Civic Defiance
Edmond Sexten inherited his family’s extensive Limerick property around 1594 and became one of the most powerful, persistent and controversial figures in the city’s early seventeenth-century government. A grandson and namesake of the Tudor mayor who had acquired the former lands of St Francis’s and St Mary’s religious houses, Sexten served as an alderman, held the mayoralty several times and repeatedly occupied the office of high sheriff. His municipal service did not produce harmony with Limerick Corporation. Instead, much of his adult life was consumed by arguments over whether his inherited lands stood inside or beyond the authority of the city’s mayor and council.
