6
  
Spenser’s Castle

AS PART OF the survey of the forfeited lands of the earl of Desmond the estate of Kilcolman, derived from the Irish for ‘Colman’s Church’, was preserved as a distinct unit.¹ The demesne consisted of an inhabitable tower house, perhaps built on the site of an existing Norman structure, with 3,028 acres of mainly pastoral land. There were some other buildings, a church, from which the estate took its name, probably ruined, and a limestone quarry. Kilcolman, although relatively small, was broadly similar to the other estates occupied by English settlers in Munster.² The estate itself consisted of three townlands, Kilcolman East (209 acres); Kilcolman Middle (233 acres); and Kilcolman West (751 acres). The rest of the land was made up from surrounding townlands: Rossgh, East and West, Kylnevalley, Lysnemucky, Ard Adam, Arden-reagh, Carrigyne, Bally Ellis, Kyllmack Ennes, and Ardenbane.³ Spenser had acquired a large squarish block of land stretching down from the Ballyhoura Hills to the Awbeg River, which formed the eastern and southern boundaries of his estate; the western boundary was the Castlepook River, separating his property from that of the Synans.⁴ The estate had first been owned by the De Rupe or Roche family, who had probably erected the castle at some point in the fourteenth century, a date that tallies with the archaeological evidence. It was briefly owned by Sir Henry Sidney in 1568 and was subsequently part of the lands confiscated by the crown after the Munster Rebellion, but was always claimed by the Roches as their own.⁵

The castle is situated on a rocky promontory overlooking a bog, commanding a view of the surrounding hills (Plate 21). Like many other Norman towers it would have been easy to defend from small raiding parties but was not designed to withstand more sustained assault.⁶ In the 1580s the estate was extremely desirable, even though much of the land needed extensive labour if it were to become especially profitable. Moreover, the plot was relatively isolated, and would have been surrounded by woods, a common problem on the Plantation, where settlers were dispersed throughout the different parts of the 300,000 acres that the Desmonds had acquired piecemeal over hundreds of years.⁷ A letter from Sir John Perrot to the Privy Council (25 October 1584) lists Kilcolman as one of the castles that are to be fortified, its strategic importance above the rich, fertile Blackwater Valley vital to guard the route between the Boggeragh and Nagle Mountains down to Cork.⁸ Accordingly, Spenser’s house was one of many small settlements established and developed along the valley in the 1580s.⁹ Close to the towns of Buttevant and Mallow, it would have been a convenient site for someone who had to travel north to Limerick; south to Cork; and across country north-east to the midland fortresses of Clonmel, Kilkenny, and Carlow, on the route to Dublin. Spenser would indeed have had to travel frequently—as part of an armed convoy—along the established routes in the wide valleys between the Ballyhoura and Mullaghareirk mountains to Limerick; and between the Galtee and Knockmealdown mountains to the midlands.¹⁰ Densely forested areas, in particular on the sides of the Ballyhouras and Galtees and in the Vale of Aherlow, would have been carefully avoided by the English settlers, who tried to clear away as much forest land as they could.¹¹ The most imposing site that he would have passed numerous times was the peak of Galtymore, the highest point in south Munster at 919 metres, between Limerick and South Tipperary, about thirty miles north-east of Kilcolman. The peak, Dawson’s Table, is visible from virtually every position in the immediate area, which Spenser used as the setting for the debate between Mutabilitie and Jove to determine the fate of the universe in ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ (Plate 22). Spenser would also have made use of the waterways, in particular the Awbeg, which was navigable in this period, and the Blackwater, and would have taken him down to Youghal, probably a more natural port for north Cork settlers to use than Cork city would have been.¹²

Although the road system in Munster was not especially bad—in fact, land travel ‘could be comparatively speedy’ by European standards—virtually all maps of the province produced in this period place heavy emphasis on an extensive system of relatively deep waterways running into the River Lee and on to Cork, as well as the Blackwater, which Spenser celebrates in The Faerie Queene.¹³ The Bristol port books record extensive trade in textiles, principally wool and cloth, hides, and wine (imported), as well as other commodities such playing-cards, metal implements, and paper.¹⁴ However, the first stone bridge over the river was not constructed until 1600, after Spenser’s death, leading to a period of bridge-building spearheaded by Richard Boyle, who saw the value of strategically placed bridges in the province, which then enabled the development of the road system.¹⁵ A ‘rough’ map of Munster preserved in the National Archives, which belonged to Burghley, represents the province in terms of exaggerated, wide waterways, showing that they were seen as the principal means of communication in Munster, the passage along the Blackwater to Youghal being one of three main routes (Figure 8).¹⁶ Spenser would have been able to access the Blackwater from its tributary, the Awbeg, immediately south of his estate, which would further explain his expressed enthusiasm for rivers in his work, especially as this route would have connected him to Elizabeth Boyle, who would become his second wife.

Figure 8. ‘Rough’ map of Munster (1586), with annotations by Lord Burghley. Reproduced with kind permission of the National Archives.

Three thousand acres was a substantial estate, even though it was one of the smallest allotments, or seigniories, distributed to an undertaker, who signed the original treaty establishing the Plantation and who agreed to populate, run, and maintain the estate.¹⁷ Land was first granted in divisions of 12,000, 10,000, 8,000, 6,000, and 4,000 acres, although, probably through a misunderstanding, Sir Walter Ralegh obtained a gargantuan estate of three and a half seigniories totalling some 42,000 acres to the south-east of Cork at Youghal, demonstrating his central importance to the enterprise.¹⁸ There were clear rules about how the lands were to be farmed, although these were changed later on. In a seigniory of 12,000 acres the undertaker was to have 1,600 acres (later changed to 2,100); a chief farmer 400 acres; other farmers plots of 300 and 200 acres; fourteen freeholders 300 acres each; and forty copyholders 100 acres each—which left 800 acres over for mesne (i.e., held by the undertaker to distribute as he saw fit).¹⁹ We know little about the actual running of Spenser’s estate, although Spenser records in his return to the commissioners that he had six households there. It is likely that there was a similar structure to other working estates, with a pecking order among the farmers and tenants working for the undertaker. Although tenants were supposed to be English, the 1611 ‘Inquisition’ found that many freeholders and farmers were Irish, undoubtedly given land by undertakers unable to fulfil their obligations.²⁰ Spenser’s estate, however well run, would have been no different.

Kilcolman was granted first to Andrew Reade, an undertaker from Faccombe, Hampshire, a lawyer who was probably closely connected to Sir Henry Wallop, whose estates were about twenty miles away, and who was by far the most important local landowner in east Hampshire.²¹ Reade’s family, like the Wallops, were involved in numerous land deals, and one of Reade’s family, Richard, dealt directly with their grander western neighbours. Andrew Reade seems to have been trusted by his social superiors, as Spenser was in Ireland, to take part in important land transactions. It is unlikely that Reade ever set foot on the Irish estate he acquired, and it is possible that he was involved in a speculative plan that was always designed to benefit Spenser.²² This would explain why Spenser was prepared to move down to Munster while he still had to keep travelling back to Dublin, in contrast to Bryskett, who looked to get back to England as often as he could. Certainly, the acquisition of Kilcolman looms large in the documents that detail Spenser’s life and his own representation of himself once his publishing career was reignited in 1590.²³ If so, Spenser may well have occupied the estate before the legal documents indicate that he did, perhaps as early as 1587, when it was assigned to Reade on 14 March.²⁴ Significantly enough, there are no records after this date of Spenser in Dublin, suggesting that his move to the south-west was now complete. Spenser and Reade had drawn up an agreement whereby Spenser would occupy the lands and assume control of the estate if Reade had not done so by 22 May 1589, a clear indication that Reade had never had plans to live there.²⁵

Spenser provided a series of answers to a list of ‘Articles of Instructions given in charge to the Commissioners for examining & inquiring of her Maiesties attained landes past to the vundertakers’ in May–June 1589, further indicating that he and his family had probably occupied the estate some time before. Spenser’s answer is preserved in the Irish State Papers alongside those provided by his neighbours and the other undertakers throughout Munster, a sign of how seriously such documents were taken by the authorities.²⁶ It was vital to have as much information about the area as possible so that it could be controlled and governed by the undertakers on behalf of the crown. It was their duty to use the legal system and raise an army in order to transform the land from a rebellious backwater into a flourishing, anglicized outpost, an expansion of England. This is the message of such treatises as Robert Payne’s ‘hugely optimistic tract’, A Brief Description of Ireland (1589), which assured would-be colonists that the land was so much more fertile than in England (a common theme in descriptions of the province), the consequent yields of crops so much more abundant, and the Irish so loyal that only a fool would not take up the exciting new opportunity on offer to settle in Munster.²⁷ Indeed, the title of Payne’s short treatise, which anticipates Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), suggests a deliberate colonial rivalry, with Munster undertakers like Payne trying to persuade English tenants that they would be better off travelling within the British Isles rather than risking all by sailing across the Atlantic, however attractive that prospect might seem.²⁸ Harriot, a client of Ralegh’s, had leased Molana Abbey near Youghal (Plate 23), in August 1589, part of Ralegh’s extensive estates on the Munster Plantation, something that Payne undoubtedly knew.²⁹ Harriot may well have been living there soon after that date, and records show that he spent time in Ireland in the 1590s, as did another Ralegh client, the artist John White.³⁰ Spenser probably knew—or, at least, encountered—Harriot, a self-made intellectual commoner like Spenser, who lived close to the town where he met and wooed his second wife, as well as White.³¹ If he travelled down the Blackwater to Youghal Spenser would have passed Molana. Spenser names the nymph who is tricked by Faunus into revealing the whereabouts of Diana in ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’, Molanna, perhaps a glancing reference to Harriot’s bold scientific explorations, which provided him with a contemporary reputation as a daring atheist.³²

Spenser’s answers to the commissioners give us an indication of the estate in 1589, which suggests that even if he had occupied it earlier than May 1589, Kilcolman was not yet up and running as an English concern.³³ In his seven responses Spenser confirms his desire to bring over settlers from England, as he was required to do, but states that he has at present only six ‘householdes of English people vpon his land’, because the patent had not yet been confirmed. However, he asserts that ‘sondry honest persons in Eng[land] have promised to come ouer to in habit his land so sone as his pat[ent]’ was granted. He had not yet divided the lands up for the tenants for the same reasons, and also states that he has not received the full complement of 4,000 he was granted, as ‘there wanteth of his dew Proporcion m [1,000] acres as he supposeth at the least’.³⁴ It appears that he never received this last section of his promised estate. In a survey undertaken in late 1591 the estate is confirmed as 3,028 acres, and Spenser, like other undertakers, was to pay a reduced rent until 1595 of £15. 13s. 9d. per annum, and, after that, the larger sum of £22. 12s. 11d.³⁵

