Commenting on the significance of the project, TCD Provost, Dr Patrick Prendergast, said:“This digitisation resource involving four decades of research by Trinity historians is a triumph of historical detective work that will revolutionise our understanding of Irish medieval history. The CIRCLE resource will stimulate important new research on late medieval Irish politics, society and the economy. The material will also prove invaluable for Irish families nationally and internationally interested in tracing their roots back to the Middle Ages.”
Trinity College Dublin historians have reconstructed invaluable medieval documents destroyed during the bombardment of the Four Courts in 1922. The Four Courts was the home of the Public Record Office, which was catastrophically destroyed when it was bombed in the conflict between pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty forces at the start of the Irish Civil War. It was previously thought that the entire medieval archive had been destroyed, but forty years’ work by a team of researchers at Trinity has led to the reconstruction of more than 20,000 hugely important government documents produced by the medieval chancery of Ireland. From today, the Irish chancery letters are available again in a new publicly accessible and free internet resource known as CIRCLE: A Calendar of Irish Chancery Letters, c.1244–1509.
Commenting on the significance of the project, TCD Provost, Dr Patrick Prendergast, said:“This digitisation resource involving four decades of research by Trinity historians is a triumph of historical detective work that will revolutionise our understanding of Irish medieval history. The CIRCLE resource will stimulate important new research on late medieval Irish politics, society and the economy. The material will also prove invaluable for Irish families nationally and internationally interested in tracing their roots back to the Middle Ages.”
When the Four Courts was bombed on June 30th,, 1922, it was a tragedy for Ireland because it began the country’s slide into bloody Civil War. But it was also a tragedy for the wider world because the explosion totally destroyed the Public Record Office. Among the most important records destroyed in the explosion at the Four Courts were the rolls of the medieval Irish chancery. This was the secretariat of the government of Ireland, established shortly after the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169. The chancery was responsible for issuing letters in the king’s name under the great seal of Ireland. Copies of many of these outgoing letters were transcribed by the medieval chancery clerks on to long rolls of parchment known as ‘chancery rolls’. All the original Irish chancery rolls were destroyed in the Four Courts blaze.
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