Falkiner — The Hospital of St. John of Jernmlem. 295 



fortunes and the successive migrations of the Grand Preceptory from 

 Jerus:ilem to Acre, from Acre to Cyprus, from Cyprus to Rhodes, from 

 Rhodes to Crete, and from Crete to its latest seat in Malta, remain, 

 in many respects, extraordinarily perfect) are sadly inadequate in 

 relation to the annals of the Order in Great Britain and Ireland. 

 While the succession of the Grand Masters of the Hospitallers, and 

 that of the Grand Priors of the several Languages — the name given to 

 the various provincial organizations throughout Europe — have been 

 preserved with tolerable completeness in the Library at Malta, the 

 official records contain only the most fragmentary references to the 

 Priors and Preceptories of the Three Kingdoms.^ Nor is this 

 deficiency made good by any extant records elsewhere. Por the 

 statistics published in Larking's "Knights Hospitallers of England 

 in 1338"^ deal solely with the property held by the Order in that 

 country, and the book takes no note of the general history of the 

 English and Irish Knights. Such information as can be gleaned 

 regarding the doings of the Order in Ireland is, therefore, inevitably 

 scrappy and unsatisfactory. Even when all the items have been 

 laboriously pieced together, they fall very far short of supplying the 

 materials for a consecutive chronicle ; and the task of reconstructing 

 the organization of the Irish branch of the Language of England from 

 the few scattered and inconsiderable bones of knowledge that survive, 

 is one that must baffle the most skilful and ingenious of historical 

 anatomists. It is possible indeed to make a very fair approximation 

 towards the succession of the Priors of Kilmainham,^ and a list of the 

 Priors of Ireland — who are not necessarily identical with the Priors 

 of Kilmainham — from the year 1330 to the dissolution of the Order, 

 Avill be found in Porter's History of the Knights of Malta."* But 

 except that a comparison of these lists with those of the Grand 

 Priors, Turcopoliers, and other officers of the English Language, 

 proves that the Irish branch had no independent existence, the heads 

 of its Preceptories being in many cases appointed from among the 

 Knights resident in England, these records throw no real light on the 

 history of the Hospitallers in Ireland. Yet, though the amount of 

 our positive knowledge is small, there are, nevertheless, indirect 



1 See Les Archives de la Bibliotheque et le Tresor de L'Oidre de Saint Jean 

 de Jerusalem a Malte." Par J. Delavalle le Roulx. Paris, 1883. 



2 Camden Series (old series) vol. Ixv. 

 ■"^ See Appendix II, p. 316, infra. 



4 Vol. ii., p. 296. 