Spenser had more pressing, immediate concerns than obtaining what he felt was his due. His right to the estate was immediately challenged by Lord Maurice Roche of Fermoy (d. 1600), from whose estate the lands had been escheated.³⁶ Roche had first complained about the loss of his lands on 3 September 1588, but had received no satisfaction.³⁷ He wrote a number of times to Ormond, Walsingham, and the queen throughout 1589, finally writing to Elizabeth and Walsingham on 12 October 1589, detailing the list of the injuries done to him by the undertakers, mentioning Spenser by name, as well as his neighbours on the Plantation: George Browne, Hugh Cuffe, Arthur Hyde, and Jesse Smythes.³⁸ Roche, an Old English gentleman, described by the Four Masters as ‘a young man distinguished for his gentleness, personal figure, and learning in Latin, Irish, and English’, was clearly convinced that he had a prior legal right to the lands.³⁹ In writing directly to the queen, Roche appears to have been hoping that he could appeal to their ancient lineage against the vulgar New English upstarts who had usurped his ancient rights, a common feature of Irish appeals to monarchs after the Reformation and Act of Kingship of 1541.⁴⁰ Roche makes a convincing case that he has been cheated of his rightful possessions by the New English who have appropriated his property and abused his tenants: ‘Edmund Spenser falsely pretending title to certain castles and 16 ploughlands, hath taken possession thereof. Also, by threatening and menacing the said Lord Roche’s tenants, and by seizing their cattle, and beating Lord Roche’s servants and bailiffs he has wasted 6 ploughlands of his Lordships lands.’ More specifically, Roche accuses Spenser of abusing his official position: ‘by collo^r of his office and by makinge of corrupt Bargaines w^th certaine psons pretendinge falslie title to p[ar]cell of the L. Roches lau[n]des disposed the said L. Roche of certaine castles and xvi plough laundes’.⁴¹

Roche’s case is entirely plausible and shows that he—or whoever was acting on his behalf—had a sophisticated knowledge of English law, as well as how he might best proceed by eventually bypassing the courts which, as his first attempt indicates, were unlikely to be sympathetic to his cause.⁴² ‘Waste’ is a technical legal term, which seems to have been used in its precise meaning by Lord Roche. As Andrew Zurcher has noted, ‘The crime of waste is basically one committed by the temporary custodian of an estate against its future possessor(s), and amounts to the stripping of that estate of its capital assets—timber, soil, mineral or metal deposits, and any buildings.’⁴³ Roche, showing that he was indeed the educated man that the Four Masters claimed he was, is arguing that Spenser and the other undertakers are guilty of the crime of abusing the land, razing to the ground what has been cultivated and built, and that they are plunderers not planters. Roche, an Anglo-Norman settler, claimed that he was the rightful owner of the estate and that the queen should recognize that her interests would be best served by returning it to him. Equally important is Roche’s other claim that Spenser has abused his office and, together with his fellow undertakers, has made corrupt bargains to obtain false titles to the land. We know that this is exactly what many of the undertakers and government employees did, and that Bryskett, Fenton, and Richard Boyle, all working in government offices and closely associated with Spenser, made their fortunes this way. Either Roche knew that Spenser had been helped by Wallop—who was, after all, one of the commissioners assigned to deal with the 574,645 acres that had come into the crown’s possession—and others to obtain his estates, as he had been by Grey some years before, perhaps because Roche had an informant in the Munster civil service,⁴⁴ or Roche was asserting that this was the general practice among the New English and so he was calculating that making such an accusation was almost certain to be vindicated in court.

Roche’s testimony provides further evidence that Spenser’s acquisition of Kilcolman was carefully prepared and planned. The undertakers’ bill against Lord Roche, submitted on the same day (which demonstrates how each party carefully crafted their formal suit), takes an entirely different tack:

Against the Lord Roche.

Imprimis the Lord Roche in Iuly 1586 and at sundry tymes before & after relieved & maynteyned one Kedagh Okelly a proclaimed Traitour being his fosterbrother & caused the Sessoures man [i. e., assessor], who had brought into the countrey, to bee apprehended And when the sayd Kedagh was sought for he convayed him away.

Iames birne

Item the said Lord secretly vpon the first report of the Spaniardes coming towards this countrey caused powder & munition to bee made in a privy place of his house, from the knowledge of his owne servauntes

mr Mc Hendry

Item the said Lord vseth in his grace to pray that god would take away this heavy hand from them and speaketh il of the gouernment, & hath vttered wordes of contempt of her Maiesties lawes calling them vniust.

mr Edmound Spencer

Iames byrne⁴⁵

Only after these first three accusations do the undertakers start to list Roche’s specific crimes against them (imprisoning tenants, stealing a cow, concealing lands from the queen). While Roche tries to make the case hinge on issues of lawful land possession and usage, the settlers try to move the case onto the question of loyalty and treason. The different approaches to the dispute indicate how far apart the mental and social worlds of natives and newcomers really were and how much Irish society would be transformed by the intrusion of New English settlers.⁴⁶ The dispute suggests that, whatever colonial writers like Robert Payne asserted, far from seeing Munster as an extended part of England, the undertakers were acutely aware that it was a hostile land that they had somehow to make civilized. English law may well be the means of achieving this aim, but the real issue was the fundamental loyalty of the region to the crown. It should not surprise us that as the case dragged on with no clear-cut solution, and as the Roche family stepped up their hostility to the colonists, Spenser should lose all faith in the wisdom of spreading English law to Ireland before the loyalty of the inhabitants had been secured.⁴⁷ Spenser’s desire for an estate underpinned his literary aspirations, the pastoral retreat providing the material base for the epic poetry, though his quest also compromised his lofty ideals, a conflict he clearly understood. But he would not have been alone in placing such a high value on the acquisition of property in early modern England.

Nevertheless, just as Roche’s case against the undertakers appears entirely plausible, so does the undertakers’ case against Roche, if taken on their terms. Roche had, in fact, been indicted for rebellion in 1580, an act that had almost cost him his estate. In a long letter on miscellaneous matters dated 20 May, Lord Justice Pelham had informed the Council in England that Maurice Roche had joined with Viscount Barry’s son in rebellion, but had changed his mind and given himself up. He blamed his father’s severe parenting, for which the angry Lord Roche threatened to disinherit him. Pelham, however, claimed that it was in everyone’s interests that the Roches be reconciled as they were such significant landowners in the Cork area.⁴⁸ Roche was therefore known to the English as a rebel who had supported the Fitzmaurice Rebellion, which helped to start the Desmond Wars and which, in turn, led to the establishment of the Plantation, a fact that could not have escaped an informed colonist such as Spenser. Furthermore, Roche’s wife, Eleanor, was the niece of James Fitzjohn Fitzgerald, fourteenth earl of Desmond, and the sister of the ‘arch traitor’, James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, who had landed at Smerwick.⁴⁹ Again, Spenser must have been aware of this link between them, so the tactics employed by the undertakers make perfect sense as a means of achieving their desire of claiming their entitlement to Munster.⁵⁰

The case between the undertakers and Roche was clearly a significant one: few other undertakers had their claims to land challenged as directly and forcefully as Spenser’s was, with an opponent who had much better access to the queen and her advisers than he did. Although there were a number of surprises, cases usually went the way of the settlers.⁵¹ Perhaps Spenser, coming from a society in which disputes over land and other matters were part of daily life, had been surprised at the level of resistance to his claims, given the stated aims of the government to make Ireland loyal and English.⁵² When he was formally granted Kilcolman on 26 October 1590, Spenser’s choice of the name for his new estate is a sign of his acceptance of the complicated and uncertain route by which he had acquired it. He was entitled to ‘hold for ever, in fee farm, by the name of “Hap Hazard”, by fealty, in common socage’.⁵³ The name, reflected the fact that the property was one he could not have expected to possess just over ten years earlier, as well as the current struggle with Lord Roche, which he knew would stretch into the foreseeable future.⁵⁴

Spenser had to deal with other land disputes involving his Irish neighbours. An undated manuscript in Spenser’s hand grants a portion of his lands to ‘MacHenry’, possibly Edmond MacHenry, an Irish landowner who pressed claims against Henry Billingsley, an undertaker who held an 11,800-acre estate at Kilfinny, Limerick, just above that of Spenser’s immediate neighbour, Hugh Cuffe.⁵⁵ The document, in Spenser’s secretary hand, reads:

Be it knowen to all men by these presentes that I Edmund Spenser of Kilcolman estate doe giue vnto mac Henry the keeping of all the woodes which I haue in Balliganim & of the rushes & brakes without making any spoyle thereof & also doe covenant with him that he shall haue one house within the bawne of Richardston for him self & his catell in tyme of warre. And also within the space of vij yeares to repayre the castle of Richardston afore sayd & in all other thinges to vse good neighbour hood to him & his

Edmund Spenser⁵⁶

Richardstown is a mile immediately west of Doneraile, and the woods formed the most southerly section of Spenser’s estate. The grant, probably made in 1589 when many claims were lodged against the newly established undertakers, raises several interesting issues about life on the Plantation and the part that Spenser played. The clause referring to ‘spoyle’ suggests that there was considerable conflict between undertakers and natives and the need for Spenser to establish a ‘bawn’ (a defensive wall) to protect MacHenry’s cattle ‘in tyme of warre’ further implies that there was fear of future aggression. Perhaps these were standard clauses agreed by lawyers, but we do not have enough comparable documents available to be confident of this. It is possible that Spenser was a ‘good colonist’ and sought to return land that rightfully belonged to someone else, holding on only to what he felt was his, and that he was here correcting the excesses of his tenants.⁵⁷ More plausibly, I think, it suggests that either Spenser was coerced into acting against his interests, feeling that he had no choice but to comply with an irate neighbour, or that he wanted to win over MacHenry as a potential ally against a more powerful branch of the Roches. The MacHenrys were related to the Roches, which shows that English settlers simply had to work with their Irish neighbours, as the history of the Spenser family’s interactions with the Nagles, Roches, and Synans demonstrates.⁵⁸ Sylvanus Spenser married one of the Nagles who owned Ballynamona Castle on the banks of the Awbeg, only about six miles from Kilcolman, which surely explains how they met, and shows how closely local families interacted in Ireland, as they did in England (Plate 24).

