Life
?1600-1653 [Piaras Feiritéir]; Gaelic lord of Ballyferriter, Dingle;
empower to raise force of 600 men by Patrick Fitzmaurice, Lord Kerry;
shifted allegiance to Gaelic interest represented by Finín Mac
Cárrthaigh; wounded in attack on Tralee Castle in 1641; held the
castle till the fall of Ross Castle, Killarney, in 1653; went to Killarney
[?Ross] to arrange terms, promised safe conduct, but seized at Castlemaine
and hanged with a priest and a bishop at the Hill of Sheep in Killarney;
his sophisticated courtly love poetry was edited by Padraig Ó Duinnín
(1903); his best-known poem,
"Leig díot t’airm, a mhacoimh mná [Lay aside thy
arms, maiden]", is addressed to a beautiful woman; there is a monument
by Seamus Murphy to the four chief Kerry Poets in Killarney town; ‘is
biogdhghad bais liom bas mo chomarsan’. DIB DIW OCIL
Works
P[adraig] Ó Duinnín, ed., Dánta Phiarais Feiritéir
[Gaelic League Series, Irish Texts 5] (Dublin 1903; rev. ed. 1934); Seán
Ó Tuama, An Gra i bhFilíocht na h-Uaisle (1988);
see also T. F. O’Rahilly, ‘A poem by Piaras Fe[i]ritéir’,
Eriu, 13 (1942); anthologised in Sean Ó Tuama, ed., An
Duanaire, Poems of the Dispossessed (OUP 1981).
John Caball, The Singing Swordsman (1953/4), biographical novel, with a preface by Daniel Corkery.
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Notes
Brian Cleeve & Anne Brady, A Dictionary of Irish Writers (Dublin: Lilliput 1985); involved in 1641 from religious rather than
political motives; his invention of a Trojan horse in the form of an artificial
sow ended in disaster; Castle surrendered in March 1642; Ferriter held
it until 1653 when he surrendered under safe conduct to Brig-Gen. Nelson
at Killarney; hanged.
Not listed in Dictionary of National Biography and no references in Field Day Anthology, gen. ed. Seamus Deane, (Derry: Field Day 1991).]
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3: Maurice O’Sullivan’s grandfather tells him of the poet and chieftain Pierce Ferriter, a leader of Irish forces in the war of 1641, [who] was captured and hanged in Killarney in 1653 [sic], a prominent figure in the folklore of West Kerry, 883; cited in footnote to Pearse Hutchinson’s poem, ‘The Frost is All Over’ [‘To kill a language is to kill a people ... Honor Croome/Could never make her Kerryman verse English’], 1335n.
University of Ulster Library, Morris Collection holds Pierce Ferriter, Dánta [&c] (Connradh na Gaedhilge 1916).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)