This page gathers the article's own "documentary proofs" of the pedigree's accuracy: a fourteenth-century mention of the O'Hurlys in the Wars of Turlough manuscript, a translated twelfth-century mortgage deed naming a Conor Oge O'Hurly, and an Annals of the Four Masters anecdote about a Danish-era ransom at Kildare — the last of which, as the notes below explain, turns out to rest on a case of mistaken identity.
Pages 111–112
As a further proof, if proof were necessary, of the correctness of the genealogy, &c., with which I have already furnished you, I now take leave to introduce the following additional particulars which my continued research has enabled me to produce:—
[p. 111] From a passage in the Wars of Turlough, a manuscript in the Royal Irish Academy, it plainly appears that The O'Hurly was one of the Chiefs of Thomond, A.D. 1309. Wherein it is mentioned that the clans of Ibh Blod, whose territories can be proved by four passages in the said MS. to have been on the east side of the Shannon, marched to encounter the clans of the MacMahons on the west side of the Shannon, and amongst the former the clan of O'Hurly is mentioned as the clan of Brennan Baron, of which O'Hurly was Chief.
My second proof is extracted from Mr. Hardiman's Collection of Irish Deeds, published in the Transactions of the Academy. These deeds chiefly relate to Thomond, which, it may be proper to state from ancient authorities, formerly extended from the Isles of Arran on the west to Slieve Evlinn, near Cashel, in Tipperary, thence to Knockainy, in the County of Limerick, and from Loop Head to Slighe Dala, in Ossory. The most ancient of those deeds are without date or signatures, having been entered into before it became customary in the islands to affix either. They belong to the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries.
The following deed is considered to be as early as the beginning of the twelfth century, and is one of the most curious, viz., thus translated:
"This is the mortgage due Conor Oge O'Hurly upon Carrowanchallagh, viz., 40 cows, that is to say, 7 in-calf cows, and every cow thereof valued at 3 shillings, and the rest of the cows barren. The said Conor Oge came by the said lands thus for stealth [Note—Stealth, literally rapine], and Conor paid 18 cows for the said land, id est, 16 cows to gallowglasses, and half a mark, fees for Brehon's judgment, otherwise called Oilegheag, which is derived from oileagh, a judge, and ioc, to pay, and said 18 cows are without any use accruing to the Conor thereout upon the said land. And the witnesses present to the said bargain are Slany Ny O'Brien, Fynnola ny Ma Gorman, Conor O'Arney, and Senawn O'Leadan. None shall have power to redeem the same."
It is doubtful whether the land was acquired by force or forfeited as an Eiric; but from the Brehon's judgment the latter might be inferred. From the above it would appear that title to lands might have been acquired by force or forfeited as an Eiric. It appears that Conor O'Hurly so acquired the land of Carrowanchallagh.
The above Conor O'Hurly must certainly have been a son of the Chief, as among the names on the list we have one of them designated Irish, that is "Donough of the Port," which is certainly the same place mentioned in the deed, namely, the quarter or cantred of the Calaidh, or Challagh.
This is corroborative evidence of the genuineness of the list of the chiefs. This place is bounded on the east by the Leadmore, on the south by the Shannon, and on the north by the Magista. It contains between 400 and 500 acres, in the parish of Kilrush, County of Clare. Its present possessor is Mr. Vandeleur, in whose family it has remained since the time of William the 3rd.
[p. 112] The Annals of the Four Masters relate that, in 962, the Danes took several captives in plundering Kildare, and amongst them was Neill O'Hurly, who ransomed himself with his own money. This is also stated in Trias Thaumaturga, page 630. From those various and ancient most indisputable authorities, always corroborating each other, it is most evident that the O'Hurly family is one of the oldest in Ireland. Proof, indeed, beyond doubt that both the name and lineage of O'Hurly are of ancient Irish origin.
Certified by me, Dublin, March 22, 1836.
OWEN CONNELLAN, &c., &c.
The bracketed page citations above ([p. 111], [p. 112]) mark the original page breaks; spelling, italics, and punctuation otherwise follow the 1905 printing exactly, including "Brennan Baron" in the Wars of Turlough paragraph — almost certainly a printer's variant of "Brenann Bán," the same ancestor named in Section 4's pedigree tables, rather than a different name. We have left it as printed rather than silently correcting it; see the historical note below.