Furthermore, Spenser did eventually lose two of his ploughlands to another Irishman of Anglo-Norman descent, Nicholas Synan [Shynan], also known as McShane and Shane Barry. The Synans were another long-established Anglo-Norman family whose base was in Kilbolane, near Charleville, on the northern side of the Ballyhoura hills. They had built Richardstown Castle, completed in 1291, as well as Castlepook (1380), fortified dwellings immediately bordering on the Kilcolman estates, but their adherence to Catholicism meant that their power was on the wane and that most of their lands were lost by the early seventeenth century.⁵⁹ The case brought before the Munster commissioners in 1592 shows that this dispute was of exactly the same nature as Roche’s case against Spenser:

Edmond Spencer deft. for Ardadam a plowe land & Killoyenesie, half a plowe land, Balliellicie a plo: lande & Ardgilbert dip lo: land.

The pts [i.e., the plaintive, Synan] tytle ys by discents from his auncestors. The defendt saith they were pcells of Sr John of Desmondes landes, viz. pcell of Kilcolman and Rosacke to wch her Matie is intitled.

The case was duly heard by the sheriff in Cork, either Florence O’Driscoll of Downshed or Hugh Cuffe, in front of a jury who weighed up the evidence and decided that ‘Ardadam … the pt shall recover until better mater appeare for her Matie or for the defenndt’, but that Balliellice ‘ys passed to the defendt at one plowe land’. Moreover, ‘the defendt ys abated the rent of two plo: landes, viz after the rate of 28 plowe landes to a Seignorie of xijm [12,000] acres, and after the rate of a C [100] marks to a seignorie of xijm [12,000] acres in the Countie of Corke’.⁶⁰

The case—as well as the grant to MacHenry—shows the determination of the authorities in Munster to bring the due process of English law to the province even if individual cases went against the undertakers who had been recruited to plant English customs and practices in Ireland. This policy often had the unfortunate effect of leaving undertakers isolated and vulnerable as settlers surrounded by understandably hostile Irish landowners.⁶¹ Indeed, as Anthony Sheehan has pointed out, English authorities were by no means always committed to supporting the New English in Ireland, and ‘the government commission of 1592 was quite willing to consider cases against the undertakers and their tenants and to rule in favour of the native claimant’.⁶² Synan was awarded the ploughlands because Spenser and the crown could not prove that they were part of the confiscated Kilcolman estate so they reverted to the original owner’s possession. To do otherwise was to create a dangerous precedent, which is why English officials were so keen to excavate records of landholding.⁶³ The rate of rent on the ploughlands was calculated in terms of the general principles of the Plantation so that all proceeded exactly as matters would have done had the case been heard in England by one of the Chancery courts which Spenser knew well and from which he later sought a judgement.⁶⁴ Given the finely balanced and problematic situation in which Spenser found himself he was undoubtedly prescient in naming his property as he did. Certainly, Nicholas Synan, like Lord Roche, was not always hostile to the English authorities and in 1594 cooperated in a land deal with Sir Thomas Norris, suggesting that even on the cusp of the Nine Years War, it was often business as usual on the Plantation.⁶⁵

In the early seventeenth century Spenser’s eldest son, Sylvanus, married Ellen Nagle, a daughter of David Nagle, from a powerful Catholic Anglo-Irish family who held extensive lands east of Kilcolman around the Nagle Mountains.⁶⁶ These Spensers brought their children up as Catholics so that by the 1630s both Spenser sons had become Catholic.⁶⁷ William, the second son who eventually inherited the Kilcolman estate, lost a significant part of the family lands in 1654 when they were confiscated by Cromwellian soldiers. This further complicates our understanding of the religious allegiances of the Spensers and it might further explain why A View makes so little mention of religion.⁶⁸ Either the Spensers had relatively cordial relationships with most of their neighbours, perhaps until the rebellion threatened to overthrow the Plantation in the mid-1590s; or English and Irish found it easier to marry after English power was secured in 1601; probably both. Perhaps the pressure for religious and social conformity after the effective collapse of the Elizabethan Reformation was simply too great to resist.⁶⁹ Certainly, by the early seventeenth century marriage between natives and incomers was common, especially in more stable areas.⁷⁰

It is hard to imagine that this union of significant local families could have taken place without some form of negotiation, especially if we consider the extent of the property involved. Documents from the 1630s and 1640s show that Sylvanus and William Spenser were dealing in land with the Nagles, perhaps selling parts of the estate to cover debts, or perhaps the families were working together to establish the unity of their holdings.⁷¹ Spenser’s family were prepared to secure their future through intermarriage, although whether this was only possible after his death is not easy to determine. Nevertheless, both of Spenser’s eldest grandchildren were known as Catholics: Hugolin, Peregrine’s eldest son, and the heir to the other Spenser estates at Renny, either converting once he had left home or preserving his faith into adulthood and never seeing fit to renounce it, unlike his eldest cousin. At the very least their stories suggest that it is possible that both of Spenser’s sons found it easy to adopt local religious practices, something that became more obvious a generation later. That the Spenser household was religious we cannot doubt; what version of religion was practised—and, concomitantly, what sort of religion was forbidden—is much harder to ascertain.

The Kilcolman estate formed part of a nexus of seigniories immediately north of the Blackwater. Spenser’s closest neighbour to the south was Thomas Norris, to whom Spenser appears to have been closely allied.⁷² Norris had the 6,000-acre seigniory of Mallow, the nearest town of any significance, where he built a large castellated house, ‘the only surviving house built by an undertaker on his demense’.⁷³ The impressive structure was based around a number of polygonal towers to provide an imposing grandeur, and was probably intended for his daughter.⁷⁴ Mallow was a relatively small settlement with no more than 200 houses in 1641, although it did have two castles, one at either end.⁷⁵ To the east of Norris was Thomas Saye, about whom nothing is known, who had the seigniory of Carriglemlery, which occupied 5,778 acres. To the immediate north was Hugh Cuffe, who had the larger seigniory of Kilmore, a total of 12,000 acres, although he was dogged with legal disputes with his neighbours, Ellen Fitzedmond Gibbon and James MacShane, which eventually reduced the size of his holdings.⁷⁶ Cuffe was probably related to Henry Cuffe, Essex’s secretary, and may have been his brother. Henry was executed in 1601 after Essex’s failed coup, and notorious for teaching the earl how to use a classical education to ferment rebellion.⁷⁷ If so, then, given that the Cuffes were a West Country family from near Taunton, who had strong links with the Paulet family, it is possible that Cuffe acquired his estate through a Ralegh connection, as the Raleghs also had strong links to the Paulets, which might in turn have linked Cuffe to Spenser before they both took up their lands.⁷⁸ Cuffe, who often complained bitterly of the hardships that his Irish estates caused him, eventually sold his lands to the Audley family.⁷⁹

It is also possible that Cuffe was the ‘H. C.’ who wrote the manuscript ‘Dialogue of Peregrynne and Silvynnus’, which was then presented to the earl of Essex, an attribution which would make sense in terms of the link between the undertakers and the fact that the author of that dialogue was influenced by A View. The opening of the work, when Silvynus encounters his brother, Peregryn, in London, having not seen him ‘full one yeare and a half’, resembles the start of Spenser’s dialogue when Eudoxus meets Irenius, who has just returned from Ireland.⁸⁰ In his second speech Silvynus states that Ireland is ‘a country of wrath’, a pun that would appear to owe much to the often repeated pun that Ireland was a ‘land of Ire’, a quibble made in Amoretti 22, when the poet states that he needs to ‘builde an altar to appease her yre’, the possessive pronoun referring to his betrothed, but, also, in the form of a synecdoche, Ireland.⁸¹ Unfortunately, it is difficult to prove that the author was Cuffe. Whoever wrote the dialogue had extensive knowledge of the political situation in the Irish midlands and may have acted as an Irish-speaking spy among the Irish community in London for Burghley, and we have no evidence that Cuffe acted in this capacity.⁸²

Whatever the truth, Spenser is more likely to have had extensive contact with Cuffe than most of the settlers, especially given their common foe, Lord Roche, and what we can assume were their shared intellectual interests. Furthermore, Cuffe, like Spenser, served as sheriff of Cork (1592–3), indicating that they were regarded in similar terms by their peers and superiors and so may also have had contact through official circles.⁸³ It has long been acknowledged that Spenser would have had a number of like-minded friends and associates on the Plantation, notably Bryskett, whom he had known before, Ralegh, and Richard Beacon.⁸⁴ Beacon’s seigniory of 6,000 acres at Clandonnell Roe was the furthest east of all the planters, beyond those of Ralegh and Sir Christopher Hatton, a hundred miles or so from Kilcolman; his other lands were in west Cork.⁸⁵ Ralegh’s at Youghal was over sixty miles away, a considerable journey anywhere in early modern Europe, but especially in a country with such a limited system of roads (albeit one that Spenser must have often made).

Spenser knew how to ride, and would have learned by the time he left Cambridge, as it would have been the easiest way of travelling to Harvey’s house in Saffron Walden. Riding would have been a skill that any aspirational gentleman would have had to master, its very familiarity, in this case, explaining a lack of references to horsemanship. More importantly, it would have been essential for the sort of work Spenser did, first as a carrier of messages, then as a secretary. The opening stanza of the first canto of The Faerie Queene advertises his familiarity with riding techniques, skills, and terminology:

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,
Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,
The cruell markes of many’ a bloudy fielde;
Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield:
His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,
As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:
Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,
As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt. (I.i.1)

‘[P]ricking’ in line 1 is a multivalent pun, a brilliant way for Spenser to relaunch his career after such a long absence and to remind readers that a premier and unsettling literary talent was back in print.⁸⁶ There is a sexual reference, especially relevant to the knight, given his particular failings in Book I. More significantly here, ‘pricking’ meant both spurring a horse on, which is obvious enough, and writing, both because a pen had to ‘prick’ the paper, and because a secretary, or any other functionary eager to produce a neat document, would use a pin to make marks in the margin so that the document could be produced in straight lines across the page (‘pricking’), as, for example, was the case with Grey’s letter to the queen dated 12 November 1580, written out in Spenser’s best formal italic hand.⁸⁷ One of the key meanings of the opening line is the connection made between Spenser’s day job and his literary career: he has ‘pricked’ out his poem just as he has spurred his horse around Ireland in the service of the state. The Red-Cross Knight has to control his ‘angry steede’, which is champing at the bit, and not let the ‘curbe’, the strap passing under the lower jaw of the horse, lead him. He has to master the skill of horsemanship if he wants to get to where he needs to go.⁸⁸ Spenser is also telling the reader that it is only through acquiring this skill that he has been able to accumulate the means to enable him to write the poem, a further sign of the vital significance of horses in early modern England.

