Publications | Down Survey | 1999 Issue Contents

'Things past cannot be recalled': the Raleagh Bible
Allan Blackstock

The proverb which heads this article was current in sixteenth-century England and is probably far older. That it is still current points to the fact that it contains what would be called in these parts more than 'a grain of truth'. Yet historians try to accomplish precisely this proverbially impossible task, or at least a version of it, by using various sources to reconstruct a narrative of the past. Perhaps another proverb would be a better motto for them: 'A book that it is shut is but a block.' One thing is certain. Less books are shut to today's historians than to our predecessors. We have the advantage of increased access to sources, through the assiduousness of archivists and others in collecting and preserving historical material and, increasingly, through modern information technologies, ranging from microfilm to the Internet.

Yet sometimes information comes in the traditional way of the 'discovery in the attic'. This happened to a friend of mine who came into possession of an old bible bearing an inscription on the inside cover which was a complete mystery. This was not the usual genealogical type of information on a family bible. Rather it was a school prize, given in April 1831 to Agnes Coultra, a pupil at William Martin's London Hibernian School at Raleagh. These were names of which my friend knew nothing. I was interested in the bible because I knew the townland of Raleagh, between Ballynahinch and Crossgar. I remembered it as a tranquil area, epitomising much of the essence of lowland County Down, a green place of low hills and well-watered valleys.

The inscription does not specify the task which gained Agnes Coultra her presentation bible, except that
she got it 'for superior merit'. However, because it does contain some hard information it presents a challenge to anyone interested in the past. Could this information be wedded to the information available in the archives to recall, if not things past, then a part of them? I thought it would be interesting to spend a couple of days in the local archives and libraries to see how far I could get, using the information on the cover of the Raleagh bible as a stimulus.

The first thing was to test my own assumptions. Was the school indeed in the Raleagh townland that I knew in county Down? The Topographical Index showed that there are two townlands called Raleagh, the other being in Cavan. Knowing that the first Ordnance Survey maps were produced for this part of Down in the 1830s, I thought I might be able to locate the school there. However the map for Raleagh manages to spread itself across three sheets and failed to show a London Hibernian School, or indeed a school of any type. My discouragement was lessened somewhat when I found, in the Ordnance Survey Memoirs, mention of an Hibernian School in the townland of Glassdrummond several miles to the north, which also was not recorded on the map.' My next resort was to the names mentioned on the cover of the bible. Could they help me confirm the location of William Martin's school as Raleagh, County Down?

Raleagh, County Cavan is in Tullyhunco parish. The Householders Index for the first rateable valuation shows one single Martin in Tullyhunco, but none in the rest of the county. The Householders Index for County Down shows that the surname was much more common there,with several occurrences in Raleagh in the 1830, though no mention of a William. On the other hand, I knew that Martin was a very common surname in mid-Down. The curiously-named Pharis Martin Junior, of Magheradroll, was a confidante of the County governor, the Marquess of Downshire, and he had several brothers in the Down Militia. The next task was to scan the church records to see if any trace could be found of Master Martin, as he was doubtless called.

Raleagh, County Down, is in the Church of Ireland parish of Kilmore and the records for the 1820s and 1830s confirmed my suspicions that there were many Martins both in Raleagh and in other adjacent townlands, though again none could be positively identified as the schoolmaster.3 However, the nearby Rademon non subscribing Presbyterian Church conducted a townland congregational survey in 1836 which confirms that there was indeed a William Martin living in Raleagh.° Given that Martin was a very common mid-Down surname, and that Coultra (or as it was sometimes rendered, Cultra or Cultragh) appears in the Down Householders Index, but not that for Cavan, tilts the balance of probability heavily in favour of this school being in County Down. However, as is often the case, although this search seemed to answer one question, in doing so it posed greater and more intriguing ones.

My next task was to try to find out about Agnes Coultra herself. Nowhere, apart from the bible inscription, could I find any Coultras in Raleagh or even in the neighbouring townlands. Yet the name rang a bell. I thought I remembered it from other work I had done on the Perceval-Maxwell Papers of Finnebrogue. I scanned my notes and found that the blacksmith at Finnebrogue in 1830 was a Thomas Cultra.5 This tied in with the Down Householders Index which reveals the surname Cultra in
the parish of Ballee, in mid-Lecale, and in the parish of Killyleagh. Here was the problem. The Ordnance Survey Memoirs show that the attendance of many school children in this period was dictated by the needs of the farm. Why would someone from Ballee or Killyleagh for that matter, attend~ a school miles away in Raleagh when there were other schools nearer? In practical terms there is no way they would have done so. It is estimated that in the pre-railway age, a return journey of 15 miles would take a full day. However, my curiosity was aroused. Seeing that the Ballee Cultras turn up in both the tithe records for the 1830s and in the later Griffith's Valuation , which gives the specific townlands and acreage, and as I knew there were good church records for Ballee, I decided to follow this line to see if I could find any reference to Agnes.

