From a View to a Discovery: Edmund Spenser, Sir John Davies, and the Defects of Law in the Realm of Ireland

Abstract

This article is a comparative analysis of Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland and Sir John Davies’ A’Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued ... until the Beginning of His Majesty’s Happy Reign. Over the past two decades, Nicholas Canny has argued for the centrality of Spenser’s View to the British colonial enterprise in Ireland during the seventeenth century, suggesting that Davies’ Discovery adhered closely to the ideas of Spenser on Irish affairs. These ideas were marked by an unabashed advocacy of military and judicial violence and a deep scepticism as to the effectiveness of the English common law, its procedures and values, in the settling of Irish affairs. This article challenges the interpretation of Canny arguing alternatively that these two texts offer, not only rival views on the efficacy of the English law in Ireland as an agent of cultural change, but also competing narrative models for writing the history of early modern Ireland, one ethnological deriving from Spenser’s View and one sovereignty-centered deriving from Davies’ Discovery.

State violence, empire, and the figure of the “soldier-victim” in Northern Ireland

“…Certainly, the writings of early propagandists (and practitioners) of English colonialism in Ireland—such as the poet Edmund Spenser and Sir John Davies—provided exemplary models for later justifications of colonial expansion, appropriation and dispossession, not least in the Americas (Pawlisch, ; Orr, . For Spenser, a policy of war, of “extra‐legal slaughter” and “military and judicial violence,” was required as the only “agent of civilization” by which the “barbarous” Irish might be “compelled to be free” (Orr, , p. 401. See also Canny, , p. 581).…”

The composition and distribution of the legal profession, and the use of law in Britain and Ireland, c.1500-c.1850

“…118 Others, like his contemporary Edmund Spenser, went further to argue that the Irish were impervious to the benign effects of English law because of the way their society, morality, and mentality worked. 119 Eighteenth and early nineteenth century petitioners from the north of Ireland knew and used the law, but they had a keen sense of para-, infra-, or quasi-judicial forms -and of opportunities to achieve their ends by entirely extra-legal means. This use of the law may have been particularly related to Ulster and perhaps to Protestantism because local courts persisted longer in the north of Ireland and most Catholic Irish seem to have been enduringly diffident about cooperating with English legal institutions.…”