GREENCOAT HOSPITAL CORK. Pietas Corcagiensis. Or, a vievv of the Green-Coat Hospital: and other Charitable Foundations, in the Parish of St. Mary Shandon, Corke: shewing The Several Steps that have been taken, in Erecting and Supporting those charities ROBERT DAY’S COPY – CORK’S GREATEST COLLECTOR

AN HISTORIC CORK RARITY

Publish’d by Order of the Trustees, (and Sold for the Use) of that Hospital. Cork: Printed by Samuel Terry, 1721. First edition. Small quarto. pp. 93, [3], 2 (folded leaves of plates). Three quarter blue morocco on marbled boards, title in gilt direct on gilt decorated spine. Embossed seal of the City of Cork Church School Board attached to front flyleaf. Half-page with bookseller’s catalogue entry and inscription ‘For / The Honble Mr. Southwel pasted to front free endpaper. Note in Robert Day’s hand underneath ‘I cut the above from a catalogue of one of ... Sales of The Revd. W.C. Neligan, D.D. - Who was better known as Doctor Sell ! & who died in the Autumn of 1887’. Inscription to the Honble the Lady Bridges on front free endpaper. Armorial bookplates of Richard Caulfield and Robert Day on front pastedowns. All edges gilt.

JISC with 6 locations only. ESTC T27327.
The Pietas Corcagiensis is among the rarest early eighteenth-century Cork-printed works and is of the highest importance for the city’s social, architectural, and charitable history. Printed by Samuel Terry, an extremely scarce Cork printer whose surviving output is minimal, the work documents in detail the founding and administration of the Green-Coat Hospital and other parochial charities of Shandon, an area historically central to the civic life of the city. Its two engraved folding prospects, the Green-Coat Hospital (1715) and the Betridges & Skiddys Almshouses (1718), rank among the earliest architectural views of Cork. Examples of either plate are rare in commerce; copies containing both plates complete, as here, are exceptionally rarer.
Provenance: Originally from the collection of the antiquarian Rev. W. C. Nelligan, Shanakiel Cork. Robert Day and Richard Caulfield’s copy with their distinctive bookplates. Also with the seal of the city of Cork Church School Board 1890. In contemporary hand inscribed to the Honourable Lady Bridges with a brief note in Robert Day’s hand pertaining to Rev Nelligan. Richard Caulfield (1823-1887) and Robert Day Jr., F.S.A., M.R.I.A. (1836-1914), two of Cork’s most distinguished nineteenth-century antiquaries. Caulfield, Librarian of Queen’s College Cork and editor of numerous fundamental Cork civic records, devoted his career to preserving the city’s documentary heritage.
His engraved allegorical bookplate, depicting ruins and a Corinthian column, is present here. Later in the collection of Robert Day Jr., the eminent Cork antiquarian, archaeologist, and collector whose vast holdings of Irish antiquities, manuscripts, and historical artefacts were celebrated in his lifetime and dispersed in the landmark 1915 Day Sale. His engraved bookplate, signed “Marcus Ward, Belfast, 1885”, appears opposite Caulfield’s; a rare instance where two of Cork’s greatest scholarly libraries converge in a single volume.
Together, these provenances give the book exceptional cultural and historical significance, linking it directly to the two men most responsible for documenting, preserving, and interpreting Cork’s early history and material culture in the nineteenth century.
The association with Richard Caulfield, author of Council Book of the Corporation of Cork, and Robert Day Jr. founder of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, firmly anchors this copy within the scholarly lineage of two great Cork antiquarians. Their combined provenance significantly enhances its historical value and importance. Institutional holdings are few; the work is wanting from many major Irish collections. It is described in JISC and WorldCat only in scattered institutional holdings, and complete copies with plates rarely, if ever, appear. The present example, retaining both plates, with two major Cork antiquarian bookplates, and in a handsome binding, must be considered one of Cork’s finest extant and most desirable copies in the marketplace.

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