coyne

coyne (coign, coigny) and livery was a phrase derived from the Irish word coinnmheadh or ‘guesting’ and the English word ‘livery’, meaning something handed out, in this case corn and straw for horses (as in the term ‘livery stables’). Together the words described a system of billeting used by Irish and Anglo‐Irish lords in later medieval Ireland, whereby the lord's gallowglass and kern, his ‘chief’ horses and their grooms, his huntsmen with their hounds, and his other employees were quartered on his tenants or subjects, exacting from their hosts not merely food and lodging but often the money for their wages also. Regional variations meant that sometimes military captains organized their own billeting, using letters of authorization from the lord, sometimes each district owed maintenance for a fixed quota of men, and sometimes liability became commuted to a money payment. Direct billeting suited a subsistence economy, but was open to abuses such as the exaction of ‘foyes’ or bribes to exempt certain householders, violent or excessive demands, and unwarranted billeting on church lands or independent neighbouring territories. The Anglo‐Irish commons constantly opposed the custom, and in 1297 parliament limited magnates' right of quartering their kerns to their own tenants in the ‘land of war’ or frontier regions of the colony. The 8th earl of Kildare was accused of being the first chief governor to exact ‘coyne and livery’ from the inhabitants of the Pale (‘the land of peace’) since the expeditions of Richard II, possibly an exaggerated claim.

Katharine Simms