Spenser would have been able to ride out to see Ralegh and others on the Plantation, but it is unlikely that he did so very often, given the difficulties of early modern transport, the expense, the labour involved, and the fear of the dispossessed native population, a problem often signalled in Spenser’s poetry. This might suggest that the image of the Red-Cross Knight on his charger was rather closer to the norm for English travellers in Ireland in this period than has often been realized.⁸⁹ He would have had to travel around the area when he was acting for the government, in particular to Limerick and Cork for the sessions of the Munster Council, and the main roads must have been usable because records show that trade, as well as military operations, took place at regular intervals and without obvious difficulty.

The most important commodity not produced locally was wine, imported from Bordeaux and northern Spain, but salt and iron were also significant staple imports. The major exports were hides, linen, and wool, and undertakers were also given licence to export corn to England and Wales, and many hoped that they could grow lucrative crops such as woad and madder, used in dying.⁹⁰ Woad was a cash crop that could be grown in Ireland free from duty and restrictions, a fact that generated considerable interest in the mid-1580s, not least from Sir Henry Wallop.⁹¹ A Belgian bronze mortar discovered in the Cork area, probably acquired to be melted down and recast, further indicates a trade in metal for remanufacture with Europe.⁹² Traders from the ports would travel into the interior selling wine carried in barrels on horses’ backs, collecting hides and cloth for export.⁹³ Although isolated, Spenser would not have been cut off at Kilcolman and, in addition to his professional duties, he probably made a few extended visits to see other planters such as Ralegh, perhaps Beacon or Warham St Leger. But his closest relationships must surely have been with his nearest neighbours, Cuffe and Norris, as it was unlikely that he spent much time travelling for pleasure. Spenser’s extensive knowledge of the immediate area would also have been acquired from the large number of maps that were available. Map-making had improved dramatically in the late sixteenth century, facilitated in part through the establishment of the Plantation and the consequent need to survey and record the lie of the land and the waterways, to which information Spenser would have had ready access through the Munster Council.⁹⁴

Many of Spenser’s other English neighbours were significantly interconnected, as were most of the undertakers in one way or another.⁹⁵ To the north-east of Kilcolman, one of a ring of seigniories around Limerick, was Ballygibbon held by Richard and Alexander Fitton, totalling 3,026 acres; their brother, Sir Edward Fitton, held Knockainy (11,515 acres), immediately to the north. Sir Edward (1548/9–1606) was another figure who corresponded with Burghley about Irish affairs, many of his letters surviving in the State Papers. He was instrumental in promoting the Munster Plantation, bringing his two brothers over, one of whom, Alexander, was still in Ireland in 1598 acting as his brother’s agent after Sir Edward had returned to Cheshire in debt and disillusioned with the project.⁹⁶ Sir Edward worked closely with the Kerry undertaker Sir Valentine Browne (d. 1589) in the 1580s, whose seigniory at Molahiffe, near Killarney, contained 6,560 acres, to uncover concealed lands for the crown and to help establish the legal basis for the Plantation. Browne, who was the effective leader of the Kerry settlers, was a ‘reluctant mortgagee’ and had to fight a difficult losing battle with the earl of Clanmore, MacCarthy-Mor, when it was revealed that the estate he occupied was made up of lands which had been seized by the earl of Desmond from the MacCarthys, who therefore had a prior claim. This was a common problem on the Plantation as lands that were often assumed to belong to the earl, especially in the 1584 survey, were often either seized by him from other Irish landowners or were ‘chargable’, i.e., the freeholders had been forced to pay him charges such as ‘coyne and livery’ [billeting soldiers free of charge], which affected their status and value.⁹⁷ The loyal earl, understandably enough, wanted them returned and the crown agreed that he had a better claim than Browne did, although a compromise was eventually reached.⁹⁸ East along the Blackwater were Arthur Hyde at the Carrignedy estate (11,766 acres) and Thomas Fleetwood and Marmaduke Redmayne at Cloghley (12,667 acres). Interestingly enough, Fleetwood and Hyde, as well as Sir Edward Fitton, were accused of Catholicism, probably because of family connections, although none of the charges could be substantiated. There was, nevertheless, a constant fear that some of those imported to prevent rebellion may actually have been secretly in sympathy with the native population, undoubtedly another influence on the creeping paranoia that characterizes Spenser’s later writings, and may well have been a significant issue within his household.⁹⁹ Spenser’s other acquaintance, Sir Warham St Leger, held the Carigaline estate (6,000 acres) in south Cork on the River Lee, west of that of Ralegh.¹⁰⁰

Spenser must also have known in some capacity Sir George Carew. He was a cousin of the pioneering colonist Sir Peter Carew (1514?–75), a client of the Cecils, and one of the chief military figures in Ireland, being especially active in Munster, where he inherited his cousin’s contested claims to land made through the research of John Hooker, author of the Irish section in Holinshed’s Chronicles, which Spenser knew well.¹⁰¹ Carew’s brother, also called Peter, had been killed at Glenmalure, an event Spenser witnessed, and, partly as a result, George was known for his bitter hatred towards the Irish, playing a key role in the defeat of Hugh O’Neill, after he became president of Munster in 1600, as his surviving papers demonstrate.¹⁰² Carew translated part of Don Alonso de Ercilla’s Spanish military epic describing the brutal conquest of Chile, The Historie of Aravcana, at some point during his time in Ireland, rendering sections of the first sixteen of the thirty-seven cantos in English prose. Carew’s translation remained in manuscript, so would not necessarily have been seen by Spenser even if it was composed before his death (it was probably written when Carew was president of Munster), as Carew was unlikely to have socialized with a relatively lowly official, albeit an emerging major poet. But the work suggests another shared intellectual concern between Spenser and other English officials living in Ireland, perhaps part of a wider culture of martial literature used as a way of thinking about conflict and conquest.¹⁰³

Spenser would have spent most of his time when in Munster either on official/state/council business, or on his estate. Probably, as he became more established and affluent, he spent less time involved in official duties but paid others to carry out tasks assigned to him, as others had once used him, and as he had done before. Given his extraordinary rate of productivity in his final years, Spenser must have spent a great deal of his time writing and preparing works for publication.¹⁰⁴ Also, bearing in mind that he made two extended visits to England, Spenser undoubtedly employed a bailiff to run his estate, making sure that he could concentrate on his other duties when he had them, and could carry on with his writing.¹⁰⁵

Spenser was involved in yet another dispute over landownership with Robert Synan, around the claim to part of the Castlepook estate, the territory to the east of Kilcolman, which carried on upwards into the Ballyhoura Mountains. Castlepook was the ancestral home of the Synans, who owed allegiance and rent to the Roches, and was well known for its substantial cave, home to the benign giant, Phooka, who secretly ground corn for farmers at night.¹⁰⁶ The estates were separated by the Castlepook and Bregog rivers, which merged just over a mile east of Kilcolman Castle, the latter referred to in Colin Clout and ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’.¹⁰⁷ Spenser’s claim was entered on 17 November 1596 through William Hiernane, husbandman, and it is likely that he was the man Spenser trusted to run his estate, so he was probably one of the farmers mentioned in the hierarchy of tenants in each seigniory.¹⁰⁸ Spenser would have left the everyday running of the estate to Hiernane, giving himself time to manage his own affairs.

How much contact Spenser would have had with Irish speakers, or whether he spoke or read much Irish, is controversial and difficult to determine. Assuming that he did employ someone to run his estate, there was no need for Spenser to have to deal with the many Irish speakers who made up the majority of the population. The Synans spoke Irish, as did the Roches, but they also would have spoken English, and, given the lawsuits that took place, it is unlikely that Spenser had that much direct contact with them. Very few English people appear to have mastered Irish, rare exceptions being Thomas Lee, but he spoke only what he called ‘broken Irishe’, and, interestingly enough, Roger Boyle, son of the earl of Cork, who had ‘Irish sufficient to be his father’s interpreter’.¹⁰⁹ Most, even experienced senior officials who had spent much time in the country, relied on interpreters, unless they married Irish women. The Irish vocabulary that Spenser uses in A View is relatively small and does not demonstrate that he had any real fluency in speaking the language. Furthermore, he often seems to cite words as he heard them rather than understanding their spelling.¹¹⁰ Irenius uses only twenty-nine loanwords of Irish, and many of his derivations are wrong, relying on earlier English misunderstandings. John Draper’s conclusion that Spenser had no more than ‘a slight conversational [grasp of Irish] and some legal vocabulary’, would seem to be accurate, as regards Spenser’s spoken knowledge.¹¹¹ It was clearly possible to function effectively in the civil service, the army, or on a plantation, without an extensive knowledge of spoken Irish, especially if one lived as part of an English family. After all, settlers were not merely discouraged from mixing with the Irish: it was against the law.¹¹²

On the other hand, a case can be made that intellectuals like Spenser would have disguised the amount of Irish they knew for fear of exposing themselves to suspicion, and in order not to undermine the case that Ireland needed immediate help from England in order to transform a land hostile to English manners, customs, civility, and order. A certain amount of Irish was necessary for everyday purposes and, as Richard Stanihurst noted, inhabitants of towns ‘speak English and Irish also because of their daily commerce with their Irish neighbours’.¹¹³ In A View Irenius refers to the Irish bards on two occasions: first, to censure the type of false history that they have produced; and, second, to explain the nature of the poetry, which he finds skilful and admirable in form, but pernicious and subversive in content. Irenius, who must at this point be speaking as Spenser, although the fictional identity provides yet another layer of protection, explains that he has ‘Cawsed diuerse of them to be translated vnto me that I might vnderstande them’.¹¹⁴ The use of the passive ensures that the exact nature and circumstances of the translation cannot be recovered, a characteristic device enabling English speakers to distance themselves from Irish.¹¹⁵ Spenser’s work suggests that he had an extensive knowledge of Irish literature and history, however this was acquired.¹¹⁶ For Richard McCabe, Spenser must have had a good reading knowledge of extremely difficult Irish in order to understand the Irish poetry that interested him, and A View acknowledges that he knew far more than he was admitting (although this does not prove that he could have spoken demotic Gaelic).¹¹⁷ Arguments have been advanced that Spenser would have been taught by Irish Lord Roche’s bard, Teig Olyve, or the earl of Ormond’s brehon (Irish) lawyer, MacClancy, but there is no surviving evidence and such cooperation is somewhat implausible.¹¹⁸ Yet the truth must be that either Spenser developed an advanced reading knowledge of Irish, or that he worked with Irish speakers who helped him read the works that he describes and those that he evidently used elsewhere. These would have included the Leabhar Gabhála (The Book of Invasions), a collection of Middle Irish poems and prose that chronicles the history of Ireland from the creation of the world to the Middle Ages, a work that owed much to Eusebius’ Chronicon, the standard history of the world up to AD 325.¹¹⁹

