Galway, the only substantial medieval city in Connacht. It was little more than a fortified ford over the Corrib river when first captured by Richard de
Burgh in 1230; the first mention of a town in the
annals is for the year 1247. Galway thrived over the next century under firm de Burgh protection, a modest walled town of about 35 acres. With the fracturing of that dynasty after 1333 the town sought its independence, receiving a murage charter from the crown in the 1390s and a far stronger municipal charter in 1484. This copperfastened the autonomy of the town against the encircling magnates, Hiberno‐Norman and Gaelic. At the same time the creation of the wardenship of
Galway gave the townsmen control over the large parish church, St Nicholas, and its possessions.
For the next century and a half Galway's mercantile elite, the ‘tribes’, extended their economic influence across much of the west and beyond. A narrow range of overseas exchanges with Spain and France—hides and fish outwards, wines and fine cloth inwards—created many civic fortunes, and, not unexpectedly, Galwaymen were precociously involved in Caribbean commerce in the early 17th century. These mercantile fortunes were converted into urban castles, rural
tower houses, land purchase, and, in the earlier stages, monastic endowments.
However, where once the English government had emancipated the townsmen, 17th‐century religious and political convulsions from across the water impoverished their decendants: Galway citizens went against their garrison and supported the confederate side in 1642 (see
confederate catholics of ireland). They capitulated to
Cromwellian forces in 1652 after a nine‐month siege; plague and expulsions followed. The urban economy recovered some of its old resilience for a generation, but in the next crisis the city remained
Jacobite until 1691; it surrendered without a siege (see
galway, articles of) and derived some benefit from inclusion within the terms of the treaty of
Limerick. Thereafter the town became something of a commercial backwater. It lost its former wholesale hinterland to Dublin, and the capital and energies of its erstwhile leading families to foreign and colonial ventures.
Only towards the end of the 18th century did the town begin to expand rapidly, thriving on the demographic explosion in its hinterland (and the agricultural surpluses to which it gave rise) before eventually being nearly overwhelmed by it. Despite the great fishing traditions of the Claddagh, the seafaring suburb to the west of the town, and a programme of docks construction, 19th‐century maritime trade never lived up to its promise. But Victorian Galway prospered in a limited way as a commercial, educational, and tourist centre of the west, with a university college (see
queen's colleges) trying to maintain minimum numbers.
Since the 1920s, and dramatically so since the 1960s, Galway has expanded more than any other provincial centre in independent Ireland; this has been a reflection both of state industrial and cultural policies, and of the atrophying of small towns in the region. Its outstanding 20th‐century public monument, the Catholic cathedral (1965), remains an ambiguous civic symbol.
Bibliography
Clarke, Howard (ed.), Irish Cities (1995)
Moran, Gerard, and Gillespie, Raymond (eds.), Galway: History and Society (1996)
David Dickson
