The Story of Jack Lattin

When Alan Woods and Liam O’ Connor at ITMA asked me to be part of this wonderful project, my biggest challenge was deciding on which topic to focus on Drawing from the Well.

Liam brought to my attention an interesting piece of research written by Seán Donnelly ‘Ecstasy in eighteenth-century Kildare?: the strange fate of John Lattin of Morristown Lattin (1731)’. On reading the line within it “I’ll make you dance Jack Lattin” a memory was resurrected from 2005 when I was studying English in St. Patrick’s College. After much rooting through my parents’ attic, I found my old journals from that time and located my notes on Joyce’s Ulysses from which the line is taken.

I had written:

Here lyeth the body of JOHN LATTIN

who Departed this life the Seventh day of July 1731 in the 21st year of his Age

Death at such a young age in these times was not unusual but the demise of Jack Lattin was far from it and the story of his death lived on in local and family tradition for nearly two centuries.

Jack was the eldest son of Patrick Lattin and Jane Alcock and heir to the 600 acre, Morristown Lattin estate in County Kildare. Settled in the same place for over 500 years, the Lattins were an Old English, Roman Catholic family who retained their lands throughout the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Between 1695 and 1728 a series of acts were passed under the Penal Law which forbade Irish Catholics from practicing their faith and the vast majority of wealthy Catholics were stripped of their wealth, their positions, their estates and their homes, leaving them virtually paupers. The penal acts prevented Catholics from bearing arms and owning horses worth more than £5. They restricted their rights to education, stopped them from buying land, and on death, Catholic property had to be divided among all sons. The Lattin family somehow managed to avoid much of this.

By the age of 21, Jack was already a well accomplished and much sought after dancer and fiddle player who frequently played with piper, Laurence Grogan of Johnstown Castle, Wexford who was admitted Attorney of the Court of Exchequer in Dublin in May 1726.

Writer Thomas Amory recalls a music session at The Conniving House on Sandymount Strand, Dublin and the company he had enjoyed there, during the first half of the 1720s:

“The Conniving House, … was a little public house, kept by Jack Macklean, about a quarter of a mile beyond Rings-end, on the top of the beach, within a few yards of the sea. … . Many a delightful evening have I passed in this pretty thatched house with the famous Larry Grogan, who played on the pipes extremely well; dear Jack Lattin, matchless on the fiddle, and the most agreeable of companions.”

There are a few versions with varying details of Jack’s feat but the version from the Mansfield tradition is the most likely:

A few days prior to his death Jack Lattin was said to be visiting Castle Browne, roughly eight miles from his home. Castle Browne, a 15^th century Eustace Castle was built to defend The Pale; a double ditch separating English settled land from Gaelic Ireland. The Brownes, like the Lattins, were Roman Catholics of Old English descent, and the two families would have socialised together.

The tune took on many variations both in notation and name particularly when it travelled to Scotland. ‘Jake Lattine’, ‘Jackie Latten’, ‘Jack o’ Latain’, ‘Jacky Layton’ and ‘Jenny Latin’ are some of the few while all adding further variations and parts to the original three-part reel. While ‘Jack Lattin’ had faded in popularity in Ireland, there are a number of related tunes to be found with the same strains such as ‘Jenny Rock the Cradle’, ‘Jackson’s Reel’, ‘The Glen Road to Carrick’ and ‘The Pinch of Snuff’.

I was interested in tracing the Lattin family tree to see if I could find any descendants of Jack Lattin. The Morristown Lattin Estate passed to Jack’s grand niece, Pauline Lattin, who married Alexander Mansfield of Yeomanstown and the estate stayed in the ownership of the Mansfields until the 1960’s. Following that Lattin/Mansfield pedigree, to my disbelief, I found Jack’s relative Peter Sweetman; a man whom in recent years I have greatly admired and dealt with on a few occasions. While he is not a dancer, he most certainly can dance rings around a court room when it comes to environmental issues.

I wondered what kind of character Jack Lattin was and how he felt along his journey. I envisaged a roguish, 21 year old, heir to his family’s estate, a confident dancer, matchless on the fiddle, possibly stubborn yet full of fun and mischief. I imagined he undertook this challenge with much the same traits; his charming character drawing huge support both in the wager and from the spectators along the roads he danced.

In October, I travelled to Clane, Co. Kildare to retrace Jack’s dance path. Using the Taylor and Skinner’s Road Map of Ireland from 1777, I started at Clongowes Wood College (Castle Browne) and walked the 8 mile or so to Morristown Lattin. Jack was said to have changed his step every furlong (1/8^th of a mile) and it’s little wonder his body may have died from exhaustion. I, having considered this as an option but not wanting to die at the end of it, decided to change my step every half a mile and I marked out 8 locations to commemorate them. These 8 locations I chose specifically as places that were present in Jack’s time and he would have danced past them on his final journey on those Kildare roads.

Walking this historical path, in October’s lockdown silence, gave me a great sense of the world Jack Lattin lived in during the 1700s. A land saturated in history, surrounded by huge estates with houses I could only ever dream of for my dolls as a child. Ladytown, Sherlockstown, Strawberry Lodge, Blackhall; home to Theobald Wolfe Tone, Jiggingstown, Oberstown, Milicent House; home to Richard Griffith, famous for his Geological Map of Ireland, Irishtown, Gammonstown Fitzgerald Estate, Morristown… Even the road itself held its own stories.