Fethard Historical Facts.

  1. 1. Town Wall. The wall is over a kilometre long and stands over seven metres high. More than 90% of the circuit survives. The first ‘murage’ grant was in 1292 in the reign of Edward I, the great townmaker. Subsequent grants were in 1299, 1375 and 1409. But the walls we see today probably date in the most part to the five year grant of 1450-1455 issued by Richard, Duke of York, Lord Lieutenant and the 4th Earl of Ormond and the subsequent maintenance-and-repair grants of 1456-68 and 1468-1480.
  2. Castles and Gatehouses. Three ‘castles’ or fortified buildings remain in Fethard, all largely intact. Court Castle or Templars’ Castle is the most magnificent by far and still preserves an extraordinary stone hand-basin built into the wall of its great hall. Edmond’s Castle and the Mural Tower flank the two southern extremities of the churchyard and dominate the river. Of the five original gates only on (the North Gate or Sparagoleith) survives. There is much hidden medieval fabric in Fethard, including part of the West Gate, the Water Gate and the East Gate.
  3. Oldest Dated Timber Roof in Ireland. Fethard’s medieval church, still in use, has the oldest scientifically-dated timber roof in Ireland. In 2011, the roof was dated by Queen’s University, Belfast by dendrochronology to 1489 (plus or minus nine years). The church has one of the finest medieval towers outside the Pale and magnificent ‘flowing’ stone tracery in its medieval windows.
  4. The Ogre. Fethard was founded in about 1208 by William de Braose, Lord of Limerick. De Braose was a pious but brutal man, known to history as the ‘Ogre of Abergavenny.’ In 1175 de Braose invited three Welsh princes and their acolytes to a Christmas feast at his castle at Abergavenny in a gesture of peace. All were murdered including the 7-year old Cadwalader. De Braose later forfeited his lands to the Crown and died hunted and in exile in France. His wife and son were captured by King John and are thought to have been starved to death.
  5. The Crutched Friars. The church and great tracts of land were given in perpetuity by William de Braose to the Crutched Friars of the priory-hospital of St John the Baptist, New Gate, Dublin. These were a group of Augustinian canons regular who ministered to the sick. They operated about 15 hospitals in the most heavily colonised parts of Ireland. The order had been founded in the Holy Land during the Crusades (they’re often mistaken for the ‘Hospitallers’ or the ‘Templars’). They wore grey habits and carried a cross in hand. They held the rectory of Fethard until 1539 when all their property fell forfeit to the Crown under Henry VIII.
  6. The Duel. A dispute arose in 1420 over the ownership of Kiltinan Castle a mile outside Fethard. The property and manor had been owned by a branch of the Butlers, the Barons Dunboyne, but it was claimed by their cousin, Thomas Butler, Prior of the Knights Hospitaller at Kilmainham. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, James Butler, 4th Earl of Ormond (another cousin), stepped in and ordered trial by combat. The duel took place on the lawn of the castle. Young James Butler, fighting on behalf of the prior (his father) was badly wounded and Edmund Butler, 6th Baron Dunboyne was killed. No-one else was hurt - it was all kept in the family.
  7. The Burning of Fethard. The ‘Butcher’, the Queen and the Earl.
In February 1468 Thomas, 7th Earl of Desmond was ‘judicially murdered’ at Drogheda by ‘the Butcher’ Sir John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester. The Desmond family preserve the story that Thomas was beheaded on the orders of Edward IV’s queen, Elizabeth Woodville. Desmond had been a good friend of the young warrior king but had made the (big) mistake of suggesting that the King had married beneath himself. When Woodville heard this, Thomas’s fate was cast. She is said to have taken the King’s signet ring while he slept and sealed the order for Thomas’s execution. When the news got out, Thomas’s brother, Garret Fitzgerald raged into Ormond territory with a huge army of mounted men and gallowglasses – some say up to 20,000. Fethard was burned and sacked. How strange are the connections of history.
