Search Results for 'James Lynch Fitzstephen'

As someone who is absolutely fascinated by the subject of history, it is rather inexplicable that in my five and half years of living in Galway that the only real historical fact I knew about the county was Mayor James Lynch Fitzstephen hanged his own son Walter for murder and thus came the term lynching. So when the opportunity to read The Little Book of Galway presented itself, I finally had a chance to bring my Galway history knowledge up to scratch and it did not disappoint.

In 1807, the Reverend Edward Mangin wrote a three-volume romantic novel entitled George the Third in which he headed one of the chapters “Which would not have appeared had it not been written”. In it he invented a story about the Mayor of Galway, James Lynch Fitzstephen, hanging his son. Thirteen years later James Hardiman published his History of Galway in which he slightly changed, and greatly elaborated on, the story. This gave Mangin’s story a much wider audience, especially in this country, and so the legend became history. It was copied by many writers over the last 200 years, books written, plays written, films made, etc.