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Searc's Web Guide to 18th Century Ireland - Aodh Buidhe MacCruitín (1670-1755)
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Email: info@searcs-web.com Searc's Web Guide to 18th Century Ireland - Aodh Buidhe MacCruitín (1670-1755) |
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Aodh Buidhe MacCruitín was born in County Clare where he was educated in Moyglass by his
cousin, the poet Aindrias MacCruitín. Aodh Buidhe fought with the Jacobites
at the Siege of Limerick and, following the signing of the Treaty of Limerick on October
3rd, 1691, he sailed for France with General Patrick Sarsfield and several thousand Irish
soldiers. In France MacCruitín joined Lord Clare's Irish Brigade and in 1707 he became a
tutor to Clare's children in Paris. In 1714 MacCruitín returned to Dublin to write a three volume history of Ireland from antiquity up to his own time. When, in 1717, he published the second volume entitled A Brief Discourse in Vindication of the Antiquity of Ireland he was arrested and imprisoned. MacCruitín's Brief Discourse, written in reply to Sir Richard Cox's Hibernia Anglicana (1689), is a exemplary history which draws on the Irish Annals and the work of contemporary Irish and foreign historians. On his release MacCruitín went to France where he published an Irish grammar book and an English-Irish dictionary before returning to Ireland to become genealogist and poet to the O'Briens of Thomond. This extract is from McCruitín's Brief Discourse (1717).© The Irish were all along from the beginning so addicted to, and had such great esteem for the knowledge of their own genealogies and histories, that in former times there have been in Ireland above two hundred chief annalists and historians by place and office such, who had estates in land set apart, and assigned to them, and their issue after them, for attending wholly that calling and the study of it. Every great lord having a sept of them peculiarly to record and transmit to posterity what especially concerned him and those deriving from him, besides what concerned the nation in general, yet all continually subject to scrutiny in the Triennial Assembly; the like they did so for their physicians, poets and harp players, by assigning them estates in land to live independently of others, the duty they owed their great lords excepted. And it was always observed that in time of war, no murders nor depredations might be committed on them; nay nothing at all belonging to them, either personal or real, should be touched by either side; so that they might have always leisure with safety to follow and study, each, his own peculiar charge, for the advancement of those matters which the Irish so highly regarded. And when the antiquary, physician, poet or harp-player happened to die, his eldest son was not to succeed him in his estate or living, but the most learned of the sept or family he was of; and by this means, every one of the family should strive to learn, in expectation of enjoying the benefit of such estates; which emulation brought the kingdom to such perfection in knowledge and learning, that it was the most learned island in all the western (or I may say) in the whole world; as domestic and foreign authors do sufficiently prove. © Searc's Web Guide 1997-2008 |
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