  1. Neighbours. The Desmond Fitzgeralds controlled the lands south of the narrow River Suir. It was often too close. In 1462, the Butlers lost 500 men fighting the Fitzgeralds at the Battle of Piltown (by Carrick). In the summer of 1582, two sons of the Earl of Ormond sallied forth from Fethard with ‘a vigorous body of cavalry and select battalions of Gallowglasses and Giomanachs…’ they met the Fitzgeralds at Knockgraffon (near Cahir) where they were defeated by the Earl of Desmond leaving ‘…a great part of their cavalry and all their foot soldiers at the mercy and discretion of their enemies…’ John O’Donovan [Ordnance Survey, 1840].
  2. The Everard family were amongst the most prominent of the burgesses of the town. They regularly held the office of ‘portreeve’ and were responsible for the upkeep of the town wall, the collection of taxes and general orderliness. Thomas Everard, the last prior of the priory-hospital in Dublin was the first vicar of Fethard after the dissolution of the monasteries. After the dissolution, the Everard family and the Butlers, Lords Dunboyne continued their families’ tradition of giving succour to the poor in the foundation of the almshouse.
  3. The Tholsel is one of the oldest purpose-built public buildings still existing in Ireland. It was built between 1605 and 1611 as an almshouse and bears the coats of arms of Everard and Dunboyne. In later years it was a courthouse and latterly a dancehall. The building was used as the cinema in the recent movie ‘Stella Days’ starring Martin Sheen, Stephen Rea and Amy Huberman and it is now the subject of a major refurbishment under the Heritage Council’s ‘Adopt a Monument’ scheme - bristling with newly-discovered medieval and post-medieval features.
  4. In the mid eighteenth century The Everard patrimony was bought by Thomas Barton, wine merchant, of Bordeaux. It was ‘French Tom’ who built the great townhouse (1763) that became the Fethard cavalry barracks. The barracks was burned by anti-treaty forces in the 1920s but the wines of Barton and Guestier and the wines of Chateau Langoa/Leoville Barton still flow out of Bordeaux.
  5. The Surrender. Cromwell marched to Fethard during the night of 2nd February 1650 in heavy rain, fording the swollen River Suir at Rochestown, near Ardfinnan and found ‘a very good wall with round a square bulwarks after the old manner of fortification.’ He billeted his troops and his horses in the ruined friary. Some 250 defenders lined the town walls under the command of Pierce Butler, the provost. But Cromwell’s reputation had preceded him: ‘after almost the whole night spent in treaty, the town was delivered to me next morning on terms that we usually call honourable.’ The burgesses were spared transportation to Connacht.
  6. Cromwell’s Curse. As he entered the town Cromwell is said to have fallen from his horse in Barrack Street and cursed the ground. Even today, no funeral procession will pass over the spot. Every cortege diverts through Burke Street.
  7. Pullers. Cromwell is said to have press-ganged the able-bodied into the task of pulling his heavy cannon the eight miles to Clonmel. Extraordinary as it may seem, ‘your family always were pullers,’ is an insult still used in the neighbourhood.
  8. A Land Worth Fighting For. Cromwell stayed a number of weeks and gathered his forces before marching to Kilkenny and then on to Clonmel where his assault was repulsed. From Bennet’s Hill he looked back on the rolling landscape of the Suir valley and said ‘This is indeed is a land worth fighting for.’
  9. Normans. Many of the original Norman families stayed in Fethard and their names survived the Cromwellian era of persecution and transportation. Amongst these families are the Everards, Hackets, Burkes, Butlers, Tobins, Walls.
  10. The Martyr. Father William Tirry was appointed prior of Fethard in 1652. In January the following year, a proclamation was published charging that ‘all priests, friars, bishops and other clergy deriving their authority from the See Apostolic of the Pope of Rome to depart out of the Kingdom of Ireland on pain of death within forty days.’ Father Tirry went into hiding in the ruined friary (you can still see his lonely room). He was arrested on Holy Saturday 1654 and executed wearing his black Augustinian habit in the market place at Clonmel on 12th May 1654. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1992. His body is believed to lie within the grounds of the friary.
  11. The Apostate. In the Augustinian Friary, there is a tomb to John Butler, former Roman Catholic Bishop of Cork (in office 1763-1786). Late in life, Butler resigned his bishopric and converted to Protestantism in order to inherit the Dunboyne title and continue his line. He married his niece Maria Butler without dispensation from the Pope. He was 58, she was 24. They had a daughter who was born deformed and died in infancy. The marriage faltered and the couple were divorced. Butler suffered great remorse and begged for absolution. He was reconciled to his Catholic faith and died in 1800 a ‘relapsed papist.’ He left a large legacy to Maynooth College and is buried with his daughter.
