Davies, Sir John

Davies, Sir John (1569–1626). The third son of a Wiltshire tanner, Davies was already a well‐known court poet when he was King James I's choice as Irish solicitor‐general (1603–6) and attorney‐general (1606–19). In his Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland was Never Entirely Subdued (1612) Davies showed how the common law had finally been extended across Ireland in James's reign. Contemporary writers— Barnaby Riche and Fynes Moryson—questioned this glowing assessment.

Pawlisch credits his subject with the invention and use of judge‐made law to underpin the Tudor conquest in default of a subservient Irish parliament. Basically the Irish law officers (most of them New Englishmen) came together and decided key issues (invariably in the interests of the state) as binding legal precedents. Their decisions rode roughshod over vested interests, both Gaelic Irish (cases of tanistry and gavelkind) and Old English (cases of mandates and town charters).

Davies, however, was not wholly responsible for this policy of arbitrary absolutism, even though he wrote up the cases in his Reports (1615). As chief law officer, he was the instrument of the government of Chichester and not even a member of his privy council. In fact both the Discovery and the Reports were written to glamorize his own role in order to get a long sought after appointment in the English judiciary, which he eventually achieved.

Sir John's influence was greatest in the Ulster plantation. Having trumpeted the rights of free‐holders, he abandoned them after the Flight of the Earls and instead advocated full‐scale colonization, which the king preferred to Chichester's more conservative proposals. Davies (himself a survey commissioner) received 7,500 acres and the impoverished aristocratic Touchet family, into which he had married, was allotted a further 9,000 acres.

Bibliography

Pawlisch, Hans , Sir John Davies and the conquest of Ireland (1985)

Hiram Morgan