"In depth" Robert Ireland junior (c. 1536-1599) of Ireland's Mansion High Street

Ireland's Mansion, High Street, Shrewsbury (image) [+]
Ireland's Mansion in 19th Century

The Irelands of Shrewsbury.

Although past historians of the town once puzzled over the origins of the Ireland family of Shrewsbury, there is little doubt that their ancestors came from Oswestry, the head or caput of the old Marcher lordship of that name. (1) The Irelands had been important figures in Oswestry from at least the late 14th century, (2) but it was David Ireland, said on his admission as a burgess of Shrewsbury in c. 1488 to be the son of Robert Ireland of Oswestry, (3) who established the Shrewsbury connection. At that date he was a servant (probably a journeyman) of the mercer Thomas Goldsmith, but was admitted a master of the Mercers’ company in 1491-2, aged about 24 – a typical age for entry. (4) His career was an exceptionally successful one. He served as one of the two wardens (senior officers) of the company eight times during his lifetime, (5) became an alderman of the borough, and before his death in 1530 was elected as one of the two Shrewsbury bailiffs on four occasions. (6)

Although a mercer, David Ireland also traded in Welsh cloth, the principal markets at that date being located at Oswestry and Welshpool. (It is easy to suspect that the family links to Oswestry must have been helpful in this respect.) By the early 16th century that trade was well-established, but had yet to fall completely into the hands of the Shrewsbury Drapers’ company with whom the trade is traditionally associated. Several of the richer tradesmen from other craft fellowships, including Ireland, are known at that time to have participated in the trade, a fact resented by the Drapers’ apprentices who feared for their livelihood. On one occasion in 1517, when Ireland was riding to the Oswestry market to buy Welsh cloth with his neighbour and fellow mercer Ralph Meighen, they were accosted by two apprentices at Montford Bridge, armed with a sword and spear. Particular resentment seems to have been taken by the apprentices to Meighen, and when Ireland asked one of them, Mathew Piers, why he would not let Meighen cross the bridge to get to market, Piers replied, ‘He should not pass that way to buy any cloth for he was one of them that would take their living from them and undo their craft.’ Ireland was not impressed, and told the two young men that if they were getting any advice, it was poor advice indeed. The incident was only one of several acts of intimidation by some of the drapers’ apprentices, and there is little doubt from evidence subsequently brought before the court of Star Chamber that some masters were colluding with their servants to frighten off other craftsmen from participating in the trade in Welsh cloth. (7) The eventual capture of the trade by the Drapers’ company was not achieved until some decades later, and the Irelands themselves were to play a small part in that story (see below).

To judge from the Lay Subsidy returns of 1525, David Ireland was then the richest man in Shrewsbury, (8) and this no doubt was a great help to those of his sons who also followed him in trade. Among them were Thomas (admitted a mercer in 1527-8, died 1554), Robert senior (admitted a mercer in 1539-40, died 1583), and William (admitted a mercer in 1528-9, died 1546). (9) Thomas and Robert both became aldermen of the borough, serving altogether as bailiffs on four occasions, and both were among those newly rich Shropshire merchants who took advantage of the sale of monastic lands after the dissolution of the monasteries. (10) Thomas acquired, among other lands, Monkmoor in Abbey Foregate, and the Albrighton estate to the north of Shrewsbury, both of which had previously belonged to Shrewsbury abbey. For his part Robert, though in association with his brother, bought Lythwood to the south of the town in 1551. That estate too had once belonged to the abbey, and was to pass down through Robert’s descendants until 1736. (11) It was the Lythwood property that enabled the two men to endow the Mercers’ almshouses near St. Chad’s church, the endowment being increased by Robert’s son Edward in his will of 1597. (12) Robert in fact was to spend much of his time at Lythwood, and in 1572 together with a fellow alderman he was ejected from the aldermanic bench for non-residence in the town or its rural liberties. It was said that he no longer attended Easter communion and had stopped contributing to his parish or to the wages of the watchmen. His children too, it was claimed, were sent to school in Shrewsbury with their meals ready-made, and would return to Lythwood after a couple of days, or at most at the end of the week. In a petition Ireland insisted that he kept his principal residence in Shrewsbury, ‘And for that purpose I am forced and do keep some of my own household continually to lodge and use hospitality therein, although notwithstanding I have an house in like manner in the country where I, my wife and some of my family do use for oversight and exercise of some part of my living as occasion serves at such time as requires, but not in such order but that I take and accept my chief dwelling house to be in Town.’ (13) Robert at least was restored to the bench, though the issue had by then become entangled with a factional dispute on the town council, involving proceedings in Star Chamber, that was to rumble on until 1578. (14)

