Life
?1480-1540; Baron of the Exchequer, 1520; Breviat of the getting of
Ireland and of the decaie of the same, and treating of ‘the oppressions
of the Irish nobility’; his MS held in Public Record Office [extant
after 1922?]; cited in Ware’s Writers of Ireland, and later
printed in Harris’s Hibernica (1770). DNB DIW
Notes
Brief reference to ‘Baron Finglas’ and other Anglo-Irish chroniclers,
in Edmund Burke, 1st Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, in Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field
Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 1, pp.834ff].
Dictionary of National Biography, fl. 1535; Irish judge; chief justice, 1534-35; his Breviat of the Getting of Ireland and the Decaie of the Same included in Harris’s Hibernica (1770).
There is an allusion in Ware’s Writers of Ireland: ‘Patrick
Finglas, a famous Lawyer, was made chief Baron of the Excehquer by Henry
VIII, aferwards chief Justice of the King’s-Bench: he writ The
Causes of the Calamities of Ireland, and their Remedies.’ ([Harris],
trans., Writers of Ireland, Dublin: Ebenezer Rider 1739 edn., Chap. XII.)
The Breviat of Ireland, by Patrick Finglas and a fifteenth c. letter from the citizens of Cork and Campion and Holinshed quote and to whic the View presently refers, both describe the revival of Irish power during the War of the Roses; and Davies, making use of Finglas, gives an account similar to Spenser’s [in View of the Present State of Ireland, ll.407-21] (Discoverie, pp.90-92; also Davies, Speech on the Irish Parliament, p.398) [Gottfried, Spenser’s Prose Works, Variorum Ed., Vol. 10, p.287.]; ALSO, Finglas writes that ‘The Erle of Ulster might dispend [i.e., gather] a Yere in that Lond above thirty thousand marks (Harris, Hibernica, 1.52); Holinshed explains on a passage based on Campion, ‘the revenues of that earldome, in the daies of Edward the third were reckoned and found to amount unto the some of one and thirty thousand marks yearelie’; and Camden writes in Britannia, ‘suis Comitibus olim trigintia millia Marcarum dependit’; all of these undoubtledy Spenser’s ‘good records’ [View, ll.557-9; Gottfried ed., 295]; ALSO, Finglas, writing long before Spenser, traces the Hibernicisation of the great Anglo-Norman families to their feuds, which arose after the departure of the Duke of clarence in the reign of Ed. III (Walter Harris, 1.41-2.)
[ top ]
Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)