The English translator of Eusebius’ other major work, The Ancient Ecclesiastical Histories (1577), Meredith Hanmer (1543–1604), had moved to Ireland to take up a number of ecclesiastical livings in or before 1591.¹²⁰ Hanmer’s patrons were the earl of Ormond and the Norris brothers, whom he served as chaplain in the early 1590s. Hanmer must have known Spenser through the latter connection—if not other ways, as he later became warden of St Mary’s church, Youghal—and he provides a link between Spenser and Ormond, one of the recipients of a dedicatory sonnet in the first edition of The Faerie Queene.¹²¹ Hanmer was a tenacious antiquarian, and he wrote to Burghley in 1594 to tell him that he was collecting as many of the country’s surviving documents as he could find. His collection of historical notes and documents, accumulated between 1601 and 1603, is preserved in the State Papers and shows signs that he was attempting to understand Irish as well as preserving records. One undated passage contains a description of the story of Murrogh O’Brien’s foster mother drinking his blood, surely taken from a manuscript of Spenser’s View, a further sign of the links between the two men.¹²² The fruits of his research were later published posthumously as A Chronicle of Ireland in James Ware’s Ancient Irish Histories (1633), the volume that also contained the first edition of A View.¹²³ Hanmer’s work suggests that there were Englishmen on the Plantation who were interested in Irish history and culture, however hostile they may have been to other aspects of Irish life (Hanmer had become well known as the chief crown opponent of Edmund Campion, so he is unlikely to have been ignorant of the course of the Desmond Rebellion, or especially sympathetic to the Irish Catholic cause). Perhaps Spenser acquired what knowledge he had of Irish from the same source as Hanmer, or even from Hanmer himself. Certainly they both had similar scholarly interests, as well as significant patrons in common.¹²⁴

English representations of Ireland, including Spenser’s own in A View, characterize Irish society as pastoral in character, the Irish living a nomadic life, following cattle herds around the country, a practice known as ‘bolleying’.¹²⁵ In England, arable farming was regarded as inherently superior to pasture farming, which was one reason for the widely held perception that the Irish, as they were savages, could not practise sustained and settled agricultural practices.¹²⁶ But, while this may well have been the view of Irish society held by most people in England, settlers in Ireland would have known that this representation did not accurately describe the more sophisticated and complex reality of Irish agricultural and social practices. Spenser’s description is a deliberate piece of propaganda, designed to reinforce English prejudices, and to persuade the queen and Privy Council to support the New English, who are represented as the only means of bringing Ireland into the modern world. Irenius’ account of Irish customs opens with his description of their primitive economy, which he sees as a distinctly Scythian practice, inherited from the ancient ancestors of the Irish, via the Scots:

I will then beginne to Counte theire Customes … and firste with the Scithian or Scottishe manners Of the which theare is one vse amongst them to kepe theire Cattell and to live themselves the moste parte of the yeare in Bollyes pasturinge vppon the mountaine and waste wilde places and removinge still to freshe lande as they haue depastured the former The which appearethe plaine to be the manner of the Scythians … and yeat is vsed amongst all the Tartarians and the people aboute the Caspian sea which are naturallie Scithians to live in the Herdes As they Call them beinge the verye same that the Irishe Bollyes are drivinge theire Cattell Continuallye with them and feedinge onelye on theire milke and white meates/¹²⁷

The passage is a carefully placed and nuanced representation with an obvious political purpose, designed to persuade statesmen with a wide knowledge of the modern and the ancient worlds and a clear series of reference points. The Irish are cast as an essentially primitive people, resembling those in the ancient world whom humanists would have read about in Strabo, Lucian, Herodotus, and others; they are also like the more savage peoples of the contemporary world, such as the Tartars, who would have been known from works such as Anthony Jenkinson’s accounts of his voyages to Russia (1557–60), Giles Fletcher’s more extended narrative of his experience as an ambassador there in 1588, and, perhaps most significantly, the recollections of Christopher Carleill, present at the gathering at Lodowick Bryskett’s house.¹²⁸

Accordingly, Spenser’s dialogue would have looked to an engaged observer like a well-informed and serious piece of humanist scholarship. What is so pernicious about booleying for English observers is that it not only preserves the Irish as an ancient, primitive society, but enables them to rebel against the English who wish only to make them civil for their own good:

By this Custome of Bolloyinge theare growe in the meane time manye greate enormityes vnto that Comon wealthe for firste if theare be any outlawes or loose people (as they are never without some) which live vppon stealthes and spoile, they are evermore succored and finde reliefe onelye in those Bollies beinge vppon the waste places, whereas els they shoulde be driven shortelye to sterve or to Come downe to the townes to steale reliefe wheare by one meanes or other they | they woulde sone be Caughte.¹²⁹

Accordingly, it becomes clear that the description of Irish pastoralism has a key place within Spenser’s argument, revealing the origins of the Irish and explaining why their way of life cannot be tolerated by civilized authorities. It is also worth noting, yet again, how central the concept of ‘waste’ was to an understanding of Irish land. In a striking parallel to Spenser’s dispute with Lord Maurice Roche, Irenius here argues that Irish practice leaves land waste, in obvious distinction to the English desire to plant and improve the soil. The next topic that Irenius and Eudoxus discuss is the Irish mantle, also derived from the Scythians, and a means of enabling them to live in a primitive manner and to subvert settled English agricultural society.¹³⁰ Spenser, in accordance with the sound humanist principles he learned from Mulcaster and Harvey, is showing how book learning can be used to sort out serious problems if applied correctly to the matter in hand.

However, Spenser must have known that what he described in A View was a serious distortion of the truth.¹³¹ If the Irish in Munster were following herds of cattle in the 1590s, it was in part because their agriculture had been so comprehensively destroyed in the late 1570s and early 1580s. Traditionally pastoralism had been a major component of the Irish economy, but, despite the frustrating lack of evidence, ‘there is no doubt that tillage was practised on an extensive scale’.¹³² The most common practice was a ‘long fallow’ system whereby part of the land was planted with crops using a team of horses rather than oxen as in England, which required the use of eight horses and meant that tenants had to cooperate and lend each other their horses in order to till the land. The rest of the land was used for pasture, the fields being rotated every few years, making sure that land was left as pasture for longer than it was tilled, a sensible process in areas with a low population. In places there was a three-course rotation system of winter-corn, spring-corn, and fallow, practised throughout the Pale in the sixteenth century, which had spread to other areas, perhaps including Munster.¹³³ The Irish economy was, unsurprisingly enough, less organized and developed than its English counterpart—there had not been any enclosure of land yet, implements for husbandry were less developed, and there were few if any of the early experiments in cross-breeding and other means of increasing yields—but it was far more sophisticated than English observers, eager to press their own claims to the land and to trumpet their abilities and achievements, suggested. Indeed, after about 1560, English farming was becoming more efficient and produced more crops and higher yields from the land specifically ‘as a result of the reclamation of waste and the conversion of pasture’, a process that explains why so many English observers reacted to the Irish countryside as they did.¹³⁴ The point is that Irish agriculture was not of a different order to that practised in England, whatever the settlers might have claimed at times.¹³⁵ Robert Payne’s description of what could be grown in Munster makes this clear, as he tried to lure over his fellow Nottinghamshire farmers with a picture of abundance and a soft life:

Their soyle for the most part is very fertile, and apt for Wheate, Rye, Barly, Peason [Peas], Beanes, Oates, Woade, Mather [used to make red dye], Rape, Hoppes, Hempe, Flaxe, and all other graines and fruites that England any wise doth yeelde … There be great store of wild Swannnes, Cranes, Pheasantes, Partriges, Heathcocks, Plouers, greene and gray, Curlewes, Woodcockes, Rayles, Quailes, & all other fowles much more plentifull then in England.¹³⁶

Payne adds that there is easy access to lead, iron, and timber from the Irish woods, which makes it easy to establish industry, and that everything is much cheaper in Ireland.¹³⁷ Supplies of wood were coming under pressure and it was widely agreed in England that Ireland could be exploited for timber to establish industrial production: which in turn, led to worries later that Irish woods were being destroyed.¹³⁸ The undertakers and settlers exploited Irish natural resources rather than face the ‘difficult capital development of an agricultural economy’, in pointed contrast to their counterparts in England.¹³⁹

One of the principal transformations that Ireland experienced in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was the loss of its woodlands, which covered about an eighth of the island in 1600 and only a fiftieth in 1800.¹⁴⁰ Irish wood was used for coopering, shipbuilding, glassmaking, housebuilding, and ironmaking.¹⁴¹ The first blast furnace in Ireland was probably established in Mogeely, County Cork, in 1593 by Spenser’s employer and neighbour, Sir Thomas Norris, although a forge had been established at Enniscorthy in 1560, another area where Spenser had bought property.¹⁴² It may have been a cooperative venture planned by Norris and Sir Walter Ralegh, using the tenants he brought over who lived on the small village on his land near the castle there, an attempt to establish a nucleated English settlement in Ireland.¹⁴³

Spenser would have run an estate that combined Irish and English agricultural practices, especially as his property was divided up into a series of well-established and agreed townlands—Kilcolman East, Middle, and West, still visible on the Ordnance Survey map today—which determined how the land was used before and after his brief tenure. If the land had not been tilled for some years, probably because of the disruption caused by the wars and dispossession of the Geraldines, then it would be left fallow for long periods, altering the ideal balance between agricultural and pastoral fields, as happened in similar areas in England, or where the soil was poor in the northern counties.¹⁴⁴ The farm would have practised the three-crop rotation system, probably planting spring and winter barley, and oats. Oats were grown in England, especially in mountainous regions, and were vital for brewing beer—traditionally a woman’s job—as well as making porridge and bread, but they were a more significant staple crop in Ireland before the introduction of the potato.¹⁴⁵ Oats, highly valued as a cereal crop to feed humans and animals in early modern Britain, were used to make flat cakes baked on a griddle, as well as porridge, which formed the diet of the Irish peasants, supplemented by milk and butter, and, when possible, beef or pork.¹⁴⁶ A number of grains were found at Kilcolman—wheat, barley, oats, and rye—probably used for brewing as well as making bread and porridge.¹⁴⁷ There was a working mill established by the time Sylvanus took over the estate, which he leased out to another undertaker: it had probably been functioning earlier.¹⁴⁸ On the pasture, cows, sheep, and goats would have grazed, guarded from the wolves which roamed in the forests up on the Ballyhoura Mountains, as Spenser frequently notes in his poetry.¹⁴⁹ In fact, according to Colin Breen, ‘with the arrival of the English planters in the latter half of the sixteenth century, pastoral activity greatly increased across Munster’, again exposing the false dichotomy of English agriculture against Irish pasturage. Sheep rearing, a more important part of economic life in Munster than the rest of Ireland, increased further in significance after the arrival of the English, where sheep were the main source of income for pastoral farms.¹⁵⁰