Apart from Albrighton, and other lands in the county, Thomas Ireland’s real estate at his death in 1554 included a large amount of property in Shrewsbury, Coleham and Frankwell, consisting in all of 27 messuages, 7 shops, 4 stables and 8 gardens. (15) With only one exception (a messuage acquired by marriage) all this property, exactly like the ex-monastic lands he had elsewhere in Shropshire, was said to be held ultimately of the King; and close investigation confirms that Thomas had in fact acquired most, if not all, the property in Shrewsbury (though not the Abbey Foregate) which had formerly belonged to Shrewsbury, Haughmond and Lilleshall abbeys. This whole estate, having come to the Crown after the Dissolution, was sold to speculators in 1545, (16) and had evidently come into Thomas Ireland’s possession by 1547. (17) It must, with his other purchases in the county, have represented the investment of what was still only a relatively short lifetime in trade (he could not have been much more than 50 years of age when he died in 1554.) Nonetheless it was these investments that were to establish his family among the Shropshire gentry. The scale of his own commercial undertakings is hinted at in a Chancery suit of the 1530s which shows that he had numerous debtors in London, including perhaps some of the clients for the Welsh cloth which, like his father, he almost certainly dealt in. (18) Thomas also married well – to Jane, daughter of William Ottley of Pitchford, and sister to Adam Ottley who in c. 1549 had erected Pitchford Hall, one of Shropshire’s best-known country houses (though much altered in the 19th century). Though counted by the 1550s among the Shropshire gentry, the Ottleys originally also owed their fortune to trade in Shrewsbury, in particular the wool trade carried out in the 15th century through the Calais staple. (19)


Robert Ireland, junior.

Most of Thomas Ireland’s own fortune passed to his son Robert Ireland junior, who was born in c. 1536. (20) As a result of his father’s social ascent, the early career of Robert jnr. seems to have taken a rather different course from his forbears. Typical of the sons of gentry, he appears to have been educated first in the law at one of the Inns of Court (the Inner Temple), and then at Balliol College, Oxford, and it is likely that despite his admission, as son of Thomas Ireland, to the Shrewsbury Mercers’ company in 1561, (21) and the fact that he served as warden of the company on several occasions, it was not trade but rents from land and urban property that provided the main source of his income. He was in fact as much a rentier as a merchant, his position in county society being confirmed by a marriage to Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Scriven of Frodesley. Every historian of Shrewsbury has had the problem of distinguishing him from his uncle Robert Ireland senior, but there is no doubt that it was the nephew who served as one of Shrewsbury’s M.P.s in the parliaments elected in 1559, 1563, and 1571, and in that capacity was persuaded to support the Shrewsbury Drapers’ company when in 1566 it obtained an Act restricting the Welsh cloth trade to its own members. Although this Act was repealed in 1572, after a successful lobby by the Shearmen’s company, supported by most of the Mercers and a mass petition from the townsmen, (22) Robert had already obtained in 1570-1, in return for his agreement to fight the appeal, a quid pro quo by which his younger brother William Ireland and three other leading mercers were admitted free of the Drapers’ company. (23) (In practice too the Drapers’ defeat was to prove only temporary). Much involved with town affairs, Robert jnr. was also to give £25 towards the defence of the realm during the Armada invasion scare of 1588 – equivalent in terms of purchasing power to perhaps £4-5,000 today.

There has always been some discussion as to whether the impressive timber-framed house in the High Street known as Ireland’s Mansion, of unknown date but probably erected about the 1570s, was built by Robert Ireland senior of Lythwood, or by his nephew Robert junior of Albrighton. There is little doubt, however, that it was the nephew who was responsible: a deed of 1577, relating to adjacent property, shows that it was Robert Ireland jnr. who owned the land on which the building stands. (24) And indeed ownership of the house was to pass to his descendants, the Albrighton branch of the Ireland family, not to their cousins at Lythwood. That connection suggests that the plot on which Ireland’s Mansion now stands would have been part of the patrimony which Robert inherited from his father Thomas, and thus almost certainly ex-monastic property. The evidence of deeds confirms that this was indeed the case, the land (originally two separate plots) having been granted to Shrewsbury abbey in the 13th century. (25) The mansion itself, which shows some signs of the local Elizabethan school of carpentry, and still bears the now eroded arms of the Ireland family on the tie-beams, was clearly designed as a speculation. A central house, originally with its own doorway to serve it, incorporates two rectangular bays, flanked on each side by two separate tenements, each with its own entrance and a canted bay. (26) Very probably Robert jnr. occupied the central accommodation – he is known to have resided in the High Street from the 1560s into the 1590s. (27) Close to the end of his life, however, he wrote to the Shrewsbury bailiffs to inform them that he was intending to move his principal residence to Albrighton, and would therefore relinquish his place as an alderman. (28)

