Irish patent and close rolls and fiants

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: Ireland
Surnames/tags: Irish_Roots Ireland

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Patent and close rolls

Traditional English (and Irish) government records were kept in the form of Court Rolls, documents written on long unwieldy rolls of velum. Some of the most significant of these were patent and close rolls. Patent rolls were essentially copies of public pronouncements (letters patent) made under the great seal of the crown, whereas close rolls were literally closed, copies of letters addressed by the crown to a single addressee.

A TCD web site has a good introduction here and houses Circle a database of Irish patent and close rolls from the period of Henry II to Henry VII. There are also some useful publications on Court rolls among the Reports on public records of Ireland and they are the subject of one of the 'gold seams in Beyond 2022 - Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury

Some of the later patent and close rolls were published as ‘calendars’ and are available in other places – although the coverage is far from complete. They can be useful sources of genealogical information.

• Henry VIII, Edward, Mary and Elizabeth (18th year)
• Elizabeth concluded (19th year to end of reign)
• James I/VI Part 1 vol 1
• Charles I (1st -8th year)
• William IV (1830 – 1837) (Patent and miscellaneous rolls)

Charles I vol II was never published, but an unpublished manuscript held by the UK National Archives (under ref TNA T 1/6535B/1 is now available on the Irish Virtual Record Treasury.

John Lodge (1692-1774), Deputy Clerk and Keeper of the Rolls, Dublin, made abstracts of all the entries in the court rolls relating to land. They are described here. His abstracts have long been available on FamilySearch, but the images there have not been indexed, so you have to use Mr Lodge's own indexes, browsing through the different pages to find what you want. The record treasury makes these same abstracts (held by the National Archives of Ireland) available under reference code NAI Lodge. The images are much better than on FamilySearch and the whole has been transcribed and is as a result, searchable. You can see what is available by browsing the hierarchy and expanding the node for the National Archives of Ireland. To search the whole thing, use this search adding a relevant key word. (It also includes volumes by John Lodge other than the court rolls).

John Lodge also produced a volume on letters patent from Henry VIII (available on Ireland’s virtual record treasury under ref NAI Lodge/22.

Fiants

Fiants are instructions to prepare letters patent. (See description here.)

A series of reports of the Deputy Keeper of Public Records in Ireland included as appendices fiants issued under the reigns of various different monarchs. In particular, faints under Elizabeth I were published in a series of appendices from 1879 to 1887. Indices to these fiants followed in two parts in 1889 and 1890.

This web page links to all these publications and adds some explanation.

Links to the publications are also contained in this space Reports on public records of Ireland.

See also Early modern Irish sources.