page_title: Buttevant
section_title: Origins of the name
hierarchical_section_title: Buttevant / Origins of the name
caption_attribution_description: English: Buttevant Convent, by George Ashlin, from picture taken in 1879.
context_page_description: Buttevant is a medieval market town, incorporated by charter of Edward III, situated in North County Cork, Ireland.
  While there may be reason to suggest that the town may occupy the site of an earlier settlement of the Donegans, Carrig Donegan, the origins of the present town are clearly and distinctly Norman, and closely connected with the settlement of the Barrys from the 13th century. Here they built their principal stronghold in North Cork.
  Buttevant is located on the N20 road between Limerick and Cork and the R522 regional road. The Dublin–Cork railway line passes by the town, but there was a station from which at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, newly raised battalions of the Royal Munster Fusiliers and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who had completed their training at the local military barracks, set out for the Western Front. Buttevant is part of the Cork East Dáil constituency.
context_section_description: The Barry family motto is Boutez-en-Avant. Rotulus Pipae Cloynensis (1364) makes ten references to Bothon in its Latin text. The Lateran Registers record the name tempore Pope Innocent VIII as Bottoniam (7 March 1489) and Buttumam (3 June 1492); and tempore Pope Alexander VI in various forms: as "Bothaniam" (14 February 1499), "Betomam" (12 March 1499), and "Buttomam" (15 January 1500). Edmund Spenser, in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), gives an early example of the modern name and associates it with Mullagh, his name for the river Awbeg:
  "Old father Mole, (Mole hight that mountain grey
  That walls the Northside of Armulla dale)
  He had a daughter fresh as floure of May,
  VVhich gaue that name vnto that pleasant vale;
  Mulla the daughter of oldMole, so hight
  The Nimph, which of that water course has charge,
  That springing out of Mole, doth run downe right
  to Butteuant where spreading forth at large,
  It giueth name vnto that auncient Cittie,
  VVhich Kilnemullah cleped is of old:
  VVhose ragged ruines breed great ruth and pittie,
  To travallers, which it from far behold"
  The Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels contains the manuscript of Father Donatus Mooney's report on the Irish Province of the Franciscans compiled in 1617/1618 in which he notes that the place "is called 'Buttyfanie' and, in Irish, 'Kilnamullagh' or 'Killnamallagh'". Philip O'Sullivan Beare in his Historiae Catholicae Iberniae, published in Spain in 1620, gives the name 'Killnamollacham' for the town and translates it into Latin as 'Ecclesia Tumulorum'. The 1st Duke of Ormonde refers to "Buttiphante" in a letter of January 1684 (Carte Manuscripts, Bodleian, 161, f. 47v), while Sir John Percival, progenitor of the Earls of Egmont, recorderd in his diary for the 16 March 1686 that the troopers "being att Buttevant Fair this day took Will Tirry and his wife and brought them hither and I examined them".
  The Irish denomination for Buttevant has reached such a degree of confusion as to make it almost unidentifiable. The oral tradition of the area consistently gives Cill na Mullach, or 'Church of the Hillocks', for Buttevant. When the area was still largely Irish speaking, that tradition was recorded by O'Donovan in the field books of the General Survey of Valuation, Griffith's valuation, which was taken in the Barony of Orrery and Kilmore ante 1850. Peadar Ua Laoghaire confirms the tradition in his Mo Scéal Féin. That notwithstanding, several other names have insistently been assigned to Buttevant by Irish Government officialdom: Cill na mBeallach, Cill na Mollach, and more recently Cill na Mallach by the Placenames Commission, explaining eruditely that it may signify The Church of the Curse, for which, the general public can be excused for thinking the Commission were referring to nearby Killmallock. P.W. Joyce in his The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places, published in Dublin in 1871, dismisses as erroneous and an invention of later times, the theory that the Irish name for Buttevant meant the Church of the Curse, and cites the Four Masters noting that a Franciscan Friary was founded at Cill na Mullach in 1251.
  The name Buttevant is reportedly a corruption of the motto of the de Barry family. On the Barry coat of arms the inscription is "Butez en Avant" - Strike/Kick/Push Forward—or, more colloquially, "Bash your way forward."
caption: Buttevant Convent 1879 by architect G.C. Ashlin
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