Sheep were undoubtedly the most common animal on Spenser’s estate.¹⁵¹ The excavations at Kilcolman indicate that the sheep were of a variety of breeds, suggesting that both Irish and English breeds were bred.¹⁵² Most specimens were about three years old, which would confirm that they were reared for wool production.¹⁵³ Irish breeds of sheep were not usually the heavy-wool-producing sheep found on English lowlands, evolved from longwool medieval breeds, but hair sheep, which resembled domestic sheep before woolly breeds were developed, and are now extinct. These sheep did not have wool, and were bred for their hides and their meat. They were also far more resistant to parasites and bad weather, and their hides could be used to make Irish mantles.¹⁵⁴ The wool and hides not used would have been exported via Cork city to England, France, Spain, and the Low Countries.¹⁵⁵ Sheep were especially important in the economy of southern Ireland and it is worth remembering that the Spencers of Wormleighton and Althorp, to whom Spenser later claimed to be related, had amassed an enormous fortune through sheep farming in Northamptonshire.¹⁵⁶ A further indication of the central importance that sheep had in the early modern English economy was that, as well as producing wool and meat, their milk would have been used to make cheese.¹⁵⁷ The farm would also have devoted some land to growing wheat, now the standard food crop of the Pale, and beans. The tenant farmers would have had their own plots and would have grown vegetables for their own consumption, as would the Spenser household. The estate, as Payne’s description of economic life in Munster suggests, would also have taken part in the timber trade, cutting down trees to supply ironworks such as Mogeely, as well as supplying English demand for ship timber, charcoal, and barrel-staves, sending the hardwood harvested down the Blackwater and on to the port of Youghal.¹⁵⁸

Spenser, like other undertakers, was evidently keen to improve his estate and to make parts of his house and gardens resemble those in rural England, transforming a military structure into a comfortable residence, converting some of its defensive features in the process by opening up walls to create large windows, establishing new rooms, and adding a series of attractive and colourful features.¹⁵⁹ The archaeological evidence suggests that he developed the Irish tower house along the lines of an English manor house, making it much less of a fortified castle than it had been in the late Middle Ages, as did most settlers who occupied existing castles.¹⁶⁰ The aim would have been to make the house more feasible as a substantial family residence and to provide the inhabitants with greater privacy, in line with architectural developments in England at the time.¹⁶¹ Chimneys were inserted so that smoke now exited via a flue and not through holes in the centre of rooms, creating a feature that invited decoration. Indeed, ‘chimneys were associated with improved living conditions … [and so] were celebrated as a status symbol’.¹⁶² The walls were reduced in thickness so that more windows could be added, and more attention was paid to what the house was like to live in, in particular, its interior design, invariably the woman’s domain.¹⁶³ Ceilings were raised to allow more ventilation. As interiors became more open to light so did the need for brighter and more detailed decoration become more obvious.¹⁶⁴ Kilcolman would probably have had mouldings on the wall, panels, tiling, and elaborate fireplaces with mantelpieces above them.¹⁶⁵ Spenser may have shared Harvey’s interest in iconographic design and installed an object like the fireplace celebrating Harvey’s father’s rope-making trade: perhaps, like many of his contemporaries, he wished to adorn his house with religious imagery, such as devotional wall hangings and alabasters, or images of St George.¹⁶⁶ There could have been biblical or classical inscriptions on and above the beams, especially if Spenser did feel that it was his duty to act as the overseer of a godly, isolated household.¹⁶⁷ Wallpaper was becoming more widely available in the period and it is possible that the walls of the house of a new member of the landed gentry were covered with this cheaper material instead of the more costly stone, velvet, or wall hangings.¹⁶⁸

As in English house development in the sixteenth century, Kilcolman had rooms built over the Great Hall—in this case a stair tower with a garderobe (toilet) and another garderobe turret—floors were added and walls plastered.¹⁶⁹ Spenser would have had to use the hall for administrative and ceremonial functions necessary for a member of the local gentry.¹⁷⁰ There is evidence of a parlour added which was largely destroyed in a fire in 1598, undoubtedly the one that preceded the family’s return to England.¹⁷¹ The room was then repaired by Sylvanus when he took over occupancy of Kilcolman, at some point before the survey of 1622 (which also states that ‘there was a fair stone house built by Edmund Spenser’, providing further evidence that the poet significantly improved the castle).¹⁷² In the same period, Sylvanus or Edmund had a cellar built, and wooden structures alongside the tower house, where servants would probably have lived.¹⁷³ There would have been a number of outbuildings essential for running a reasonably substantial estate, archaeological remains of which survive. These would have included ‘stable, barn, forge, cart shed, well house, storage rooms, kitchen, servants’ lodging, etc.’.¹⁷⁴ Such buildings were probably hastily constructed, as other archaeological evidence suggests that their plastered stone walls were often held together by clay rather than mortar, presumably because there was a lack of skilled masons in Ireland and buildings had to be erected quickly.¹⁷⁵ The more substantial buildings would have had wooden roofs, while the barns and sheds would have been thatched.¹⁷⁶

Remains on the site suggest that the Spenser family led a relatively privileged existence, with a decent diet and time for leisure. It is unlikely that Machabyas had to cook and act as a housewife, although, like many women of her status, she would have known how to prepare food and would have overseen the household accounts.¹⁷⁷ Animal bones recovered from the site indicate that mutton and goat were the principal forms of meat consumed, pork being a rarity, suggesting that relatively few pigs were kept on the farm, as was normal in Ireland.¹⁷⁸ Rabbits, perhaps kept in cages, ducks, and geese were also reared. There was evidence that deer were consumed, indicating that hunting in the forests was a popular sport, as in England.¹⁷⁹ There are shards of north Devon gravel-tempered ware, found elsewhere on the Plantation, further evidence that there was a healthy trade between England and Munster. More significantly there was also a tuning peg for a lute, which we might well expect to find, given Spenser’s interest in music in his poetry, and the verse attributed to him by Sir James Ware on the earl of Cork’s lute, a sign that Spenser was associated with music, even if that poem is spurious.¹⁸⁰ Music was undoubtedly one of the leisure activities supported at Kilcolman. It is also likely that the Spensers spent some money on furniture, ornaments, and pewter, again, like other families in England and elsewhere on the Plantation, as the economy of the British Isles developed to enable families to acquire more goods and consumables.¹⁸¹ William Herbert, one of the most vocal and innovative of the undertakers, who occupied the large Castleisaland estate (13,276 acres) about thirty miles west of Kilcolman in Kerry, brought over a wealth of items and materials from England: tapestries, linen, bedding, pewter, brass, plate, jewels, and cloth, a variety of items of furniture (bedsteads, table-boards, chests, stools, leather chairs, and a close stool), as well as iron, armour, and weapons (cannon and hand guns).¹⁸²

Also among the animal bone assemblage unearthed at Kilcolman were the remains of shellfish, as well as chicken, goose, and rabbit.¹⁸³ Overall the waste reveals a varied and interesting diet, with considerable consumption of high status foods, indicating that the Spensers lived rather better than their counterparts in Cork city.¹⁸⁴ Fishing was an important industry in Munster and fish would have been an important part of the Spenser family’s diet, especially as there is extensive evidence from the Plantation of fish being smoked and then stored in barrels for trade, and extensive fishing from the abundant supply in the local rivers. Fish were also kept in ponds and there may have been one at Kilcolman, although there is no surviving evidence.¹⁸⁵ The surviving inventory for Herbert’s estate shows that his larder contained cheese, bacon, beer, bread, and spices, as well as soap and starch.¹⁸⁶

There is also evidence that Spenser had a walled garden built north of the tower house, the east part of which was probably used as a kitchen garden to grow vegetables and herbs. If the Spensers had followed the advice given to English families then Machabyas would have been in charge of the gardens.¹⁸⁷ The west could have contained a pleasure garden, perhaps a knot garden with emblematic patterns of flowers and shrubs, as was the fashion for Elizabethan estates.¹⁸⁸ Planting gardens in Ireland, especially ones inspired by classical literature or Italian culture and styles, was seen as a key method of establishing civility and cultural superiority, as well as to provide an aspirational model for pliant natives to adopt.¹⁸⁹ William Herbert established a garden, hopyard, orchard, and carefully designed pathways for walking around his manor house, as well as a mill, brewery, kiln, and stables; Thomas Norris had two gardens and an orchard.¹⁹⁰ Spenser may not have been as ambitious or as affluent as Herbert, but the evidence that does survive indicates that he planned similar developments on his estate. Like Shakespeare, whose work shows how much he knew about horticulture and agriculture, Spenser’s poetry indicates a profound interest in gardens and gardening.¹⁹¹ A careful student of Virgil’s poetic reflections on and instructions about rural activities, represented in his Georgics, Spenser’s own literary output suggests that he thought carefully about the ways in which poetry can be used to think about such matters and, to a lesser extent, in the management of estates.¹⁹²

Many questions remain in constructing the nature of everyday life on the estate. In particular, what was the relationship between Spenser, his wives, and their children? Life on the Munster Plantation may have forced women, who in other ways were conscious of their rising social status, to breastfeed their own children rather than to use servants, unless they brought over their own or recruited from English women living in Ireland. Families were much closer knit units than they would have been had they remained in England, because of their relative isolation.¹⁹³ Certainly there would have been little opportunity for the sort of male friendship that Spenser and Harvey had cultivated, and Spenser, having already thought about the institution of marriage and what it meant for two people to live together, would have been conscious of the need to ensure that the couple enjoyed spending time together. It is also likely that some of Elizabeth’s relatives, who we know came over to Ireland, lived at Kilcolman, perhaps younger sons and daughters, like Peregrine Spenser, who worked for Richard Boyle after his mother intervened to secure him gainful employment.¹⁹⁴ Children were often sent away from home in early adolescence to school or to work as part of their upbringing to ensure a successful transition from childhood to adulthood.¹⁹⁵

Did the Spensers employ a tutor? Education and the provision of schools was an important topic in this period, in part through a desire to educate and so anglicize the Irish, in part through the need to provide for English settlers in Ireland.¹⁹⁶ If not, then they must have taught their children themselves, which would have been the case for many families on the Plantation. It is possible that they made use of an impoverished Anglican cleric in the area, co-opting one into their household as a ‘life-cycle servant’, which was common practice in England.¹⁹⁷ However, such figures were notoriously absent in Ireland, which had trouble attracting English clerics to poor benefices.¹⁹⁸ There is no record of a school being established in the Doneraile area.

