Quality of Family Life and Mortality in Seventeenth Century Dublin

Inquiry into the quality of family life in seventeenth century Dublin is an attempt to understand conditions in the second largest city in the British Isles; further, the era was one of convulsions in the body politic, social, and religious. The Scottish James I and VI (1556 1625) determined that the Irish province closest to Scotland, Ulster, would be settled = `planted” by Presbyterians. The process was undertaken at the expense of Ulster’s tradition bound, gaelic population. Decades later, that policy of deliberate alienation led to the uprising in 1641 led by Sir Phelim O’ Neill. A decade of violence was summated in an outbreak of bubonic plague from baleful Nature, and by the violent, swift campaign of Oliver Cromwell in 1649. Thirty years later, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, confirmed by the defeat of James II at the Boyne, consolidated power in Ireland in the hands of the Protestant ascendancy. Quality of life in the several decades of turmoil was destroyed for many, but Dublin was spared the physical destruction experienced at Drogheda to the north; Dublin’s deliverance was the work of Colonel Michael Jones and his victory at nearby Rathmines. Subsequently, Dublin’s households flourished in the several parishes; in some piped water was available, but mortality was always high.