ABSTRACT
In the fourteenth century, judges whose origins lay in England shared the Irish benches with men from Irish backgrounds. Despite the axiom, familiar from the time of King John, that Ireland was governed by the laws of England, there were, of course, marked differences between the social and political contexts in which the law was applied on either side of the sea. Convergences and divergences are well illustrated in the career of Ellis Ashbourne, chief justice of the court of the governor of Ireland for seven years between 1329 and 1343. Ashbourne was a member of the Dublin establishment, with a mayor and provosts of the city among his kinsmen and recent ancestors. He was an assiduous networker between Ireland and England. As a judge, he itinerated with English governors such as John Darcy of Knayth, later steward and chamberlain of Edward III’s household, and Thomas Charlton, bishop of Hereford, a former treasurer of England. His temporary dismissal in 1341, amid allegations of abuse of office, was an offshoot of an English crisis, when Edward III rounded upon his ministers after the financial disaster of his early campaigns in France. But when Ashbourne fell from grace again, in 1343, complaints against him took a more sinister – and more Irish – turn. Among his acquisitions had been land in the Wicklow foothills, together with the constableship of Arklow Castle. Certain of his neighbours, describing themselves grandly as the king’s ‘lieges of the march of Ireland’, accused him of seditious conspiracies with local Gaelic Irish chiefs, which had led to the killing of loyal subjects. Such was his power, they claimed, that no redress could be had against him in Ireland. More subtle testimony to Ireland’s distinctness is provided by Ashbourne’s riposte, when his legal representatives argued successfully in the King’s Bench that, since the king had his judges and his chancery in Ireland, accusations of felony and trespass arising in that country should be tried there, and not in England.?