Ballee Church of Ireland records reveal that a William Cultra served on Ballee Church Vestry in 1830 and 1831 Was this Agnes's father? I eagerly searched the baptism, marriage and burial records for the parish, hoping to find some mention of Agnes, but in vain. As members of the Vestry did not necessarily have to be Anglicans, I next tried the records of Ballee Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church, which fortunately survive from 1811. I found that William Cultra attended that church, that his wife's maiden name was Hunter and that their first child, Robert, was baptised on 22 June 1812. Given that Agnes Coultra was the age to attend school in 1831, I felt it was worth going on to search through the baptismal register. Other children did indeed follow. I traced two boys and three girls, but none called Agnes.9 However, the record for the likely years of 1817 and 1818 was very obviously and frustratingly incomplete. Hoping that if the gap in the baptismal records concealed Agnes, the marnage register might reveal her. Here I found the three girls getting marned in the 1840s and 1850s, but again no Agnes. The trail was getting cold. This left me with the double assumption that Agnes's baptism was concealed by the incompleteness of the register and that she never married. It seemed more likely that I was barking up the wrong tree entirely and that wherever the Agnes Coultra who attended Raleigh Hibernian School came from, there was no immediate connection with the Cultras of Ballee. At this point the quest took an unexpected turning when it was suggested to me that, as Ballee Non Subscribing Church had its own graveyard, I might find a gravestone.

The relevant volume of R S J Clarke's Gravestone Inscriptions of County Down not only showed me that William Cultra died in 1849, aged 72, but that the name Agnes was in the Cultra family. However, neither of the Agnes Cultras here could possibly have been at school in 1831. William's sister Agnes died in 1844 also aged 72, while his wife Agnes, considerably younger than him, died at the age of 75 in 1867. This in itself proves nothing, but given that the name Agnes occurs on both sides of this family, some connection cannot be ruled out.

We could speculate that if Agnes was indeed from Ballee she might have been a servant living away from home, or was hired out and that her employer allowed her to attend the school. Perhaps the fact that there were non subscribing Presbyterian Churches in both Ballee and Raleagh may have made some such arrangement possible. However, this is guesswork. Some records of the London Hibernian Schools do exist although, as far as I could establish, not in Belfast. They might reveal more. Also there is the possibility that Agnes may have come from another family entirely, from Killyleagh perhaps. Another possibility is that contemporary inconsistency in the spelling of surnames conceals hers. The Finnebrogue blacksmith Thomas Cultra, is sometimes called Coulter. It is impossible to tell. More research might reveal more, or it might not. Perhaps it is right that, despite our archive technology, the past retains some of its mystery.

What is not a mystery, however, is that whoever the Agnes Coultra at Raleagh School was, she lived, to misquote an oriental blessing, in interesting times. Even a child at school in 1831 could a hardly fail to have been aware of wider events that cast dark shadows over the green and pleasant land that was, and still is, Raleagh. This part of County Down in the years 1830-1831 was 'disturbed' in a number of ways, both political and religious.

The London Hibernian Society was founded in 1809 following a visit from English evangelicals, at the request of their Irish colleagues. Evangelicals feared that the poor of all faiths were being lost to religion. The availability of bibles was poor. It was reckoned that in 1805 there were not twelve provincial towns in Ireland where copies could be got. Even in north-east Ulster, where literacy rates were higher, a clergyman noted in 1808 'the bible could not be procured for any money'." A major part of the evangelical approach was therefore to distribute free copies of the scriptures. The British and Foreign Bible Society mass-produced bibles for distribution including, in 1823, 5,000 bibles in the Irish language. The Raleagh bible was published by them in 1825.

From 1814 onwards The London Hibernian Society changed its role from preaching to concentrate on education. By 1830 it had 1 ,373 schools. The teachers were paid in relation to the proficiency of their pupils, an early and rather radical case of performance related pay! 'Deserving scholars', like Agnes Coultra, were 'rewarded with gifts of bibles or testaments.

