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that the first account of the Purgatory actually written in Ireland is one by James Yonge, an Anglo-Irish Dublin notary, and even he was employed by Laurence Rathold of Pászthó to record the Hungarian nobleman’s own 1411 visit to the site. 54 In the accounts of this sacred Irish place, the Gaelic-Irish are curiously absent, and the holy island is presented as an open territory inviting new and fitting inhabitants, stewards and adventurers. Like the Holy Land in European accounts, the
noght ben used’ (VII. 4303–7). Richard II himself (to whom Gower first dedicated the Confessio , before rededicating the revised version to Henry Bolingbroke) was the subject of rumours regarding his court's alleged debauchery. In his 1422 English adaptation of the Secretum secretorum , the Dublin notary James Yonge claimed that after Richard's second marriage, ‘Than regnyde avoutry and lechurie in hym and his howse-maynage, that al the roialme thanne rumourt and lothit for that rousty Synne’ (James Yonge, The Gouernaunce of Prynces , in Three Prose Versions of