Digital Archive
Liber A (1485-1712)
Cite this document
Collection Galway Corporation Records
Title Liber A (1485-1712)
Description The records of Galway Corporation from its foundation in 1485. It consists of a statute book (Liber A) giving the names of members of the Corporation and statutes passed (1485 to 1710). Also the minute books of meetings of the Corporation from 1679, giving the dates of meetings, attendance, and business transacted. While the town may have struggled somewhat in the fourteenth century, there is no doubt that the town begun to expand rapidly in the fifteenth century. It achieved administrative autonomy with the grant of a royal charter in 1484. One of the ways for this administrative and judicial independence to be shown was through the keeping and maintenance of the council books for the corporation of Galway. The Town Records of Galway, the minute books of the Corporation, attained serious importance in the early nineteenth century, as the records of other corporations also did. There were a number of reasons for this, but primarily because the corporations came under political pressure to justify their existence, and one way to claim their independence was to proclaim their rights as being held "out of mind". From the 1880s to around 1906 a great deal of work was done in terms of preserving and making accessible the corporation books in an appropriate manner. This process is illuminating in showing the attitudes of people towards primary source material at the time. The work consisted on printing transcripts of the books to make them available to readers on the one hand, and rebinding the pages in guard books to preserve them on the other. The binding of Liber A saw the pages unbound, then pasted onto pages already bound into the new binding. The quality of the original pages was good, and, as the writing was on one side, it was pasted onto good quality paper. Transparent paper was used to repair tears and frayed edges where necessary in a manner similar to the way scotch tape is utilised today, but was used as sparingly as possible.
Date 01/01/1485
Date Issued 44587
Publisher University of Galway
Extent 312pp
Topic Trade,Taxes,Freemen,Religion,Church,Debtors,Indenture,Mayor,Safety,Crime,Defence,Sanitation,Health,Land,Litigation,Public Works,Building,Commerce,Laws,Corporation,Fines
Geographic Galway
Temporal 1600,1700,1400,1500,Early Tudor,Reformation,Elizabethan,Jacobean,Caroline,Wars of the Three Kingdoms,Cromwellian,Restoration,Williamite War,Penal
Genre Minutes (Records)
Creator / Author Name Galway Corporation