284 Proceedinrjs of the Royal Irish Academy. 



II. 



The Possessions of the Hospital. 



Our notion of the importance of the Hospital of Kilmainham would 

 be extremely inadequate were we to conceive of its authority as 

 limited to the lands directly annexed to the Priory, extensive though 

 these rapidly became through the grants of successive monarchs, and 

 the bounty of generations of pious donors. The immediate possessions 

 of the Priory (which included a great part of the modern Chapelizod, 

 as well as the mills and weirs of Kilmainham) had probably assumed 

 the aspect which they presented as late as Tudor times even before the 

 assignment of the property of the despoiled Templars, early in the 

 fourteenth century, had powerfully increased the wealth of the 

 Xnights of St. John. But besides what they owed to royal liberality, 

 the Priors of Kilmainham were continually receiving accessions of 

 property in the form of gifts of houses and small parcels of land 

 scattered through the City and County of Dublin. The bare recital of 

 these occupies many closely written pages in the Inquisition ordered 

 in the 33rd of Henry YIII, after the dissolution of the monasteries, 

 to ascertain the extent of the possessions of the Priory.^ That docu- 

 ment begins by reciting the immediate belongings of the Priory in the 

 following terms : — 



" Inquisition, this Wednesday next after the Peast of Corpus 

 Christi, 33rd Henry VIII, finds that the last prior was seized of the 

 said Priory with all its buildings, and three gardens, and an orchard 

 walled with stone, four towers erected on the said walls; one tower on 

 the north hangs over the bridge crossing the river Lyffe, which 

 gardens and orchard were reserved for the use of the Hospital, 26Q 

 acres of arable land, the demesne, annual value £13; 12 acres of 

 meadow, a large wood containing 42 acres on the north of the river, 

 another wood of 10 acres of underwood and 5 of pasture, which were 

 reserved for the use of the Hospital, and 260 acres of pasture and 

 briars." 



The Inquisition goes on to enumerate in a long list of additional 

 possessions a mill on the river Lyffey, a fulling mill on the river 

 Cammoke, a salmon weir with boat and nets on the Liffey, the 



^ The substance of this Inquisition has been printed in D'Alton's " History of 

 the County of Dublin," pp. 624-6. 