The London Hibernian Society was officially interdenominational. The Earl of Roden, recalling the 1820s, when he was vice president, noted that 'they [the schools] were great blessings in those days ... promoting the union of all denominations of their brother Protestants in one common but simple object ... in circulating the Scriptures without note or comment.'' However its activities were controversial. The London Hibernian Society was seen as one of a number of evangelical groups involved in trying to convert Roman Catholics in what historians have dubbed 'the Second Reformation.' An agent of the society gave a flavour of this when he described Ireland as 'a land of beads, not bibles.'' There was understandable hostility from the Catholic clergy towards what they saw as proselytism. Indeed the then Anglican bishop of Down in the 1830s, Richard Mant, had provoked such a storm in his previous diocese of Killaloe by urging his clergymen to proselytize amongst Catholics, that he had had to leave it.' County Down was also tense. In 1825 one of Lord Roden's correspondents told him: 'In the town of Clough ... a man ... threatened to abuse me if I came that way with my false bibles.'

In 1830, of the 80,000 pupils attending London Hibernian Schools throughout Ireland, about a quarter were Roman Catholics. This is taken to show that the evangelicals were failing to win over Catholics. The Hibernian School at Kilmore was visited by G. Scott of the Ordnance Survey in 1836. He found 94 pupils on the books, 75 Protestants and 19 Catholics, while the unnamed master and mistress were both Protestants. However, at Kilmore at any rate, when Scott visited the school on 24 November, indifference, bad weather or the economic realities of life outweighed any other considerations, and there were no girls and only about 12 boys in attendance.

On top of this background of religious competition came the fallout from the granting of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. This helped to raise tensions further on both sides. For Catholics, the sense of victory at members of their faith being able to take seats in parliament was undercut by the loss of the forty shilling freehold vote and the banning of 'dangerous associations or assemblies', which included Daniel O'Connell's Catholic Association. Although the liberal Presbyterian leader, Henry Montgomery, supported emancipation, more conservative Protestants, particularly evangelicals, saw it as an attack on the Church of Ireland's established position. Moreover, the ban on assemblies was also to include Orange parades.

In 1835, William Sharman Crawford, who owned the Rademon estate near Raleagh and property at Crawfordsburn, gave evidence before the House of Commons Select Committee on Orange Lodges. He recalled the year 1830 as one of rising communal tension in mid-Down. Figures in the local community tried to alleviate the tension. Parades of 'Threshers' had been prevented on St. Patrick's Day in Crossgar (or Everogue's Bridge as it was also called then), principally by the intervention of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Down, William Crolly. Similar appeals were made to the Orangemen by members of the gentry. However, as spring turned to summer, tensions soared in townlands near Crossgar. Clashes were reported near the Cock Inn at Listooder. The government re-issued its proclamation banning Orange parades that July. Notices were posted on church doors and displayed in public buildings. Magistrates, like Sharman Crawford, were circulated and told to prevent demonstrations. However, some processions took place, particularly in rural areas. At some of these there was trouble.' In mid-Down, as the l2th of July neared, it was clear that some Orangemen intended to defy the proclamation and march on Crossgar. Arches of orange and purple flowers were put up in Crossgar and at the Cock Inn, and Crawford and other magistrates, had to read the Riot Act.'

As though all this were not enough, County Down's traditionally turbulent electoral politics further increased the temperature. The crises of 1829 and 1830 were closely followed by two bitterly contested elections, in August 1830 and May 1831. County politics had traditionally been the cause of severe rivalry amongst the Down gentry families. In the 1831 election, the radical William Sharman Crawford, stood as 'An independent and patriotic Irishman' and came within 150 votes of securing the second county seat, which was won by the second Lord Castlereagh. Contested elections were the bane of the county gentry's life, and were to be avoided if at all possible. Not only were contests expensive in financial terms for the treating of voters and the payment of agents, lawyers, 'runners' and writers of abusive ballads, but by the sheer excitement and tension they generated they upset 'the tranquillity of the County'. In the area around Raleagh, as we have seen, tranquillity was already in short supply in 1830.

This continued to be the case on through 1831 and into 1832. After further trouble in at Crossgar in February 1832, Lord Downshire told Lord Dufferin that yeomen should never wear their red coats or carry muskets 'except on days of inspection, [otherwise], the proneness of the peasantry is such to drink that no person can answer for himself, should a crowd assemble, or a personal attack be made by a person of an opposite way of thinking.'z' Such comments tacitly convey an atmosphere of tinderbox tension, fuelled by alcohol. Raleagh, in April 1831 when Agnes Coultra was presented with her bible, was therefore close to the eye of
various storms. No matter how young she was, it is fair to surmise that Agnes must have been aware, at some level, of the goings on in the adult world outside the schoolroom door. Yet we can never know for sure what she thought.

Our archive sources reveal what the educated, letterwriting class thought about these events, but no amount of archival technology can recreate what never existed in the first place. With people like Agnes and their parents, communication was largely oral. The fireside stories, the oral history of these troubled times, like those of the Rebellion a generation earlier, have been lost.