Welsh Journals

was. He had a large family and two parishes to look after, and the former curate and churchwardens were to blame for not delivering his answers on the Paper of Queries." The flustered rector was John Carne of Nash, in the Vale of Glamorgan. He did not say that his "two parishes" were there and not in Nottinghamshire, and that it was at home in Nash Manor that he normally resided. Archbishop Drummond was too much the gentleman to comment. JRG Ignatius Murphy, The Diocese of Killaloe: 1850-1904 [Four Courts Press, Dublin, 1995]. 527 pp. ISBN: 1 85182 124 4. Price £ 30.00 (hardback). The Catholic diocese of Killaloe, straddles the Shannon just above Limerick and takes in large parts of counties Clare and Tipperary. While its inhabitants I write as the son of them might see it as distinguished in many ways, it does have one true claim worthy of record here: it has now an expert diocesan history covering the crucial period in the formation of the Catholic Church in Ireland in modern times. This might not seem important, but it should be noted that only a minority of Catholic dioceses in Ireland possess written histories, and many of those that exist are no more than eulogies of its bishops, lists of building programmes, and some clerical gossip in lieu of social history. However, despite this author not being a professional historian he was a canonist he knew, in Bloch's phrase, the historian's craft, and practised it well in that he took a small area (the diocese) and a small time range (18th and 19th centuries) and sought to lay bare the social structures, the concerns, developments in thinking and attitudes of his subjects, while setting that in a meaningful frame. He planned three volumes to cover the period the size being dictated by his correct decision to quote sources in extenso and give full notes so that his work could be followed up. He saw two of them appear before his death in 1993; requiescat in pace. This volume begins with the Synod of Thurles (1850): a turning-point in the Romanising of the Church's structures, attitudes, and devotions, and basic element in the creation of the recent Irish Catholic Church. Thurles coincided with the re-structuring that took place after the Great Famine (1846-9) with its massive building programme of churches, schools, the establishment of religious houses (male and female), and a new interest in parochial administration with the much reduced population. The changed social environment of the period led directly to the concerns about land that dominated rural politics in the 1870s and 80s how were the clergy to react to its protests and violence. All were farmers' sons and fears about land were closer to their hearts than theological or canonical theory. The church as an organisation benefited greatly from the results of the Land War for a country of 'peasant proprietors' looked to it for social affirmation.