Disappointing News for Ray Afsar
Re Manor of Monkstown
A sixteenth-century document then in the Public Record Office, Dublin (deliberately destroyed in 1922) quoted in Charles A. Webster, The Diocese of Cork (Cork, 1920), p. 143 n. describes Legan [= Monkstown] as a manor. I do not know if there is any relevant reference in the printed Two Chartularies of Bath.
See an article on Monkstown in Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, Vol. 30, No. 131 (Jan-June 1925), pp. 89-95, which says: ‘The lands confiscated from the Archdeacons were granted under the Commission of Grace, 13 June 1st James II to Michael Boyle, Archbishop of Armagh “with court leet and baron and all other privileges formerly granted to John Archdeacon.”
On Michael Boyle’s death it passed to his daughters, the heirs-general after the death of his son Viscount Blessington, and finally it came by descent into the joint possession of the Earls of Longford and Viscount de Vesci.’
Monkstown was thus a manor in 1684. The grant to Archdeacon would presumably have been under the Commission for Defective Titles in the 1630s, and would take time to run down. The Archdeacons had held the land since before 1600.
Thus there can be no connection whatever with the manor of Belvoir (Carrigaline), which belonged to the Earls of Shannon.
It is of course possible that an Earl of Shannon purchased the manorial rights of Monkstown from the de Vescis (or their coheirs), who however continued to hold the land: if so, why is the conveyance not cited for title?.
Dr Kenneth Nicholls of the History Department, The National University of Ireland (Cork)
This would appear to prove conclusively that Strutt & Parker should have heeded our advice and not sold the Lordship of the Manor of Monkstown, and that even now Ray Afsar’s family should ask for the return of the money that they have spent.
The opinion of another knowledgeable person in the field is that: “You cannot subsume one manor in another; it is a trick to suggest otherwise.”