Historical Note — the Wars of Turlough, and What Counts as "Proof"
The Wars of Turlough (Irish: Caithréim Thoirdhealbhaigh, "The Triumphs of Turlough"), by the fourteenth-century author Seán mac Ruaidhrí Mac Craith, is a lengthy prose-and-verse narrative celebrating the Dalcassian/O'Brien cause in Thomond's wars against the Anglo-Norman de Clare family in the early 1300s, edited and translated into English by Standish Hayes O'Grady for the Irish Texts Society (vols. XXVI–XXVII, 1929). It is genuine and important medieval Irish literature, and its historical framework (real wars, real dates, real participants) is broadly trusted by historians — but it was composed as a partisan, celebratory narrative for an O'Brien patron, in the tradition of bardic history, not as a neutral chronicle. That matters here because the article calls this citation, and the Hardiman deed that follows it, "proof" of the O'Hurly pedigree's correctness. The deed below is a genuinely strong piece of documentary evidence — a real, dated, witnessed legal instrument. A passing mention of "the clan of O'Hurly" inside a bardic war-narrative is a different, weaker kind of evidence: it confirms the O'Hurlys had standing as a recognized clan of Thomond by the fourteenth century (itself useful), but it doesn't independently verify the specific genealogical chain the article is building. Both are worth having; they aren't equally strong.
We tracked down O'Grady's translation of the specific AD 1309 episode the article means. It describes O'Brien threatening to unleash "Hy-Blood" (Ibh Blod — the O'Hurlys' own tribal name, per Section 4) against the Clancullen sept (the Mac Namaras) unless a peace held; when it broke down, Hy-Blood crossed the "green-fenced marches of Kilgorey" and fought a pitched battle against Donough Mac Conmara's forces, with heavy losses on both sides. After the battle, the text says, "compassion for the grievous disaster that in such brief space had overtaken those gentlemen touched Thomond's irachts at large... both east and west, and universally, these became twined in a fast tie of kindness for the seed of Blod." This genuinely confirms Ibh Blod as a real, active political and military force in Thomond in 1309, on the east side of the Shannon, exactly where Section 3 places them — independent corroboration of real value. What it does not do is name O'Hurly, or confirm that "O'Hurly was Chief" of this group at the time: no individual leader of Hy-Blood is named anywhere in this particular episode.
A search of the full text (a CELT electronic edition of the same O'Grady translation, roughly 68,000 words) found no occurrence of the surname "O'Hurly" anywhere in the manuscript — consistent with Section 4's own pedigree, which places the family's adoption of the "Ó" a few generations after Urthuile. It did, however, turn up something better: a few pages before the 1309 battle, in the build-up to the same Hy-Blood/Clancullen conflict (a 1307 raid on Clancullen's church-lands at Moynoe touching off a full mobilization in 1308), a poet "of the seed of Blod" composed a muster-poem calling each of Hy-Blood's allied septs to arms by name — Clandonnchuan, the O'Conaings, Clankennedy, the O'Hogans, the O'Shanachans, the O'Ahiarns, the O'Molonys, and others — including the line "Spare not the seed of Brenann Bane, that will encounter you in the west." Brenann Bán is the same ancestor Section 4's pedigree names as Blod's son and the O'Hurlys' direct forebear, so this is a genuine, independently verifiable appearance of his descendants as a real, named military sept within Hy-Blood's mobilization in exactly this period — considerably closer to corroboration than the battle scene alone, even though it still names no individual chief and predates the family's use of "O'Hurly" as a surname. The article says its claim rests on "four passages" in the manuscript; between the muster-poem and the battle account, we've now found at least two of them, though neither yet supplies the specific "O'Hurly was Chief" detail.
Historical Note — James Hardiman and the Collection of Irish Deeds
James Hardiman (1782–1855) was a Galway-born antiquarian, librarian of Queen's College Galway from its founding in 1849, and one of the most important collectors and editors of Irish-language manuscript material in the early nineteenth century, best known for his History of the Town and County of Galway (1820) and his two-volume Irish Minstrelsy (1831). His collection and translation of early Irish deeds, published in the Royal Irish Academy's Transactions, made a body of genuine medieval legal documents — the kind of primary source this family history otherwise lacks for its earliest generations — available to nineteenth-century readers for the first time. The mortgage deed quoted above, naming a real Conor Oge O'Hurly as a party to a dated land transaction, is exactly the sort of documentary anchor that distinguishes it from the bardic and legendary material discussed elsewhere in this series.
