Description
The 1641 Depositions are witness testimonies, mainly by Protestants, but also by some Catholics, from all social backgrounds, concerning their experiences of the 1641 Irish rebellion.
The testimonies document the loss of goods, military activity, and the alleged crimes committed by the Irish insurgents. This body of material is unparalleled anywhere in early modern Europe. It provides a unique source of information for the causes and events surrounding the 1641 rebellion and for the social, economic, cultural, religious, and political history of seventeenth-century Ireland, England and Scotland.
In total, 19,010 manuscript pages in 31 bound volumes held at Trinity College Dublin have been transcribed and are arranged for publication in 12 volumes from 2014 onwards. The depositions are available online at www.1641.tcd.ie
Cavan and Fermanagh were the counties from which refugees first arrived in Dublin after the outbreak of rebellion and their accounts of what befell them, both in their homes and in their flight, capture their experiences with vivid immediacy. Unwittingly too, they give abundant evidence of the make-up and way of life of settler society on the eve of rebellion and of their relations with the native community.
