The Churchwardens’ Accounts of the Parishes of St Bride, St Michael Le Pole & St Stephen: Dublin 1663-1742

This is the ninth volume in the texts and calendars series published by Four Courts Press in association with the Representative Church Body Library, which seeks to provide critical editions of significant Church of Ireland archives and manuscripts with substantial interpretative and explanatory apparatus. This volume complements W.J.R. Wallace’s earlier edition of the vestry minutes of the parishes of St Bride, St Michael Le Pole and St Stephen which was published in 2011. Together they form a valuable source not alone for the study of Dublin parish life in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but also for the ways in which the Church interacted with the life of the city of Dublin and beyond. The churchwardens were the principal officers of the vestry, the committee which ran the affairs of the parish, and so their accounts, which had to be presented annually, provide a considerable mass of information in a regular and structured fashion.