House - 16th/17th century, Dublin City, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
House
Somewhere in the warren of early modern Dublin, there once stood a building recorded only as a poorhouse, associated with a man named Richard Bounchell and placed, approximately, in Meyler's Alley.
The date given is around 1603, which places it at a moment when Dublin was beginning its transformation from a tightly walled medieval town into something larger and more complex. The building itself has left almost no trace, and its precise location within the alley has not been established.
The reference comes from Howard Clarke's work on Dublin, cited in a 2002 publication, where Bounchell's poorhouse appears briefly as a landmark of the neighbourhood. Meyler's Alley was one of the smaller lanes threading through the north side of the old city, the kind of street that accumulated tradespeople, tenants, and institutions that did not quite fit the grander thoroughfares. A poorhouse in this context would have been a private or semi-private arrangement for housing the destitute, common in early modern Irish and English towns before any formal state provision existed. Such buildings were often unremarkable in construction, which may explain why so little survives in the record. The name Bounchell is unusual enough to suggest a specific individual of some local standing, though nothing further about him appears in the available notes.
Because the site has not been precisely located, there is no address to visit and no physical fabric to examine. What remains is a name in a footnote and a general area of the old city. For anyone interested in the archaeology or urban history of early modern Dublin, the value here is less in the place itself and more in what it represents: a fragment of social history embedded in a streetname that has itself largely vanished from modern maps. Researchers working with Clarke's text or with early seventeenth-century Dublin records may find the reference a useful thread to follow, even if it leads, at present, to an empty space on the plan.