The same issues apply to the question of daily worship. Would the Spensers and their children have attended a local church? If so, would they have travelled into Doneraile (about five miles) or Buttevant (about six miles), both situated on the Awbeg, which would have provided a natural link to either town? It is more likely that they had a chapel somewhere in the house, like many much grander houses in the area, such as Blarney Castle. If so, it would have been on the upper floor, the typical location, but no evidence has survived. There is a ruined church on the north side of Kilcolman bog, but whether it survived the Reformation, or was repaired and used, is not known. It is most likely that Spenser conducted everyday worship held in the house, using the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, as evidence in surviving contemporary copies indicates was the case when there was no church nearby or service available.¹⁹⁹ He would have led the family and servants in daily prayers and perhaps also took Sunday services, on the occasions when the Spensers did not travel into Buttevant or Mallow.²⁰⁰ There were relatively powerful churches in both towns, Spenser having obvious connections to each. He worked for Thomas Norris, who lived in Mallow Castle, and he acquired the ruined abbey in Buttevant, probably in 1597.²⁰¹ Religious devotion was undoubtedly more varied and improvised than it was in England. Furthermore, although it is improbable that Spenser did not use the Book of Common Prayer, exactly what type of religion dominated the household is hard to determine. Spenser’s own background and the evidence of his writings suggest an eclectic faith and, perhaps, change over time. Richard Boyle was a noted Protestant, ‘theologically left of centre’, so perhaps Elizabeth was too.²⁰² However, Sylvanus and Peregrine both became Catholic at some point in their lives, if the suspicions of the authorities are accurate, perhaps through expediency, while Katherine married a friend of the earl’s, and went to live in Bandon, a noted Protestant, planter town.²⁰³ Perhaps the compromise of the Prayer Book held the family and household together.²⁰⁴

The description of the landscape in Colin Clout indicates that Spenser was familiar with the route to Buttevant, travelling there by means of the Awbeg:

Old father Mole, (Mole hight that mountain gray
That walls the Northside of Armulla dale)
He had a daughter fresh as floure of May,
Which gaue that name vnto that pleasant vale;
Mulla the daughter of old Mole, so hight
The Nimph, which of that water course has charge,
That springing out of Mole, doth run downe right
to Butteuant where spreding forth at large,
It giueth name vnto that auncient Cittie,
Which Kilnemullah cleped is of old:
Whose ragged ruines breed great ruth and pittie,
To travailers, which it from far behold.
Full faine she lou’d, and was belou’d full faine,
Of her owne brother riuer, Bregog hight,
So hight because of this deceitfull traine,
Which he with Mulla wrought to win delight. (lines 104–19)

Mole is the name Spenser gives to the Ballyhoura Hills that overlook his estate from the north, and Mulla is the Awbeg, named here from the ancient name for Buttevant, Kilnemullah.²⁰⁵ Here Spenser uses his knowledge of local topography to produce an aetiological fable which explains the creation of the rivers, the Mulla and Bregog, that mark the boundaries of his own lands, and that connect him to the key settlements in the area: in other words, the natural features that determine his life.²⁰⁶ The Mulla wants to marry Bregog, but her father prefers Arlo, a tributary of the Blackwater.²⁰⁷ To circumvent his wishes, the crafty Bregog flows underground and meets Mulla. In his fury Mole creates a landslide and blocks the course of the Bregog, so that the two rivers become one, ‘so deare his loue he bought’ (line 155). The Bregog is, as Spenser’s myth represents it, ‘for over a mile of its course dry for half the year’ (Plate 25).²⁰⁸ The myth used here, which shows that Spenser was engaged with local Irish folklore, whether he could read such legends in Irish or was simply repeating tales he heard, looks forward to the evocative, symbolic representation of his environment in ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’. Furthermore, in celebrating the Irish rivers on his land in this manner, Spenser is engaging in ‘an act of substitution in which he play[s] the part of a rival Irish bard’, replacing the natives he criticized so forcefully in A View of the Present State of Ireland.²⁰⁹ In representing his close connection to his land—albeit with a certain amount of ambivalence—he is stating his right to be considered a local, a poet who can speak for the Ireland where he lives.²¹⁰

What is also apparent here is the poet’s lament for the destruction of Buttevant, a once impressive city now laid low. As ever in Spenser, the description is ambiguous. We do not know whether the poet is simply regretting the fact that time marches on, whether he is pinning the blame on foolish men for causing unnecessary destruction and, if so, whether the blame lies with the English or the Irish. Spenser’s brief lament for Buttevant is expanded at the end of The Faerie Queene in the account of the ravages wrought by the Blatant Beast, when he despoils the monasteries:

Into their cloysters now he broken had,
Through which the Monckes he chaced here & there.
And them pursu’d into their dortours sad,
And searched all their cels and secrets neare;
In which what filth and ordure did appeare,
Were yrkesome to report; yet that foule Beast
Nought sparing them, the more did tosse and teare,
And ransacke all their dennes from most to least,
Regarding nought religion, nor their holy heast.

From thence into the sacred Church he broke,
And robd the Chancell, and the deskes downe threw,
And Altars fouled, and blasphemy spoke,
And th’Images for all their goodly hew,
Did cast to ground, whilest none was them to rew;
So all confounded and disordered there. (FQ VI.xii.23 and 24, lines 1–6)

The British Isles were littered with the ruins of religious foundations in the late sixteenth century.²¹¹ Even so, this is an astonishing image, especially for readers who want to see Spenser as a straightforward Protestant with low church leanings. Equally so, it complicates the arguments of those who want to see accounts of ‘bare ruin’d quires’ as evidence of a coded sympathy for Catholicism.²¹² Many ‘church papists’ were nostalgic for the unified church of the late Middle Ages.²¹³ Ben Jonson was presumably referring to these stanzas when he remarked to William Drummond that ‘by the blating beast the puritans were understood’.²¹⁴ Jonson’s judgement is acute, indicating that he thought that Spenser, like so many others, deeply regretted the division of Christendom and the destruction it wrought, and, like Rome and Verulam (St Albans) in his own Complaints, looked back nostalgically to a more unified, happier past.²¹⁵

Here, we are told, the Beast despoils the monasteries, ejecting the monks, before entering their cells where the narrator, using the rhetorical device of occupatio, describes what he claims he wishes to keep hidden: ‘In which what filth and ordure did appeare, | Were yrksome to report.’ What should be a sacred place for thought and study has become the hidden area where the bowels are evacuated, a suppressed pun on ‘closet’, an enclosed room that could also be a privy.²¹⁶ This confusion has predictably dire consequences for the church, although whether it is the Beast who defiles the monasteries, or the monks themselves, is left to the reader to decide.²¹⁷ The Beast then attacks the church and its furniture, rather as Kirkrapine did in the opening book of The Faerie Queene before he was dispatched by Una’s lion.²¹⁸ While the allegory there looked like a traditional attack on the greedy abuse of the church—although it could easily be read to indicate a ‘sympathy for traditional religion’—here it is rather more problematic.²¹⁹ The Beast robs the chancel, traditionally the most sacred part of the church which contains the altar, often behind a rood screen, separating the clergy and the church’s valuable goods—plate, chalice, etc.—from the laity in the nave. Spenser’s representation of this part as the ‘sacred church’ carefully conforms to the standard division of space in the late medieval church, distinguishing it from the post-Reformation Protestant church.²²⁰ The Beast then fouls the altar himself, indicating that either he was guilty of the first offences in the monasteries, or that he has learned his appalling behaviour from the monks, before uttering blasphemy and destroying the images, which are described in notably positive terms. The use of the term ‘altar’ is significant, as more ardent reformers were replacing stone altars with wooden communion tables, and, as Brian Cummings has pointed out, ‘an altar that was not stone was not an altar’.²²¹ Spenser’s narrator speaks in a manner diametrically opposed to the concerns of reformers, certainly in its radical Edwardian form, and his words read like a strong defence of traditional religion.²²² We witness the growth of disorder and chaos, which engulfs and overturns order and hierarchy, a fear that shadowed Spenser’s life and writing. Here, traditional pre-Reformation religion is the locus of stability, security, and culture.

Of course, this cannot quite be the case, although Spenser was associated with writers like the antiquarian John Stow who clearly did have Catholic sympathies and who was outraged at what they saw as the wanton destruction of the beliefs, values, and institutions of traditional English religion.²²³ Sir Henry Sidney, to take another example, had books dedicated to him by prominent recusants Edmund Campion and Richard Stanihurst.²²⁴ Nevertheless, it is the Beast’s indiscriminate attack on all forms of religion which is the target of these lines, even if the religious institutions described are clearly late medieval. It was as a consequence of the Reformation that Spenser was able to achieve the rank of gentleman through the acquisition of property, which enabled him to write what he did. As Sir Thomas Smith noted in 1572, ‘England was neuer that can be heard of, fuller of people than it is at this day, and the dissolution of Abbayes hath done two things of importance heerin: It hath doubled the number of gentlemen and mariages, whereby commeth daily more increase of people: and suche yonger brothers as were wonte to be thruste into Abbayes, there to liue (an idle life) sith that is taken from them, must nowe séeke some other place to liue in. By thys meanes there are many lacke abode, and fewe dwellings emptie.’²²⁵ Most of the properties and land that he acquired were disestablished religious foundations of various types, although mainly Franciscan: friaries at New Ross, New Abbey, and Enniscorthy; the prebend at Effin; a series of ecclesiastical livings mainly to the south-west of Cork city, and Buttevant Abbey, also a Franciscan friary. The Irish church was largely in ruins at the end of the sixteenth century.²²⁶ These are substantial concerns that would have been acquired by people much higher up the social scale in England. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that ecclesiastical ruins in Ireland featured so prominently in Spenser’s imagination, not least the one which he was to own a few years later and which he must have seen frequently, perhaps even once a week.²²⁷ The Irish landscape, even more so than in England, and especially Munster, was devastated in the 1580s and 1590s, peppered with shells of once grand buildings, a catastrophe which was very much to Spenser’s advantage—at least, at first—although he was painfully aware of the price others paid for his gain. What he had managed to create and build in his lifetime might eventually be ruined, perhaps sooner rather than later. Travellers to Ireland now witness Kilcolman as a ruin, just like Buttevant Abbey.