Among Robert’s contemporaries was the lawyer Richard Prynce of Abbey Foregate, a co-beneficiary of the sale of monastic lands and, like the Irelands, an example of the new men entering Shropshire’s landed society during the 16th century. As stated in the outline of Prynce’s life, relations between the Shrewsbury representatives of this class were often fraught. In 1586 Robert Ireland and his brother George, a resident of the Abbey Foregate, were alleged to have assaulted Prynce in the suburb, (29) and an even more serious incident took place three years later, on Friday, 8 March 1589, on the occasion of a local funeral. (30) A respected shearman Humphrey Anderton had just died and his coffin was to be borne from the Abbey Foregate to St. Mary’s church in the town for burial. Among the mourners were Alderman Richard Owen (who in 1592 built Owen’s Mansion in the High Street), and Anderton’s landlord, Richard Prynce himself. After crossing the Stone (English) Bridge, the cortège climbed up the Wyle Cop to the Red Lion inn, now the Lion Hotel, where Robert Ireland and other aldermen were waiting to join the procession. After some jostling for position, Robert joined up with Prynce and Owen, the three men walking up Dogpole abreast, occasionally stepping over the open drain which ran down the middle of the street – still shown on the 19th century drawing of the Drapers’ almshouses further up the street.

Near the middle of the Drapers’ almshouses on the west side of St. Mary’s churchyard, a large stone stuck out into the street – perhaps a block for mounting horses. Both Ireland and Prynce were walking on that side of the street, with Prynce beside the wall. It looked as if Prynce might have to step behind Ireland and allow him to go ahead. Suddenly, as they approached the stone, Prynce darted forward to get in front, but Ireland was ready for him. What happened next took place so quickly that no witness was able to give a clear account. Owen, who was on the other side of the street, holding a handkerchief to his nose because of the smell from the drain, looked up to see the two men shouldering and barging each other. Others, like widow Elizabeth Scott, watching the procession as she sewed by her door, saw Prynce stagger back with blood streaming from his head. The pall bearer Richard Harding, hearing the commotion, helped to set the coffin down in the road, and turned round to see Ireland dagger in hand, his glove smeared with blood. Both Prynce and Ireland had a servant with them who rushed in to assist their masters, whipping out their own daggers and striking out at each other. Ireland himself was pulled into an adjoining house by his brother George, as Prynce screamed out, ‘let me not be murdered for I have never a weapon upon me.’

Afterwards the Shrewsbury bailiffs took down depositions from the witnesses, and some weeks later the Great Court (which met twice-yearly to deal with communal offences) looked over the evidence and found Ireland guilty of an affray with bloodshed, for which he was fined 6s. 8d., the standard tariff for an offence of that kind. It was an instance of how at this date even the most prominent figures in the town could be forced to submit to community justice. The reluctance of both Prynce and Ireland to give way to each other by the Drapers’ almshouses was also typical of the volatile and combustible nature of personal behaviour in Tudor England – something the English seem to have been notorious for. (31) Such sensitivity about status was reflected, for example, in the practice known as ‘taking the wall’. When two persons met in the street they would try to keep to the wall or house side, thus forcing the other to step towards the middle of the street where the drain was. The Shrewsbury shearman John Pewe was once imprisoned for disrespect towards Richard Harding, then one of the wardens of the Shearmen’s company and a pall bearer at Anderton’s funeral, ‘in taking the wall of him and jostling him in the passing by.’ (32)

The brawl between Ireland and Prynce also illustrates how common it was for men to carry daggers. They were used principally for eating, not as weapons. Cutlery did not become common until much later – in Shropshire about the 18th century. (33) Until then the short dagger or knife was used to cut up food and pick it up with the point. Various taboos were linked to the dagger’s use, such as pointing it at your own face. As Caxton’s Book of Courtsey put it, ‘Bear not your knife toward your visage, for therein is peril and mickle [much] dread.’ Conversely, it was good manners, if you wanted to pass someone a knife, to take the point in your hand and offer the handle. (34)

