Pembridge, John

Pembridge, John (fl. 1347), Dominican friar and chronicler, was head of the Dominican order in Ireland from 1331 to 1343. He is likely to have been the compiler of the ‘Annales Hiberniae ab anno Christi 1162 usque ad annum 1370’, at least as far as 1347 (‘Hic finitur cronica Pembrig’ appears at the end of the section for that year in the fifteenth-century TCD MS 584). Hitherto the chronicler was identified as ‘Christopher Pembridge’, about whom nothing was known, but Bernadette Williams has pointed out that ‘Christopher’ originates in Walter Harris's (qv) edition of James Ware's (qv) De scriptoribus Hiberniae (1746). Ware in the 1639 edition had named the chronicler as Pembridge, but gave no first name; however, Williams points to a note by Ware referring to ‘C. Pembridge’ as indicating ‘cronica Pembridge’, which may have led to the confusion. The fifteenth-century manuscript copy in the Bodleian Library (MS Laud 526) makes no reference to the name of the chronicler.

The ‘Annales Hiberniae’ forms an effective commentary on the history of the English in Ireland, particularly on those inhabiting the province of Leinster. As Williams has pointed out, there is a strong Dominican bias in the chronicle. Events in Dublin are given special attention, including the foundation of a university in 1320 and the execution of Sir William de Bermingham (qv) in 1332. In the sixteenth century it was widely consulted by scholars. In 1517 Philip Flattisbury (qv) took extracts from the ‘Annales’ for Gerald Fitzgerald (qv), 9th earl of Kildare, while James Grace of Kilkenny made use of a copy between 1537 and 1539 for his own set of annals. The manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, seems to have belonged to William Preston (qv) (d. 1532), Viscount Gormanston. It would appear that Gormanston during 1520–21 made a gift of it to the lord lieutenant, Thomas Howard (qv), earl of Surrey. On his recall, Howard brought the manuscript to England, where it passed into the possession of his grandson William Howard, Lord Howard of Naworth. The latter gave it to William Camden to assist his work. Sir George Carew (qv) subsequently acquired it; it then passed into the possession of Archbishop William Laud. It consists of some forty-one leaves of vellum and paper, measuring eight and a half inches (21.6 cm) in length by five and a half inches (14 cm) in width. The ‘Annales’ was published first in William Camden's Britannia (1607), and again in 1884 by Sir John Gilbert (qv) in the second volume of the Chartularies of St Mary's abbey, Dubin; in both cases the Bodleian manuscript was used.