300 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



as Rhodes, was no phantom jurisdiction. A statute of Henry YI 

 passed by the Irish Parliament in 1447 indicates the mode in which 

 that authority was enforced. A Visitor-General appointed for the 

 purpose by the Grand Master, and invested with plenary powers of 

 deprivation, was despatched to Ireland, and was licensed by Letters 

 Patent from the King, to put the Bulls of the Grand Master into 

 execution. The Act recites how the Visitor "in a general chapter 

 held before him at Drogheda, by the advice of the brethren and 

 the council of the said Hospital for the contumacy, contempt, rebellion, 

 and dilapidation of the goods of the said hospital, and the non- 

 payment of the annual pension to the said Lord Master of the Rhodes, 

 deprived Thomas FitzGerald of his 'prioralty,' and appointed Thomas 

 Talbot in his stead." Thus the Order could make its power felt from 

 the far east to the far west of Europe, and the Grand Master's 

 authority could reach from the Levant to the Irish Sea. Purther- 

 more, the Irish establishment of the Order was apparently regarded 

 as a branch of the English Language, as the province was called, and 

 the appointments to the office of Prior of Ireland, which were made 

 at Rhodes, were usually filled from the Preceptories of the flourish- 

 ing English Hospitallers, whose principal house is commemorated in 

 St. John's Gate at Clerkenwell, and in the name still attached to one 

 of its principal possessions, the important district of modern London 

 known as St. John's AVood. Thus, in the earlier half of the history 

 of the Order in Ireland, the Priors of Kilmainham were almost 

 exclusively Anglo-Normans ; and it is not until the fifteenth century 

 that we find the names of such great Anglo- or Norman-Irish families 

 as those of Butler, FitzGerald, and Talbot on the roll. Thencefor- 

 ward, however, the Priors appear in a character political rather than 

 military or monastic ; and in place of manning the Government of 

 Ireland, as their predecessors had done, they seem rather to have 

 become permanent chiefs of an anti-English opposition. Neverthe- 

 less, despite some vague traditions of the grandeur and importance of 

 some of the earlier heads of the Hospital, as Roger Utlaugh and 

 Ralph de Ufford, it is the names of those later Priors wlio flourished 

 under the Lancastrian sovereigns, together with that of James Keating, 

 whose stormy priorate belonged to the reign of Edward IV, Richard III, 

 and Henry VII, and embraced the unfortunate adoption of the cause 

 of Lambert Simnel, that must occupy, in the absence of any personal 

 record of their predecessors, the most conspicuous place in the roll 

 of the Priors of Kilmainham. 



The great period of the Hospitallers in Great Britain may be said 



