Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/298

 2 88 Folklore and History in Ireland.

these natural factors artificial ones were added a fine hot-bed of trouble was well in preparation, and the resultant clash of cultures, intermittently intensified, has continued to this day.

It is to one section of the transplanted customs I wish to draw your attention to-day, for though the pages of Folklore have record of Irish legends, charms, May customs and Hollontide doings, there is no reference to the purely urban customs connected with civic life in Ireland. Natur- ally these have much in common with English municipal customs, yet if it were only to mark those very similarities, or to note digressions from the parent type, it seems to me they would be worth consideration.

So far as municipal organisation and government were concerned Irish towns were modelled upon the examples of English towns. It was, you will remember, customary in mediaeval days, when a town obtained a charter, to borrow the experience of an older town and copy the successful features of its administration and privileges. It became what is known as the mother town or city. So when the Plantagenet kings, as bribes or rewards, began to bestow rights of local self-government on their Irish towns, Bristol was the city most frequently selected as prototype, and her charters were adopted as the model for those granted to the greater number of Irish municipal institutions. The daughter town not only copied the administrative of her mother town, but also would appeal to the latter for solution of legal or civic difficulties. There are frequent references, for instance, of appeals by Dublin to Bristol for such aid. The chief magistrate of Irish municipalities appears for a long time to have been more often termed the Sovereign than the Mayor of the town. Wesley, during his visit to Belfast, refers to the Sovereign not the Mayor, even in his day.^

' There are many tempting premises in connection with the word, but, so far, I have not been able to make {jood any that suggested themselves to me,