place of assembly of a cathedral
chapter
.

charge
. In heraldry, a device borne on an
escutcheon
.

charnel-house
. A building in a cemetery which received the bones of the disinterred when new graves were dug.

charter
. A royal writ conferring rights and privileges such as perpetual grants of lands, liberties or manors.

charter schools
. Charter schools originated in the Irish charity school movement of the early eighteenth century, a voluntary system which enrolled children of all denominations but provided instruction in the Protestant faith. A key figure in the movement was Dr Henry Maule who founded the Society in Dublin for Promoting Christian Knowledge in 1717. Charter schools were so called after George II's 1734 charter which established the Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland. Hugh Boulter, archbishop of Armagh, was instrumental in securing the royal charter which enabled the society to solicit donations and bequests. Its activities were boosted in 1747 when the Irish parliament granted it the licensing duty on street hawkers. An annual parliamentary grant was voted from 1751 to 1831 which amounted to in excess of £1 million in the 80 years of its existence. Blatantly proselytising, the schools accepted only Catholic children between 1775 and 1803. The practice of removing Catholic children from their parents to a distant area so that conversion could more easily be achieved was particularly resented. By the 1820s only 34 charter schools were operating and the society was attracting increasingly hostile attacks from Catholic clergy. In educational terms its results were deemed far from satisfactory and many of the pupils were underfed, poorly-clothed and cruelly treated. The charter school system withered as the Dublin administration lost faith in its ability to provide adequately for the educational needs of the poorer classes. After 1832 charter schools were reserved for Protestants of all classes and the quality of educational provision improved. (
First report of the commissioners of Irish Education inquiry,
HC 1825 (400) XII; Milne,
The Irish charter schools
.)

chartulary
. 1: A register of charters and title deeds, as of a monastery 2: The place where records were kept.

chattel
. Personalty as opposed to realty.

chasuble
. A sleeveless outer vestment worn by a priest at mass.

chevaux de frise
. (Fr., Friesland horses) Originally revolving bars studded with stakes or spikes employed as a defence against cavalry, the term is also used retrospectively to describe a projecting wall of rocks forming the defensive outworks of a
hill-fort
.

chevron
. In heraldry, a gable-shaped band on an
escutcheon
.

chief
. In heraldry, a broad band across the top of an
escutcheon
.

chief clerk of the court of king's bench
. A sinecure of the chief justice and nominally the principal officer of the court in all matters relative to civil suits, his duties included the enrolment of pleadings and judgements on the civil side of the court but were usually delegated to attorneys.

chief governor
. The senior crown official in Ireland who was known in pre-Tudor times as the
justiciar,
custos
, king's lieutenant, deputy king's lieutenant, deputy justiciar and later as the
lord lieutenant, lord deputy
or viceroy.
See
county governor. (Ellis,
Reform,
pp. 12– 31; Otway Ruthven, ‘The chief governors', pp. 227–36; Wood, ‘The office', pp. 206–38.)

chief place
. In England, the
king's bench
; in Ireland from the twelfth to the late fourteenth century, the
justiciar's court
(forerunner to the Irish king's bench).

chief rent
. 1: Crown rent 2: Rent payable by a freeholder to the manorial lord.

chiefry
. A tribute or rent owed to a Gaelic overlord by his vassals.

chief secretary
. Although nominally ranking below the
lord lieutenant
, the chief secretary was the most important government official in the Irish administration in the nineteenth century. He was effectively the prime minister of Ireland and responsible for the introduction of a vast range of legislation on a broad range of key issues to the extent that enactments were often subsequently popularised under his name.
Goulborn's Act
and the
Balfour acts
are all named after the chief secretaries who introduced them in the house of commons. His frequent absence from the country meant that the bulk of the work in the chief secretary's office was actually carried out by under-secretaries who supervised the administration of almost every public department in Ireland. The National Archives holds the vast range of correspondence (dating from 1790) which passed through the chief secretary's office, an archive which survives to this day because the records were stored in the
State Paper Office
when fire consumed the Public Record Office in 1922.
See
police. (Flanagan, ‘The chief secretary', pp. 197–225; Hughes, ‘The chief secretary', pp. 59–72.)

chirograph
. A writing in which the text is duplicated and then divided through the letters of the word ‘chirograph' (or by indent) into two identical parts so that if a dispute should arise later the joining of the two proves them authentic.

choir
. The
chancel
of a church.