  12. The Witch. In 1895 Michael Cleary was tried and convicted of killing his wife Bridget Cleary in the neighbouring village of Cloneen. Michael had burned Bridget’s body in the belief that she was a changeling – a demonic substitute swapped by the fairies. It was a cause celebre. The world’s press descended on Fethard and put up in Stokes’s Hotel (a sixteenth century inn that was sadly demolished in 1993). A spooky little rhyme survives; ‘Are you a witch? Or are you fairy? Or are the wife of Michael Cleary?’
  13. Ghosts have been seen in MacCarthy’s Hotel where any one of the three elderly ladies who once owned the hotel sometimes appear. An unknown drinker is sometimes seen reflected in the mirror at the bar. Stooped figures in full monastic garb have been seen in and around the medieval churchyard. A local family tell of waking to see a tall figure in a black or grey cowled robe leaning over the cot of their sick child as if in prayer. The child soon recovered.
  14. Soldier’s Luck (Part I). Robert Jolly, a handsome young soldier, was stationed in Fethard in 1680 as part of a cavalry regiment. He fell in love with a penniless orphan girl named Eleanor Meagher. But before anything came of their love, Robert Jolly was posted to serve abroad. Eleanor went to England as a companion to a rich lady. In London she caught the eye of an elderly but wealthy jew whose riches dazzled the young girl. She married. In the course of time, as old men do, he died and Eleanor found herself rich but lonely. Unhappy and still in London, she was passing a barracks and noticed her old beau standing guard. They married and returned to Fethard. They lived at Knockelly Castle. The magnificent castle in its two acre bawn, still dominates the land to the east of the town and the tomb in Holy Trinity Church still bears witness to the love that waited its turn.
  15. Soldier’s Luck (Part II). In the medieval church and graveyard (Holy Trinity C of I) are a number of interesting monuments, some of which are connected with the British Army cavalry barracks. One records the death of Private Isaac Bennett of the King’s Dragoon Guards ‘who was shot in an unequal contest with a party of Rebels on the night of 27th of May 1813 at Ardmayle.’ Two years year later (June 1815) the regiment distinguished itself against Napoleon at Waterloo.
  16. Cavalry Tradition. There were four British Army Cavalry barracks in South Tipperary, at Cahir, Carrick, Clogheen and Fethard. The countryside was perfect for horses (unlike North Tipperary which had only infantry barracks). At Waterloo, Major-General Sir William Ponsonby was in command of the Union Brigade and was responsible for the ill-fated charge of the Scots’ Greys immortalised by Lady Butler in her famous painting of the battle. Ponsonby had been MP for Fethard until the Act of Union and was killed at Waterloo. He was played by the actor Michael Wilding in the 1970s film ‘Waterloo.’
  17. Talk of a Tunnel. There are persistent rumours of a tunnel linking the Augustinian Friary (which was outside the town walls) with Templars’ Castle in the churchyard. The old men who ventured into the tunnel when they were boys are not long dead, but the exact whereabouts of the tunnel seems to have died with them.
  18. The Fethard Statues. In the National Museum in Kildare Street on what is known as a ‘long-term loan’ you will find three late fifteenth century painted oak statues. They are almost human in size and they represent God the Father, Christ on Calvary and St John the Baptist. They had been hidden in Fethard during the Reformation and kept safe for over five hundred years. They are amongst a tiny number of these precious artefacts to have survived in Ireland.
  19. The Fethard Statutes. In 1428, James Butler, the ‘White Earl’ of Ormond issued ordinances in Fethard wresting control of County Kilkenny from the English Crown and adding it to his fiefdom of Tipperary as ‘one country under one lord.’ This became the territory known as the Earldom and supremacy of ‘Ormond’ and it endured under the authority of the Butlers until it was formally abolished in 1715. The last of the great private administrations in Ireland.
  20. Sheela-na-Gig. Fethard’s wall is protected by its very own obscene and ancient carving. You can see him/her/it as you come into the town over Watergate Bridge.

Fethard in Winter