The day-books of Joshua Boyle

Legal agent in early Stuart Ireland

David Heffernan, editor

Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork (1566–1643), was reputedly the wealthiest man in the Stuart dominions, with an estate of over 100,000 acres in Ireland. His rise from humble beginnings in his native Kent elicited a lot of questions about how he had made his money and acquired his vast estate. In the 1630s, as his rivalry with the viceroy of Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, escalated, his many enemies pounced and Boyle found himself mired in legal cases, sometimes challenging his title to lands he had acquired decades earlier. He lawyered up accordingly. One of Boyle’s legal agents was a cousin of his by the name of Joshua Boyle. This book presents six ‘day-books’ or diaries that Joshua composed for the earl’s perusal between November 1638 and August 1639 while Cork was residing in England. In them we see Joshua moving between the courts in Dublin, where he liaised with the earl’s senior lawyers, while also acting as a rent collector there for his master and as steward of his seat, Lismore Castle, in Munster. The ‘day-books’ provide a uniquely detailed insight into the court system of mid-seventeenth-century Ireland from the perspective of a mid-ranking legal agent, while also shedding light on the politics and society of Ireland in the period shortly before the outbreak of the 1641 rebellion. This book is a volume in the Irish Legal History Society series. 

David Heffernan is an independent historian of Tudor and early Stuart Ireland. He is the author of six books, including most recently, The court minutes of the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers, London concerning their Londonderry estate, 1609–1676 (MC, Dublin, 2025).