Edmund Spenser
historical figure · 2 works · 7 mentions · 9 anchored passages
Spenser
in the texts
Lectures on the Early History of Institutions
English poet and administrator who wrote critically of Irish law.
Nor does the Brehon law altogether disappoint the expectations of the patriotic Irishmen who, partly trusting to the testimony of Edmund Spenser, the least unkind of the English critics of Ireland, though one of the most ruthless in his practical suggestions, looked forward to its manifesting, when it was published, an equity and reasonableness which would put to shame the barbarous jurisprudence of England.
It has been very commonly believed that, before the agrarian measures of James the First, Ireland was one of the countries in which private property in land was invested with least sacredness, and in which forms of ownership generally considered as barbarous most extensively prevailed.
Edmund Spenser and Sir John Davis cannot have merely intended to calumniate the Irish native aristocracy when they emphatically declared that the ‘chiefs do most shamefully rackrent their tenants,’ and spoke with vehement indignation of the exactions from which the tribesmen suffered, the ‘coshering,’ and the ‘coin and livery,’ which occur over and over again in their pages.
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
Sixteenth-century English writer who recorded and criticized Irish chiefs' cuttings and cosherings.
Now, when Englishmen like Edmund Spenser first began to put their observations of Ireland into writing at the end of the sixteenth century, there was one Irish practice of which they spoke with the keenest indignation.