Death in the Castle Yard: Judicial Murder as Spectacle

• In Event: Violent Lives in Early Modern Britain and Ireland

Abstract

At nine o’clock in the morning of the 7th of September 1583, two Gaelic Irish elite figures were led into the courtyard of Dublin Castle to begin what one commentator has referred to as the last trial by combat in the British Isles. These two individuals, Tadhg MacGiollaphraig and Conor Mac Cormac O’Connor though related by blood proceeded to fight each other to the death, until one decapitated the other. My paper will explore the circumstances which brought them to this dramatic moment and explain how explicit government failure to accommodate dispossessed Gaelic elite figures in a plantation setting and a systematic campaign of violent attrition produced a desperation that ended in this extreme moment. I will also explore how this display of intimate violence functioned as spectacle and entertainment for the lord justices and the assembled Privy Council.

Author

• Vincent Patrick Carey, SUNY Plattsburgh