Christian Brothers
. A lay, Catholic teaching order founded in Waterford in 1802 by Edmund Rice (1762–1844) to provide elementary education to the children of poor families. Within ten years the Brothers had established additional schools in Cork and Dublin and in 1820 they gained papal recognition as the ‘Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools of Ireland'. Shortly afterwards Rice was elected superior-general of the new order, a post he retained until he retired in 1838. In 1827 brothers in Cork seceded from the order to form a distinct diocesan congregation, the Presentation Brothers. With the exception of a brief period in the 1830s, the order remained aloof from the national school system and its attendant grants and payments because the rules of that system would have had to be profoundly modified to accommodate schools so totally immersed in Catholic doctrine and observance. Thus, Christian Brothers' schools were funded by public subscription and church-door collections and only entered the national system after independence. The order established secondary schools throughout the country and founded communities in Africa, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Avowedly nationalist, the Brothers' schools educated many of the future separatist and post-independence leaders of Ireland. (Keogh,
Edmund Rice
.)

Chronicles of Ireland, The
. A didactic work written by Sir James Perrot, son of Sir John, lord deputy of Ireland (1584–88), which narrates events in Ireland in the late sixteenth century in the hope that lessons might be learned by posterity. It opens with a treatise on historiography, describes the customs and habits of the native Irish and criticises the central administration. Perrot never finished the chronicles which end in 1608 prior to the plantation of Ulster, a process he intended to cover in the work. From a historical point of view the principal value of Perrot's writing derives from the liberal access he had to contemporary records and to the protagonists in the events he describes. (Wood,
The chronicles
.)

Church Education Society
. Founded in 1839, the Church Education Society was the Anglican response to the emergence of the non-denominational national school system. It was established because many Anglican clergymen refused to countenance anything other than Anglican control over any system of education the state might introduce. The national system, with its emphasis on non-denominationalism, interfered with their duty to proselytise and they regarded it ‘a conspiracy to keep the light of God's word from ever shining upon a Roman Catholic child'. Rather than connect with the state system, they created their own – the
Church Education Society
– which was organised on a nationwide basis through diocesan education societies.
Kildare Place Society
schools were absorbed by the new system which was open to children of all persuasions. All pupils were required to read scripture but only Anglicans were expected to learn Anglican doctrine. Initially the society was well supported and by 1849 the number of affiliated schools had risen from 825 (43,627 pupils) to 1,848 (111,877 pupils). Catholics accounted for over half of the enrolment in 1848. The society soon realised that education was an expensive business and petitioned in 1845 for public funds to support its work. This request was refused and the financial burdens imposed by the decision to remain outside the national system continued to mount. In 1860 the Anglican archbishop of Dublin recommended the society to come to terms with the commissioners of education and it did so soon after. (Akenson,
The Irish education experiment
, pp. 147–201, 286–94, 364–5, 371–2.)

churching
. The religious ceremony of purification and thanksgiving through which women were socially reintegrated after childbirth. Traditionally, women recently delivered of a child were unable to perform normal household duties or visit relatives and friends until churched. The basis for this prohibition lay in the belief that the pains of labour were akin to the pains of hell and the act of churching cleansed them of this stigma and re-admitted them to church and society.

