South Prior’s Land

Civic Defiance

Gerard Hannan 13 hours ago

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.

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Pery Foundations

Gerard Hannan 13 hours ago

The Pery family’s rise in Limerick began not with the Georgian streets that later carried its name, but with land accumulated during the Tudor dissolution of Ireland’s religious houses. William Pery, who died in Limerick around 1635, appears to have been the first member of the family to settle permanently in Ireland. The more consequential ancestor, however, was Edmond Sexten, mayor of Limerick in 1535. Through political skill, royal service and his relationship with the English court, Sexten obtained property that would remain within his descendants’ inheritance and eventually shape the physical expansion of Limerick city.

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