Lynch · 1493
The hanging of Walter Lynch
By tradition, in 1493 the Mayor of Galway hanged his own son from the window of his house for the murder of a Spanish guest. The English phrase 'lynch law' is sometimes traced to that day; the etymology is contested but the story is genuinely 15th-century Galway.
Draft entry · awaiting review
James Lynch FitzStephen was Mayor of Galway in 1493 — a wealthy Galway merchant in the years of the city's high prosperity, with a son, Walter, in his late teens. The story, as it has come down through the Galway tradition and was set down in print in the 19th century by James Hardiman in his History of Galway (1820), runs as follows.
James returned from a trading voyage to Spain in the spring of 1493 with the son of one of his Spanish business partners — a young man named Gomez, who was to be lodged with the Lynch household and to learn the Galway end of the Iberian wine trade. Walter Lynch took an instant dislike to the guest, partly through ordinary teenage rivalry and partly because Gomez paid attentions to a young Galway woman to whom Walter had been promised. After several weeks of accumulating quarrel, Walter stabbed Gomez to death in a back-street near the docks one summer evening and threw the body into the harbour.
Walter confessed to his father within a day. James Lynch, by the office of Mayor, was the city's chief magistrate and presided personally at his son's trial. He pronounced the sentence himself: hanging, by the morning. The Galway populace, by the tradition, mobilised against the sentence — Walter was popular, the Lynches were popular, the Spanish merchant community would surely accept a substantial blood-payment. The Mayor refused all entreaty. On the morning of the hanging the city's executioner reportedly refused to attend, and the gathered crowd would not let any other man approach the gallows.
James Lynch led his son out of the front door of the family house on Lombard Street, took him to the upper-floor window above the street, fastened the rope himself, and threw the boy out of the window from the second storey. Walter was found dead on the cobbles below. The window — Lynch's Window — is still marked at the building, with a stone tablet bearing a crow-and-skull motif and the Latin inscription 'Remember death'.
The English phrase 'lynch law' for summary public execution is sometimes traced, in the popular Galway tradition, to this hanging. The actual etymology is far more likely to be Charles Lynch, an 18th-century Virginia magistrate who organised informal courts in the American Revolutionary War, and the connection to the Galway Lynches is by surname only. But the Galway story is genuinely 15th-century and is one of the most compactly affecting episodes in the city's chronicle. Lynch's Window is still pointed out by the Galway tour guides, who tell the story without footnoting the etymology.