THOUSAND OF DOCUMENTS which were almost destroyed during the 1922 bombardment of the Four Courts have been reconstructed by historians at Trinity College Dublin.
The Four Courts was home to the Public Record Office, which was 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 40 years’ work by a team of researchers at TCD has led to the reconstruction of more than 20,000 government documents produced by the medieval chancery of Ireland. They’re now available online.
The chancery was the secretariat of the government of Ireland and was responsible for issuing letters in the king’s name.
Professor of Medieval History at TCD Seán Duffy said that this is the “largest collection of new records to do with medieval Ireland to be made available in a generation”.
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![This is a unique image because it shows what the medieval Irish chancery rolls looked like before they were destroyed. The jagged edge at the top of the image is where one membrane of sheepskin (parchment) was stitched to the next and rolled up to create a chancery roll. The original is in Latin. In translation it reads: “Memorandum that all the rolls of the Irish chancery with writs, inquisitions, bills and all memoranda touching the said chancery from the time of master Thomas Cantok, formerly chancellor of Ireland [appointed chancellor on 28 October 1291], up to the twenty-eighth year of the reign of Edward I [1299–1300] were burned by accident in the abbey of St Mary near Dublin in the great fire in that abbey, except two rolls of the twenty-eighth year, one of writs patent and the other of writs close.”](https://c0.thejournal.ie/media/2012/05/5.-Facsimile-of-patent-roll-dating-to-1309-2-145x145.jpg)
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