Lynch (family)

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The flags of the Tribes in Eyre Square
Lynch Castle - Historic home of the Lynch family in Galway, built in the late 15th or early 16th centuries.

The family Lynch of Galway is the best known of those Anglo-14 and Cambro-Norman families that the Tribes of Galway ( English Tribes of Galway are called) and for centuries the city and the surrounding countryside in County Galway in Ireland dominated.

Traditionally, the family sees themselves as descendants of a family from Linz , descended from the youngest son Charlemagne . However, this cannot be proven. What is certain, however, is the Anglo-Norman origin. A Sir Hugo de Lynch accompanied William I during the conquest of England in 1066 . The first recorded family member in Ireland is Andrew de Lynch, who was involved in the invasion that began in 1169 during the reign of Henry II . His son settled in Galway around 1261 and made a large fortune by marrying the sole heir of the Mareschall family, whose male line was extinguished. Galway operated an intensive maritime trade with Spain and from the end of the 14th century also with Portugal, where the Irish also traveled to Lisbon . Two Portuguese letters of protection from 1465 for John and Dominic Lynch show that the family was directly involved in sea trade with Portugal.

In order to break the dominance of the de Burgo family in Galway, Dominick Lynch Fitz John successfully sought a new charter for Galway with Richard III. , which from December 15, 1484 granted the citizens of the city the right to elect a mayor. His brother Pierce Lynch immediately benefited from this and became the first freely elected mayor of Galway and over a period of 170 years a total of 84 members of the family should take office. After the fall of Galway on April 12, 1652 in the course of the reconquest of Ireland by Oliver Cromwell , the family was expropriated and on October 25, 1654 the last Catholic mayor of the city, Thomas Lynch FitzAmbrose, was ousted.

Some branches of the family settled in the Galway area. The O'Heynes lands were given to the Crown of England by Hugh O'Heynes "the Yellow" in the late 17th century, and the Lynches acquired the property and settled there. Around 1820 the family's country houses and castles were found in Galway, Barna , Drimcong, Lydacan Castle , Moycullen, Newcastle (Galway) and Shannonbridge .

In 1848, some unused hewn stones and fragments from the 16th and 17th centuries were used to build them into the north wall of St. Nikolas Cemetery. This included a door frame with a relief plaque above it, depicting a skull with two crossed bones, and above it a two-part rectangular window. This became a macabre tourist attraction as the story was spread that Galway mayor and magistrate James Lynch Fitz Stephen sentenced his own son to death in 1493 and hanged him in the location. The story became an urban legend that also served to explain the concept of lynching . However, it is now considered refuted.

literature

  • Seán Spellissy: The History of Galway: City & County . The Celtic Bookshop, Limerick 1999, ISBN 0-9534683-4-8 .
  • Adrian Martyn: The Tribes of Galway: 1124-1642 , Galway, 2016. ISBN 978-0-9955025-0-5

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Spellissy, p. 38.
  2. ↑ Wendy Childs, Timothy O'Neill: Overseas trade . In: Art Cosgrove (ed.): A New History of Ireland: Medieval Ireland 1169–1534 . Oxford University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-953970-3 , pp. 498 .
  3. ↑ Spellissy, p. 43.
  4. ↑ Spellissy, p. 38.
  5. ↑ Spellissy, p. 140.
  6. ↑ Spellissy, p. 64.
  7. ↑ Spellissy, p. 38.
  8. ↑ Spellissy, p. 37.