Glossary
- Eiric
- In Brehon law, a body-fine or compensation payment, most often associated with a killing, paid by an offender or their kin to the victim's kin in place of blood vengeance. Its appearance here, in a discussion of how a parcel of land may have been "forfeited as an Eiric," suggests land could sometimes substitute for a cash payment of this fine — part of why the deed's own text hedges on whether the land changed hands by force or by this kind of legal forfeiture.
- Gallowglass
- An anglicization of gallóglaigh ("foreign warriors"), heavily armed mercenary soldiers, originally of mixed Norse-Gaelic descent from the Hebrides and western Scotland, who served as elite professional troops for Irish and Anglo-Irish lords from the thirteenth century onward. Their fee for military service, paid here in cattle as part of the Carrowanchallagh transaction, was a recognized category of expense significant enough to be itemized in a land deed.
- Trias Thaumaturga
- Latin for "Three Wonder-Workers," a 1647 compendium of the lives of Saints Patrick, Brigid, and Columba compiled by the Louvain-based Irish Franciscan scholar John Colgan, part of the same continental Irish-college scholarly tradition that produced the Four Masters' own annals. Its citation here for the 962 Danish-captivity anecdote is typical of how nineteenth-century antiquarians cross-checked one early modern compilation against another.
Historical Note — the Annals of the Four Masters, and the Mystery of "Neill O'Hurly"
This is the first point in the series where the article directly quotes an entry it attributes to the Annals of the Four Masters, rather than simply mentioning the work in passing (as in Section 2's note on Owen Connellan). The Annals were compiled between 1632 and 1636 at a Franciscan friary near Donegal town by the chief compiler Michael Ó Cléirigh and three collaborating scholars — hence the name given to the work by later readers — drawing together and synchronizing a wide range of earlier Irish annalistic sources into a single chronological record of Irish history from a mythical prehistory down to 1616.
The specific anecdote quoted here, however, does not hold up well under closer inspection. The wording — a Danish plundering of Kildare, captives taken, a ransom paid in the raider's own money — closely matches a real, independently verifiable annal entry, but not the one the article names. The Annals of Ulster, s.a. 964 (a year the annals themselves flag as "alias 963"), record that "Cell Dara [Kildare] was plundered by the foreigners... but it was compassionated by the wonderful piety of Niall ua Eruilb, nearly all the clerics being redeemed... with his own silver," enough to fill "the full of the great house of Brigit and the full of the oratory" (CELT electronic edition, Corpus of Electronic Texts, University College Cork). The event, the place, and the ransom-in-silver detail all match the 1905 article's anecdote closely — but two things don't. First, the direction of the transaction is reversed: Niall was not a captive who "ransomed himself," but a wealthy patron who paid, out of piety, to free clergy who had been taken. Second, and more importantly for this family history, his name was ua Eruilb, not Ó hUrthuile/O'Hurly. "Eruilb" derives from the Old Norse personal name Herjólfr, and belongs to a distinct lineage sometimes called Clann Eruilb, whose own ethnic character — Gaelic, Hiberno-Norse, or a mixture — is still an open question in current scholarship (a recent Irish Historical Studies article is devoted to exactly that question, and to this same Niall). The resemblance to "Ó hUrthuile" is phonetic only, and it is easy to see how an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century reader, working from a Latinized or Anglicized rendering of "Ua hEruilb," could mistake it for an early spelling of "O'Hurly."
What we have not been able to verify directly is whether this same entry genuinely also appears in the Annals of the Four Masters under the year 962 as the article states (we checked the Annals of Ulster, not the Four Masters, and the two annal-collections don't always carry identical entries), or whether the article's second citation, Trias Thaumaturga page 630, independently corroborates an O'Hurly rather than an ua Eruilb at that same event. So this isn't a closed case — but given how precisely the Annals of Ulster's actual wording matches the anecdote, and given that a real, separately-documented "ua Eruilb" is already attached to this exact ransom, this looks like the weakest of the "documentary proofs" gathered in this section, not the strongest, its confident Latin citation apparatus notwithstanding.