Ten years later, and three years after retiring to his country seat at Albrighton, Robert Ireland died on 6 October 1599. Recording his death, the local annalist described Ireland as ‘a stout protestant and a furtherer of the poor, a good housekeeper and one that kept great countenance in his proceedings in this town. He died godly in good remembrance unto the last end and was solemnly buried in Saint Chad’s church in Shrewsbury, for whom were many weeping tears and great moan. He will be missed of his kinsfolk and friends’ This eulogy echoed that which the annalist had entered retrospectively for Robert’s father Thomas at his death in 1554: ‘Thomas Ireland was a right protestant and a diligent favourer of the word of God, and was also a virtuous and charitable man unto the poor, zealous and careful in providing for them.’ (35) Father and son, together with Thomas’s brother Robert, had in fact been among the early supporters of protestantism in Shrewsbury, and as such both Robert snr. and Robert jnr. had been recommended in 1564 by the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield as men suitable to bear office in the town. (36) It was an ironic assessment since their ancestor David Ireland had, in contrast, been strongly attached to the old religion. In his will of 1530 David made arrangements that were staunchly Catholic. As well as requesting that priests from all four Shrewsbury parishes should be present at his requiem mass, he asked that St. Gregory’s trental – a popular devotion before the Reformation – be sung too, (37) while friars from all three Shrewsbury houses were to pray for the souls of himself, wife and all christians. In addition, £100 was left to endow a chantry at St. Thomas’s altar in St. Chad’s church, and money was also left to the vicars choral of that church to sing an annual obit in his memory. (38) Yet his grandson, born just a few years later, was to take a different turn, and to live through some of the greatest cultural changes in Shrewsbury’s history.

The descendants of Robert Ireland jnr. remained settled at Albrighton Hall into the 18th century. Interestingly, they had by the early 1700s reverted to the Catholic faith, and as ‘papists’ were obliged to register their estates under the penal statutes. The returns show that in Shrewsbury they still retained much of the ex-monastic property which Thomas Ireland had acquired by 1547 – a source of some guilt to them perhaps. (39) But a sad fate lay in store. Thomas Ireland, eventual inheritor of the estate, was said to have ‘addicted himself to low vices and profligate associations’, and in 1789 died miserably in a garret of the family mansion at Albrighton. His eldest son Thomas Peshall Ireland was no less dissolute, and at his death in 1792 the remains of the estate, having first come to an illegitimate daughter who died a minor, then descended to a relative in America. He, having crossed the Atlantic to claim his inheritance, then sold it all and returned to America, thus bringing to an end the story of the Irelands of Shrewsbury and Albrighton. (40) Long before then, however, Ireland’s Mansion in the High Street had been disposed of. About 1736, known appropriately as ‘Ireland’s Folly’, it had been sold to the Tory politician and rabid Jacobite, Corbet Kynaston. (41) And from Kynaston it was to pass to the Corbets of Sundorne, eventually being sold in 1907-08. (42) Thus for over 300 years Ireland’s Mansion, perhaps the most prestigious speculation ever built in Tudor Shrewsbury, was to provide a useful source of rental income for members of the local gentry. (43)

