{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.01929824561403509, 'fraction_numerical': 0.014035087719298246, 'mean_word_length': 5.132616487455197, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Guilds of Dublin and Immigrants in the Seventeenth Century

A recurring theme in the history of Dublin was the city’s efforts to enhance and preserve its heritage of civic privileges, obtained through a series of royal grants dating back to its foundation. These rights and immunities informed all aspects of Dublin society, shaping its political, legal and economic structures. This article will examine the efforts of guilds and the civic elite to defend their economic privileges in the face of threats from immigrant artisans or traders. It will pay especial attention to the ways in which a changing religious and political situation influenced policy in this area. In 1600 the aldermanic elite that oversaw the city’s finances, policing and administration was a religiously mixed grouping. After 1650, apart from the Jacobite interlude, it became an avowedly Protestant body, although the patriciate still remained divided between dissenters and adherents of the Church of Ireland.1 There was, however, significant continuity in terms of social composition, in that the patricians were mainly wealthy traders, closely linked to the merchant guild and keen to preserve the city’s privileges out of economic and political self-interest. In 1672, for example, the New Rules imposed by the government, in an ostensible bid to boost trade, sought to enfranchise more citizens, chiefly by reducing the entry fine.2 The civic elite, though deeply divided along political and religious lines, united to defend the corporation’s control over the admission of new citizens.3 The number enfranchised upon payment of an entry fine actually declined from a yearly average of 34 before 1672 to 24 after that date.4