FRIDAY FEATURE: Today I wanted to highlight another one of the FREE 'Discover' areas of our website - the R.J. Hunter section which has been created in memory of a much loved and highly respected historian of Early Modern Ireland. Robert (affectionately known as Bob) Hunter specialised in the history of the early 1600s, the period of the Ulster Plantation, and was particularly interested in the contribution of the English to the shaping of the province during this era.

As his daughter Laura Hunter Houghton states "Robert John Hunter did not publish as much as he had hoped during his lifetime. His research extended far beyond his published output." For that reason the R.J. Hunter Project was established after his untimely death which published a number of his writings and listed his other published articles and essays here.

We have also made three of his essays freely available:

• The Plantation in Omagh Barony

• Tobacco pipes in Ireland in the reign of James I

• John Carvile’s project for plantation, 1609

These can be found at the bottom of this page.

One of his greatest achievements is his work on the Muster Roll of Ulster, c1630. - a large, leather-bound volume in the British Library. The volume consists of 283 folio sheets on which are recorded the names of 13,147 males from the nine counties of Ulster. Each county forms a separate section of the volume and the men who mustered are listed under the names of their landlords; beside each man's name is a description of the weapons he was carrying or a note that he was unarmed. Most of the men who mustered were English and Scottish settlers and, in the absence of comprehensive parish and estate records, the muster rolls is the nearest one has to a census of the British population of early seventeenth-century Ulster.

We have published this as 'Men and Arms: The Ulster Settlers, c. 1630' containing all the c. 13,000 names in the Ulster muster roll. In addition, and this is where Bob Hunter's and John Johnston's scholarship has added considerable value to the document, they have also appended information on these men in the muster rolls from sources such as the 1622 commission survey and the depositions following the 1641 native rising. This information is made available as extensive footnotes to the original muster roll listings.

This database of names is also available to our Guild members here