At his coronation the monarch swore to preserve the peace of the kingdom, maintain the laws and customs of the realm and diligently do justice to his subjects. Upholding these tenets underpinned the successful exercise of kingship. Indeed, the quality of the king’s rule was frequently judged contemporaneously and historically by his record on justice. Yet, while the king did have personal input and was ultimately responsible for issuing legislative decrees and upholding law and order, operationally this was not something he could do on his own. The enormous task of day-to-day judicial administration was delegated to a mixture of trained judges, lawyers and royal officials, who worked alongside less specialised men of law, shire bureaucrats and a pool of borough merchants and county gentry. These assisted the crown by acting on a variety of local commissions and as constituency representatives in parliament.

This chapter provides an account of the Public Records Office of Ireland as a legal repository, before its destruction in 1922 as an early ‘casualty’ of the Irish Civil War. The chapter supplies a succinct account of Ireland’s historic courts and their record-keeping, providing an overview of the legal contents of the Public Record Office of Ireland at the moment of its destruction. Using several case studies, the chapter then illustrates the process of archival reconstruction through the use of substitute and replacement sources, spanning the late medieval period up to the end of the nineteenth century. It argues that attempting to reconstruct these lost legal archives constitutes a powerful method of historical reappraisal, revealing how many of Ireland’s historic courts were created, evolved and disappeared.