Life
fl.1500 [var. Flatisbury]; drew up The Red Book of the Earls of Kildare, later [now] in possession of Dukes of Leinster, transcribed to Anglo-Irish annals printed in Camden’s Britannia [var. Brittania]; cited in Ware’s Writers of Ireland. ODNB
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Commentary
Walter Harris, trans. Sir James Ware, Writers of Ireland (1736 edn.): ‘Philip Flatisbury [sic] lived about this time [1517], and at the Request of Gerald, Earl of Kildare, writ divers Chronicles, says Stanihust. In the beginning of those Annals, extant in the MS under his Name, there is an Account of the Author and his Work: “here follows divers Chronicles written at the Request of the Noble and Powerful Lord Gerald, son of Gerald, the King’s Deputy of Ireland, by Philip Flatisbury of Johnstown, near the Naas, in the Year of our Lord 1517; and the 9th of Henry VIII. But comparing them with those published by Cambden at the end of his Britannia, of which the greater part was writ by Pembrige [sic], as we have elsewhere said, it appears that Flatisbury was only a Verbal Transcriber of them, not the Author, excepting some little Addition. ’Tis certain that many have affixed their Names to those Books which they only transrcibed; whereby the true Authors have been unjustly depriv’d of their Honour.’ (Chap. XII; K2.)
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