Sources
1 Shropshire Archives [SA] 6001/2790, pp. 624-8, 641; 6001/4078, pp. 797, 801 (genealogical notes of George and Joseph Morris); Transactions Shropshire Archaeological Society [T.S.A.S.], 2nd ser. vi. (1894), 305-26.
2 Llinos B. Smith, ‘Oswestry’ in R.A. Griffiths, Boroughs of Mediaeval Wales (1978), 236, n. 68; Victoria County History [V.C.H.] Shropshire, iv. 106; Rev. W.V. Lloyd, ‘The sheriffs of Montgomeryshire’, Montgomeryshire Collections, ix (1876), 92.
3 SA 3365/67, fo. 106v.
4 T.S.A.S. viii (1885), 305 (date of admission corrected). He was said to be 50 years of age in May 1517, so must have been born about 1467: National Archives [NA] STAC 2/25/275.
5 SA 6001/4260 (Mercers’ minute book).
6 T.S.A.S. 3rd ser. iv. (1904), 262-3; SA 3365/75 (council assembly books).
7 NA STAC 2/25/275.
8 SA 3365/172; M.A. Faraday, The Lay Subsidy for Shropshire 1524-7, Shropshire Record Series, Vol. 3 (1999), 70. David Ireland was one of the tax commissioners for the borough in 1525.
9 T.S.A.S. viii (1885), 309-11 (dates of admisssion corrected as appropriate).
10 SA 3365/76 (council assembly book); V.C.H. Shropshire, iv. 131.
11 V.C.H. Shropshire, viii. 42; NA CP25 (2)/62/497/31. In his will Thomas left instructions to raise £200 from the sale of timber ‘from my part of Lythwood.’ NA Prob 11/37. F. 10 More.
12 V.C.H. Shropshire, ii. 111; NA Prob 11/90, 103 Cobham.
13 SA 3365/1912.
14 Details in W.A. Champion, The Economy of Shrewsbury, 1400-1560/1660 (1987, unpubl. TS at SA 6000/6866), 214-15, 224-5.
15 NA E150/870/1.
16 NA C66/747, m. 50.
17 NA E368/321, Recorda Hil. 38 Hen. VIII, rot. 10d (homage by Thos. Ireland for ex-monastic lands in Shrewsbury).
18 NA C1/831/6-10.
19 V.C.H. Shropshire, viii. 118-120; Champion, Economy of Shrewsbury, 122, 222-3.
20 Robert was aged 18 in Nov. 1554: NA E150/870/1. Except where noted, this paragraph is based on P.W. Hasler ed. The History of Parliament. House of Commons, 1558-1603 (1981), vol. II, 370; and T.C. Mendenhall, The Shrewsbury Drapers and the Welsh Wool Trade in the XVI and XVII Centuries (1953), 124-30.
21 T.S.A.S. viii (1885), 317.
22 T.S.A.S. lvi. (1957-60), 172-9.
23 SA 1831/6/1, fos. 257-8. The fact that Robert jnr. himself did not exploit this opportunity to be admitted to the Drapers’ company also suggests he was not active in the Welsh cloth trade.
24 SA 1146/52. This corrects the mistake in W.A. Champion, Everyday Life in Tudor Shrewsbury (1994), 29-30.
25 The long-established Colle family owned the corner properties on High Street/Mardol Head, and their deeds show that the adjacent plot (i.e. on the site of Ireland’s Mansion) had belonged to Shrewsbury abbey: SA 6001/2794, pp. 6, 9. For the grants to the abbey, see U. Rees (ed.), The Cartulary of Shrewsbury Abbey, 2 vols. (1975), nos. 163, 176B. 196.
26 Madge Moran, Vernacular Buildings of Shropshire (2003), 254.
27 SA 3365/1842, boxes 1-2 (Shrewsbury suit lists).
28 SA 6001/2790, p. 630.
29 NA STAC 5/P42/6.
30 For the following, see Champion, Everyday Life, 54-6. Original sources, SA 3365/1103, 1106.
31 But there were unspoken rules about how far violence could be taken in a brawl: see C.V. Phythian-Adams, ‘Rituals of personal confrontation in late medieval England’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 73 (1991).
32 SA 3365/2635 (petitions).
33 B. Trinder, A History of Shropshire (1983), 63.
34 N. Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford, 1978 ed.), 123.
35 T.S.A.S. iii (1880), 264, 342.
36 B. Coulton, ‘The Establishment of Protestantism in a Provincial town: A Study of Shrewsbury in the Sixteenth Century’, Sixteenth Century Journal, xxvii. (1996), 317; id. ‘Implementing the Reformation in the urban community: Coventry and Shrewsbury 1559-1603’, Midland History, xxv. (2000), 50-1.
37 Cf. E. Duffy, The Stripping Of The Altars (1992), 238, 370-3.
38 NA Prob 11/23, F. 19 Jankyn.
39 T.S.A.S. 3rd ser. v. (1905), 221-5, 235-6.
40 Thus at least Joseph Morris, SA 6001/6761, note interleaved at p. 113.
41 SA 6000/3380; 6001/2619 (Corbet Kynaston rent roll)
42 SA 1431 (11 May 1739); 1709/10 (boxes 209-10); 802/1 (Salt colln. old ref.); T.S.A.S. 2nd ser. vi. (1894), 219.
43 In 1738 Ireland’s Mansion was bringing in about £60 p.a. in rent (SA 6001/2619, Corbet Kynaston rent roll). At that date an annual income of £50 was enough to ‘live a comfortable lower-middle-class life’: P. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (1989), 14.