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The research in this dissertation was based on the observation that possession and control of land was a key factor in the exercise of royal power in Medieval Ireland between c.650 and c.1200. As scholarship has not yet advanced far enough for an overview of royal power to be written, case studies are employed in this dissertation to explore the exercise of kingship in relation to facets of land use. A broad chronological focus has been adopted in order to accommodate the utilisation of diverse types of sources. This dissertation begins with an introduction to the topic and an outline of the methodology and sources employed in the ensuring analysis. The body of the dissertation is divided into two sections, which are largely defined by chronological and generic factors. In section one (Chapters Two and Three), narrative texts concerning the Eȯganacht dynastic ancestor figure Corc, and saints Éimíne and Senán (<i>Cáin Éimíne Báin</i> and <i>Betha Senáin</i>), which (with the exception of <i>Betha Senáin</i>) date mainly between the seventh and tenth centuries, are examined. Land ownership and rights over land were used in these texts to legitimise kingships, create political alliances and depict royal governance. <i>Cáin Éimíne Báin</i> and <i>Betha Senáin</i> form a generic and chronological bridge between sections one and two. <i>Cáin Éimíne Báin</i>, although the older of the texts, partially resembles the later evidence utilised in section two, while <i>Betha Senáin </i>is closer in date to the later evidence, but is more akin to the earlier narrative texts. In the second section (Chapters Four and Five), the use of grants of land (and rights over land) in royal governance is investigated, by analysing eleventh- and twelfth-century administrative documents, namely the Gaelic <i>notitiae</i> (land notes), in the Book of Kells and Latin charters issues by Irish Kings.

To say what this thesis is is to say what it is not. It is not a history of the Irish Civil War. War is a past thing, a remembered or forgotten thing. The whys and the wherefores are taken for granted. It begins instead at the end of civil war. Secondly, it is not a study of republican memory. Republicanism has quite a singular approach to its dead. Death, there, is a simpler thing. Men die for Ireland; death is an inspiration complete the republican task. That is not to diminish its experience of civil war. It is instead to focus on the more troubled experience of remembering the Free State dead. The emphasis is not part of any elaborate exercise in rehabilitation. The question of what was and was not done in the woods in Kerry is not at issue here. The dead, or rather their commemoration, is the prime concern of this thesis; how the winners of a war no one wished to fight express whether there is of pride, sorrow, bitterness, triumphalism, shame. The Free State dead are merely the more evocative examples of this dilemma. After civil war can the winners honour their victory; can they commemorate it, can they hail their conquering heroes with the blood of their comrades still fresh on their boots? Or does civil war, by its very nature, demand silence? Should the winners cover themselves in shame, bow their heads and hope that the nation forgets 'our lamentable spasm of national madness'? What is a poor victorious state to do; all the time watched by a vigilant empire, all the time wary of an enemy which only stopped fighting but never surrounded its arms? It is this conflict of impulses, the tussle of memory and forgetting that is imperative here. Hence it is addressed at its most public point, at the very point at which it becomes part of the landscape, at the statutes and crosses, in the ritual and rhetoric of commemoration. Indeed it is at the foot of these cenotaphs and crosses that this thesis poses its central questions. What is particular about the memory of civil war? What is particular to the Irish example when Europe has inscribed its grief in <I>lieux de mémoire</I>? What is its legacy? Was the bitterness as deep as the silence would suggest or was it convenient, merely the means to more superficial party political ends?