Church of Ireland
. The Church of Ireland, also known as the Episcopalian or Anglican church, traces its episcopal succession to pre-Reformation times. It became the established state church in Ireland in 1537 and remained so until 1869 (see Irish Church Act). The Reformation made little headway in Ireland at first and its few successes were confined to the tiny proportion of the country where the king's writ ran. No serious attempt was made to convert the native Gaelic-speaking population and the influence of the Catholic counter-reformation ensured that the conservative Anglo-Irish of the Pale chose recusancy rather than attend Anglican services. In tandem with the plantations and an influx of English and Scottish settlers, the church gradually extended its ministry to every diocese in the country with an episcopacy that was largely English – by 1625 only three out of 23 prelates were Irishmen. Throughout much of its history – apart from the early seventeenth century when its Calvinist leanings enabled it to accommodate Presbyterians and puritans within the ministry and the early nineteenth century when it engaged in a vigorous missionary campaign – the church sought to achieve conformity by exclusion or coercion rather than through missionary zeal. Its influence at government level declined when the
Act of Union
, which created the United Church of England and Ireland, permitted only four prelates to sit in the house of lords at Westminster where their impact was minimal. The growing confidence of the Catholic church, the campaign for
Catholic emancipation
, the controversial evangelical ‘
second reformation
', the injustice of
tithe
, the disproportionate overendowment of the church relative to the proportion of the population to which it ministered, Anglican attempts to gain control of the national system of education and an inability to effect reform from within all contributed to a diminution of its status and prepared the way for externally-imposed reform by
Whig
governments. In every century the church attempted to reform administrative and pastoral inadequacies and confront the scandals of absenteeism, plurality of benefices and neglect of duty but genuine reform only came about in the nineteenth century when the
Church Temporalities Act
(1833) and the
Irish Church Act
(1869) disendowed the church, stripped it of its privileged position and streamlined its structure. Following disestablishment the church became an independent voluntary body and was compelled to rely on its own resources. A
general convention
of lay and clerical representatives in 1870 resulted in a restructuring of church administration, the establishment of a supreme governing body consisting of bishops, clergy and lay diocesan representatives (the General Synod) and the creation of the
Representative Church Body
to handle the fiscal affairs of the church. (Akenson,
The Church of Ireland
; Milne
, The Church of Ireland
.)

Church Million Act
. During the
tithe
war of the 1830s many people defaulted on their payments. Government expeditions to compel the payment of arrears yielded less than the actual cost of the expeditions and failed to halt the spread of anti-tithe violence. In 1833 the Church Million Act (3 & 4 Will. IV, c. 100) was passed, so called because of the sum of money advanced, and the government assumed responsibility for the payment of tithe arrears for the years 1831–3 inclusive, subject to some scaling down of the actual amounts to be paid. It also ceased to pursue defaulters for arrears.

Church Temporalities Act
(1833). Despite being packed with sympathisers, an 1831 royal commission on ecclesiastical revenue and patronage confirmed that the Established church was heavily over-endowed and excessively wealthy relative to the proportion of the population to which it ministered. The advent of a
Whig
government committed to church reform ensured the passage of the Church Temporalities Act (3 & 4 Will. IV, c. 37, amended by 4 & 5 Will. IV, c. 90). The moderate Lord Stanley prepared the bill and eased its passage through parliament by engaging Archbishop Beresford, the primate of all Ireland, step by step in the drafting of the measure. The act provided for major administrative and financial re-structuring of the church. Financial savings from the implementation of the act were to be allocated to a newly established body, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for Ireland (comprising the archbishops of Dublin and Armagh and four other bishops), who were to apply the money to effect improvements in the church. With the establishment of the ecclesiastical commissioners, the
Board of First Fruits
was abolished. The number of archbishoprics was reduced from four to two (Cashel and Tuam were reduced to bishoprics when those sees became vacant) and ten bishoprics were united with neighbouring
dioceses
. The income of several bishoprics, including Armagh and Derry, was reduced. The act also included the first nineteenth-century land purchase provision for tenants. Tenants holding bishops' leases were allowed purchase their holding in
fee simple
subject to annual perpetual rents. The purchase price was paid to the ecclesiastical commissioners who retained any surplus having paid the respective bishops a sum equivalent to the annual rent and renewal fines for the holding. At parish level provision was made for suppressing benefices with congregations of less than 50 souls when next they fell vacant and for their union with neighbouring parishes, a clause which affected more than one-third of Anglican parishes.
Non-cures
were abolished and the right of
church-wardens
to levy parish cess was revoked, thereby removing the civil functions of the parish. The income of some ministers was reduced in parishes where the income was disproportionate to the level of spiritual duties performed. The revenue and tithe of the suppressed bishoprics, the surplus from the reduction in income of some of the remaining bishoprics, the income and property of the suppressed parishes, the remaining funds of the Board of First Fruits, the proceeds of a graduated tax on clerical earnings over £300, the income from non-cures and the surplus remaining after bishops' rents were paid were then applied by the ecclesiastical commissioners towards improving the physical infrastructure of the church. The commissioners funded the building and reparation of churches, purchased land for the construction of
glebe
houses, supported clergymen on small livings and, since parish cess had been abolished, paid parish clerks. After the passage of the disestablishing
Irish Church Ac
t in 1869, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for Ireland were replaced by the
Representative Church Body
. (
Report of His Majesty's commissioners of ecclesiastical inquiry,
HC 1831 (93) IX; Akenson,
The Church of Ireland
.)