36 Bríd McGrath Clonmel Corporation Records 1657–8 1 Scholars have paid greater attention to the transformation of rural Ireland brought about by the transplantation to Connaught than to the effect of the expulsion of the Catholic merchant and artisan classes from the old Irish towns, including in Tipperary. 2 Ó Siochrú noted that ‘the emphasis on plantation settlement continues to mask the startling transformation of Irish towns and cities, which proved to be one the most lasting legacies of the Cromwellian conquest, and marked an irrevocable turning point in both the possibilities of civic militarism and the nature of urban society and politics more generally.’ 3 The Cromwellian regime suppressed the Catholic towns’ charters, replaced their councils with military governors, expelled the Catholic inhabitants and installed new English settlers. The former Catholic inhabitants were banned from living within walled towns and from holding civic office and settled in the suburbs or emigrated. While the Corporations Act of 1661 in England restored the old charters and personnel, no similar measure was enacted for Ireland, and the old towns and cities became the preserve of the new Protestant settlers. 4 Few studies have explored how this process worked at local level and only Pender has used the surviving town records to do so. 5 Clonmel’s 1 The author is grateful to the National Library of Ireland (N.L.I.) for permission to publish this transcript of its manuscript Holroyd-Smyth Papers, N.L.I. MS 49,518/66 and to Aidan Clarke for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 In an otherwise very careful account, J.G. Simms, ‘The Cromwellian settlement of Tipperary’ in Tipperary Historical Journal (1989), 27–34, barely mentions the towns of Cashel and Clonmel, while W.J. Smyth, Map-making, landscapes and memory: a geography of colonial and early modern Ireland c. 1530–1750 (Cork, 2006), chapter 9, ‘County Tipperary’, also emphasises the rural transformation, with few references to the towns. 3 M. Ó Siochrú, ‘Civil autonomy and military power in early modern Ireland’ in Journal of Early Modern History, 15, 1 (2000), 31–57. 4 Ó Siochrú, ‘Civic autonomy’; T.C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English government and reform in Ireland 1649–1660 (Oxford, 2000), 63. For the settlement of Catholics in Clonmel’s west, east and north, but not the south, suburbs, see W. Burke, History of Clonmel (Waterford, 1906), 90, 251–5. 5 S. Pender, ‘Studies in Waterford history: 1’ in Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, LI, 2 nd ser. (1946), 10–26; S. Pender, ‘Studies in Waterford history: 2’ in ibid., 108–25; S. Pender, ‘Studies in Waterford history: 3’ in ibid., LII, 2 nd ser. (1947), 18–29; S. Pender, ‘Studies in Waterford history: 4’ in ibid., 149–77. I am grateful to Dónal Moore for bringing these references to my attention. See Mark McCarthy, ‘Turning a world upside down: The metamorphosis of property, settlement and society in the city of Cork during the 1640s and 1650s’ in Irish Geography, 33 (2000), 37–55. Corporation records from the period from 1654 survive in some form for Cork, New Ross, Trim and Waterford (as above). Cork City Archive MS. CCCA/U127, transcript of the records of Cork D’Oyer Hundred, 1656–9. P.D. Vigors,