News
Kenneth Nicholls (1934-2025)
Kenneth Nicholls (1934-2025) was Statutory Lecturer in the Department (now School) of History at University College Cork from his appointment in 1974 until his retirement in 2005. Widely regarded as one of the greatest scholars of his generation, as a teacher he ranged broadly through time and space, offering undergraduates a magical carpet-ride of Irish, British, European and even Asian History from the Middle Ages to the Demographic Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though some students could find the journey challenging, tugging away at old orthodoxies, many found it inspiring and revelatory. No other lecturer demonstrated such a range or depth of knowledge. On his best days his classes could be spellbinding. They were never dull.
But it was for his pioneering research on medieval and early modern Gaelic Ireland, its territories, structures and ruling ‘clans’ that he became internationally renowned. His book Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland in the Middle Ages (1972, reprinted with revisions 2003) proved hugely influential, with an impact way out of proportion to its initial 177 pages. Simply put, in the study of Ireland’s Gaelic past there is ‘before Nicholls’ and ‘after Nicholls’. His book offered for the first time a coherent and integrated overview of how indigenous Irish society survived, adapted, and continued to function during the supposedly ‘lost centuries’ between the Anglo-Norman invasion of the 1170s and the various British plantations of the 1600s. And then there was the map: ‘Lordships, c.1534, by K.W. Nicholls’, which appeared in a chapter he co-wrote for the New History of Ireland, iii, 1534-1691 (Oxford UP, 1976). Nothing like it had ever appeared before, a precise geographical recapturing of nearly a hundred dynastic territories into which Ireland had been divided, and through which it was controlled, on the eve of the commencement of the English Tudor conquest. Only a historian with an unsurpassed mastery of the primary sources, and an obsessive desire for precision, could have achieved this; only Kenneth. The map is of seminal importance, used by every teacher and researcher of early modern Irish history, and helped transform understanding of what the Tudor conquest meant, and how it proceeded.
Still researching and writing until his final illness, during his life Kenneth published over a hundred journal articles, book chapters, essays and reviews that fully reflected the scope of his interests. His range was astonishing: pioneering forays into legal history, church administration, Hiberno-Scottish links, not to forget his study of Irish placenames, or changing agricultural practices and environmental conditions. Much of the current scholarship of the medieval and early modern period draws on this work; it will continue to do so for many years to come.
There was mischief too, quite a bit of it. Kenneth was not one to accept shallow argument (‘spurious rubbish’) or the inaccurate use of documentary evidence (‘charlatanism’); he could respond with swift and cutting criticism, or, no less injurious to the victim, a derisive hoot and cackle from his seat in the audience. Yet Kenneth was also very generous, particularly to younger scholars, many of whom he supported with advice, loyal friendship, and ready access to his seemingly endless store of archival expertise. A conversation with Ken was worth several days’ library work. The difficulty was in plucking up the courage to approach him in the first place. To an uninitiated postgraduate his heavy tweed jacket, waistcoat and jumper (worn in all weathers), his strange shapeless corduroy trousers and horn-rimmed glasses seemed alien, forbidding, but time and again courage was rewarded. Kenneth delighted in new research students and the promise of their work, and once his own shyness – the root of the problem - was breached, he was quick to offer valuable assistance. His palaeographical skills were legendary. Many is the student (and ‘established’ scholars also) who, unable to decipher the squiggles that passed for handwriting on fifteenth- or sixteenth-century documents, took their bewilderment to Ken, only to have him glance at the item, squint, grunt, and decode it, in a matter of minutes. A master at the peak of his craft.
He strongly believed in the historian’s public role. Every year while he was still able, he would drive all around Ireland addressing the members of local history societies, encouraging their curiosity about the places where they lived and who had gone before them. The size of the crowds he attracted could surprise some university colleagues. But who else could address a general audience about the ancient subdivisions of their region (using sources in English, Irish and Latin), or the numerous illegitimate offspring of local landlords and the troubles they caused, and then take questions from the floor on the ‘real’ identity of Elizabeth I’s supposed Irish lover, or the changing price of cattle feed. Kenneth did this, willingly, answering just about everything with exemplary exactitude. And the audience left singing his praises.
Aged ninety Kenneth died in Bantry Hospital early in the morning of Sunday 25 May. One of a kind, he will be greatly missed. But one thing is certain -his scholarly legacy, in all those books and articles, will long outlive him. May he rest in peace.
David Edwards, 26 May 2025.
Funeral information is available at the link below:
https://rip.ie/death-notice/kenneth-w-nicholls-cork-templemartin-595106