Limerick city began as a
Viking settlement on the south‐west part of King's Island, close to the lowest fording point across the Shannon. For two centuries before the Anglo‐Norman invasion Limerick had been under the sway of the
O'Briens, becoming in effect their capital in the 12th century and not passing permanently out of their control until Domnal Mór's death in 1194. The walled island settlement was then drawn into firmer English control with its first charter (1197), its royal castle (1210), and the relocation of many of its former inhabitants south across the Abbey river to ‘Irishtown’. The latter suburb was eventually enclosed within a second set of walls. St Mary's in ‘Englishtown’ is the only medieval cathedral surviving largely intact in a provincial Irish port; its pre‐Norman elements were mostly eradicated in the 13th‐century reconstruction, but the quality and range of its 15th‐century additions is evidence of the city's late medieval revival.
The political agility of its old patrons, the O'Briens, protected Limerick from some of the harsher swings of fortune in the course of the 17th century—until 1690. The choice then of the city as rallying point for
Jacobite and French forces and the twelve‐month siege (see
williamite war) was a tribute both to the apparent impregnability of the site and to the strength and cohesiveness of the old order in the city. Sections of the walled city suffered badly in the conflict, but the siege was remembered for the manner of its ending: the departure of the ‘wild geese’ and the controversy over the half‐honoured peace terms (see
limerick, treaty of) which still reverberated a century later.
In the post‐siege reconstruction, brick replaced the stone and timber of the walled city. The walls themselves remained until 1760, by which time Limerick had developed as a centre of Atlantic trade, gentry consumption, and
woollen manufacturing. The city at that stage burst its claustrophobic bounds and over the following 70 years a grid‐iron network of residential and commercial streets was constructed to the south‐west of the Irishtown and outside the jurisdiction of the corporation. Appropriately this became known as Newtown Pery, after the ground landlord of the new zone and the very successful general patron of the city, Edmond Sexton Pery (1719–1806). The city's social and commercial centre was transplanted; even the new town hall in 1843 was located in the Newtown. But in this period of expansion the physical limitations of the Shannon as a trade artery (despite a canal link to Killaloe) denied Limerick the opportunity of becoming the great outport many believed was its destiny.
Always a preponderantly Catholic city, Limerick in the 19th century witnessed a pronounced growth in the visibility and range of its Catholic institutions which helped to mould its distinctive religious culture. The industrial traditions in textiles and milling adapted to changed times (e.g. the development of army clothing and lace manufacture) but the pervasive poverty of the old city remained. Even in the second half of the 20th century, with the old slums swept away and Limerick (as part of the mid‐west region) one of the most successful centres of modern industrial development, it remained a city of extremes.
Bibliography
Clarke, Howard (ed.), Irish Cities (1995)
Hill, Judith , The Building of Limerick (1991)
David Dickson
