the twin problems of danger from the land and sea are referred to, and possibly exaggerated, in subsequent petitions for help (Lydon 1979). That these were not to be taken at face value is shown by the 1399 report to Council which stated that, despite many grants, 'little is done' to improve the city's defences (IND 68). (Thomas)
In March 1375 the Mayor and citizens told King Edward - ''if all your said land of Ireland should be gained by your enemies, which God forbid, it would be regained better and more quickly by your said city than by any other city throughout your said land of Ireland". It seem that the reason why this should be so, according to the Mayor, was that the city contained only "seven acres of land within the walls, like a little castle". We must therefore get our scale right in viewing medieval Waterford: if it was the second city in Ireland, it was In truth a small place within its walls. Not only that, the same petition of 1375 depicts a situation so desperate that, we are forced to conclude that the city was not only small, but poor as well. It told of "divers slaughters recently made by the enemies of those parts" - on one occasion the Mayor, Bailiffs, the Sheriff, Coroner and twenty six of the better men of the city, together with eighty loyal Englishmen from Coventry, Dartmouth, Bristol and other places were slaughtered: six weeks later another twenty four men of Waterford were slain; they were aggrieved because the country around was robbed, burned and destroyed right up to the walls; ships were taken at sea, so that now there were no ships or barges in the city where there used to be more than elsewhere in Ireland; they complained of their great costs in repairing the belfry of the Church of Blessed Trinity, which had been blown down by a tempest, to the great comfort of their enemies; that they bad to pay for the repair of the ancient walls of the city, which had fallen through their weight; and also of the great coats which they bear in defending the King's rights and inheritance through litigation with the town of Ross, which had lasted long and was still pending before the King in the chancery of England - all of which had made them so poor that they cannot stay there any longer without royal aid.
It is not to, be believed that the Mayor and his leading citizens were preparing to pull out of Waterford, or that the situation was quite as desperate as depicted in the petition. Irish towns in the later middle ages were more than adept at putting on the poor mouth when it suited them and on this occasion the Mayor was looking for a grant of the custon known as the coket for nine or ten years and the reduction of the annual farm of the city from 100 to 75 marks. It is noteworthy, too, that this was a time of great disturbance in Munster aad that the government of the day, headed by William of Windsor, was not only proving singularly ineffective in restoring order (at least according to its critics), but was also attempting to raise money by means of taxation, to which Waterford, like other towns, would have to contribute. (Lydon p. 5-6)
See MI357