By Patrick McDonagh
Published in Irish Historical Studies, January 2026.
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Abstract

The topic of urban revolt in medieval Ireland has been overlooked by wider scholarship. This article offers the first detailed analysis of a revolt which occurred in Galway in the late fourteenth century. The basis of this study is a twentieth-century transcription made of an extract from a plea roll of the king’s bench in Ireland before the latter’s destruction in 1922, which records the judicial proceedings taken against one of the town’s rebels and provides an under-exploited (and not entirely reliable) narrative of the key facts of this rebellion. This article locates the actions of Galway townspeople within a wider European pattern of protest and rebellion in the second half of the fourteenth century and, more specifically, places the revolt in the context of contemporary political events in Ireland and England. The events in Galway should be viewed as a genuinely ‘popular’ revolt, challenging assumptions about the presumed loyalty of towns and cities in medieval Ireland to the English crown and its local representatives.