It is inconceivable that Spenser did not have a substantial library on his estate, given his isolated situation, how he appears to have planned his life, and the learned references throughout his works published after he had acquired Kilcolman.²²⁸ The second half of the sixteenth century was a period in which many intellectuals started to assemble libraries as they realized the potential of early printed books, which were now being produced in larger numbers than in the first half of the century. The loss of the monastic libraries after their disestablishment was keenly felt and various attempts were made to establish libraries that could be used by a wider public.²²⁹ Many individuals assembled large libraries because institutional ones that existed, such as those at the Inns of Court, were often limited and inadequate for the needs of most readers.²³⁰ Moreover, Spenser had been provided with the example of two significant book collectors in Harvey and Smith, working in the library of one which was inspired by that of the other.

As Raymond Gillespie has pointed out, access to large numbers of books was possible for individuals in southern Ireland, given the records of the numbers imported and testimony from early readers, even those who could not assemble a significant personal collection.²³¹ Presumably, either Spenser’s books did not survive, which is likely given the evidence of fire at his estate in 1598, or he left no obvious sign of ownership in his books and they were dispersed at some point in the seventeenth century. Evidence of a number of private libraries does survive, and, living in the same area, Meredith Hanmer certainly found it possible to acquire a substantial collection of books, as well as manuscripts. But most surviving libraries were possessed by gentlemen of much greater means than Spenser, whose families were not dispersed in the way that Spenser’s was in the seventeenth century.²³² Books varied in price and cost anything between ½d. for a ballad to 42s. for a copy of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. In the same period a pair of shoes cost 6d., a hen 2d., a pig just over 1s., and beef was about 2d. a pound.²³³ Hanmer probably funded his book-buying habit by acquiring various ecclesiastical livings, and it is likely that Spenser was able to use some of his considerable income from various official positions—which he farmed out to others—to purchase books needed for his real work.²³⁴ The inventory of the earl of Kildare’s possessions made in 1526 shows that he had imported a miscellaneous collection of books into Ireland. The inventory is divided up into Latin, French, and English books, and shows that as well as obvious classics and religious literature, he possessed copies of More’s Utopia, Henry VIII’s Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (‘The kyng of Englond his answer to Lutter’), Mandeville’s Travels, Le Roman de la Rose, Petrarch’s works, ‘Lanncelot du lake 3 volumis’, Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, Chaucer’s Troilus, a book simply entitled ‘Arthur’, and, most intriguingly, ‘The Shepherdis Calender’, the French work that Spenser also knew, showing just how widely read this work was in the sixteenth century.²³⁵

Just as Spenser was able to acquire an estate in Ireland that would never have been available to him in England, so, one suspects, he was able to collect enough books to make a library (although he may have been able to borrow books from such literate friends and contemporaries as Bryskett, Hanmer, and Thomas Norris). While it is impossible to know how large the library would have been and exactly what it would have contained, it is possible to make a number of educated guesses.²³⁶ Some gentlemen, such as William Crashaw (1572–1625/6), lawyer and father of the poet Richard, were able to amass huge personal collections, which rivalled those of the university libraries. Crashaw’s library consisted of some 200 manuscripts—possibly more—and 4,000 books, demonstrating how many works could be acquired by determined bibliophiles, and it is possible that Hanmer had an equally large library.²³⁷ Certainly many bishops had collections well above 400 volumes in the early seventeenth century, as did some scholars at the two English universities.²³⁸

In England Spenser would have had access to books, as we know that he exchanged copies with Harvey, probably others as well, and he was undoubtedly able to use some larger collections, such as those of Sir Thomas Smith or the Bedford family.²³⁹ Major collections would have been used by more than the owner. Crashaw’s collection, which he left to the Middle Temple where he had been their preacher when he moved back to Yorkshire, was ‘the resource centre of a working scholar, preacher, publicist, polemicist, and divine’, and so would have been available for others.²⁴⁰ Spenser must have acquired a few volumes while working in Dublin; he might have been able to buy books imported into Cork, Youghal, Waterford, and Limerick, although records show that most of those imported were for schools (horn books, grammar books, fables); and he would have bought some on his two visits to London in 1590 and 1596.²⁴¹ If he had any models in mind they were probably those of Harvey in Cambridge or Saffron Walden and Smith’s library at Hill Hall.²⁴²

If Spenser had a number of books, he would have organized them into categories, arranged on ‘sloping shelves set round the room at an angle to the wall’, as contemporary library inventories and illustrations demonstrate.²⁴³ There would have been sections on theology; history; liberal arts and philosophy; medicine; law; cosmography and geography; and music.²⁴⁴ There would have been more books on theology, history, and rhetoric than other categories, and most books would have been in Latin.²⁴⁵ There would also have been a number of works in Italian and French, and possibly Spanish and German, especially as Spenser had been a student of teachers so keen to instil in their charges the value of reading contemporary literature in foreign languages.²⁴⁶ Accompanying these would have been the relevant dictionaries and guides, and there would have been a large number of standard reference books.²⁴⁷ Spenser probably possessed rather more books of English poetry than many of his contemporaries, but, even so, these would have been a relatively minor section of his library.²⁴⁸ Books on what we now think of as science would have been included in the sections on liberal arts and philosophy and cosmography and geography. While most book owners in England purchased loose sheets and bound their own books, it is unlikely that this service was readily available in Ireland, although someone might have bound some of Spenser’s books in England on his behalf.²⁴⁹

There were obvious works that most educated gentlemen would have possessed: Virgil, Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Lucan, numerous volumes of Cicero, Erasmus, Ovid, Pliny, Herodotus, Seneca, Hesoid, Xenophon, Tacitus, Suetonius, Ptolemy, Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, with a collection of commentaries, along with the Bible and its own attendant commentaries, the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, and other familiar works from any private library.²⁵⁰ All such works would have been imported from English publishers.²⁵¹ There would have been a large collection of books of theology, ecclesiology, and religious devotions, especially given Spenser’s work as a bishop’s secretary. Spenser would have possessed Calvin’s Institutes, as well as a selection of works by church fathers such as Augustine, Jerome, and Tertullian; major European Reformation figures such as Melanchthon, Luther, Bucer, and Bèze; and English theologians and thinkers such as John Jewel and Hugh Latimer.²⁵² There would also have been legal works such as Bracton’s definitive study of English law, De Legibus, and Justinian’s Institutes, and a number of works on rhetoric, probably including Thomas Wilson’s popular manual, The Arte of Rhetoricke (1553), as well as a number of works on rhetoric and logic by Ramus.²⁵³ It is also hard to believe that Spenser did not have works on farming and animal husbandry, such as Thomas Blundeville’s The Foure Chiefest Offices Belonging to Horsemanship, which was frequently reprinted in the late sixteenth century, or even the two short treatises on horses by the governor of Connaught, Sir Nicholas Malby; the equally popular Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry by Thomas Tusser, which was in Gabriel Harvey’s library and which told husbandmen and housewives how to run their estate, and how to plan the farming year in an easily searchable array of devout verses; and Barnabe Googe’s Foure Bookes of Husbandry, which told readers how to run an estate, plant a garden, and manage crop cycles. Googe spent considerable time in Ireland and makes it clear in his dedicatory letter to Sir William Fitzwilliam, Lord Deputy of Ireland (1571–5 and 1588–94), and his preface to the reader, that his translation is partly aimed at transforming a country such as Ireland from dearth and chaos to civility and order.²⁵⁴ Ben Jonson had a volume which bound together Spenser’s Calender with Tusser’s guide to managing an estate, showing how close practical advice on husbandry was to georgic poetry, a genre that especially interested Spenser.²⁵⁵

We can also infer a great deal from Spenser’s writings, especially those after 1590, which makes A View particularly valuable, because of the sources it cites.²⁵⁶ It is likely, therefore, that Spenser possessed works of history, anthropology, and topography, including Buchanan’s History of Scotland, which is referenced a number of times; Camden’s Britannia; Holinshed’s Chronicles; Strabo’s Geography; Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth; Machiavelli’s Discourses; Hector Boethius’ History of the Scottish People; Johan Boemus’ The Fardle of Facions, the first comprehensive survey of the origins of European peoples; Diodorus Siculus’ Universal History; and others. There would have been works of more local history such as Richard Carew’s history and topography of Cornwall and William Lambarde’s work on Kent, and works on Wales and Welsh history.²⁵⁷ Spenser may not have possessed many Irish books, but he clearly had access to them, probably from neighbouring collections, such as that of Hanmer. He would also have possessed other more modern works, especially if we bear in mind what we know about his reading tastes from his correspondence with Harvey.

Spenser must have had more popular works, such as almanacs, jest books, travel guides, collections and encyclopedias, such as those produced by Stephen Bateman; and, most importantly for his poetry, editions of old and recent works of European and English literature, such as Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Apology for Poetry, and perhaps Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, Chaucer, Langland, Gascoigne, Marlowe, Skelton, probably Nashe (given his antagonistic relationship with Harvey in the early 1590s), perhaps Churchyard and Chapman, Boccaccio (in particular, De Claris Mulieribus), Tasso, Ariosto, perhaps Dante, Du Bartas, Du Bellay, Ronsard.²⁵⁸ There must also have been some manuscripts passed between poets, such as Ralegh’s ‘Ocean to Cynthia’, which Spenser saw at various stages of its life, works by Drayton, Daniel, probably Mary Sidney, and other members of her circle to which Spenser was connected.²⁵⁹ Moreover, given their availability in Elizabethan England, Spenser might have possessed some medieval manuscripts, possibly even illuminated ones.²⁶⁰ In total, his working library must have contained at least 200–300 volumes, probably rather more, a substantial collection that he would never have had the means to acquire had he stayed in England: perhaps he possessed as many volumes as John Donne, who often complained of poverty but acquired as many as a thousand books.²⁶¹ The same is true of Spenser’s gaining an estate, and in England he would probably not have needed to accumulate so many books himself, as it would have been easier to use and borrow those owned by others.