As it is usually understood, coyne and livery was the single most important tax in later medieval Ireland. It comprised the key element in the system of tributes and exactions used in the native lordships whereby the lords and chieftains required their subjects to give free entertainment (food, lodging, etc.) to their servants and followers. Often used as a tax to meet the maintenance of a lord’s army, the extent to which it could be imposed determined the military strength of a lordship; conversely, a strong military lord could impose it as often as he liked, once he had the troops to enforce it. Oppression and racketeering were the bedfellows of coyne and livery.
It is important to avoid giving too precise a definition of the tax. The term "coyne and livery" is a hybrid one, used by English writers to describe a range of taxes in use in the Gaelic and gaelicized lordships, all of which revolved around the taking of free entertainment in some form or other. For instance, the cuddy (coid oidche) was specifically the taking of a night’s entertainment, but was sometimes dubbed coyne and livery by English observers. Similarly, the bishops in Gaelic areas levied "noctials," something very like coyne and livery: essentially the compulsory hospitality demanded of their tenants and clergy.
The word "coyne," sometimes rendered "coign," dates to post-Norman times and is derived from the Gaelic words for billeting and quartering, coinnem and coin-nmed. An earlier term, congbail, used in the Brehon Law texts and meaning entertainment or maintenance, may provide its pre-Norman root. Meiconia, or miconia, was most likely a Hiberno-Latin derivate of coinnmed, in use by the late fifteenth century. Sorthan, or "sorren," was an equivalent term used in parts of Munster. "Livery" referred to the provision of free food and bedding for a lord’s cavalry ("horsemen") and fodder and stabling for his horses and their grooms, known as "horseboys."
Already endemic across Gaelic Ireland, coyne and livery spread into the lands of the "Englishry" in the course of the fourteenth century, as the military authority of the royal administration in Dublin declined and responsibility for the defense of outlying colonial regions was increasingly devolved to local lords and landowners. The chronology of its adoption is difficult to determine exactly. Even in the late thirteenth century the marcher lords of the colony were increasingly predisposed to the forced requisition of food and lodging by their private armies through purveyance. As the fourteenth century progressed and military arrangements evolved, at some point purveyance began to merge with coyne and livery, which began to replace it—presumably because it was more flexible and better-suited to the defense of ethnically mixed lordships populated by Gaelic as well as Anglo-Irish inhabitants (already the rank and file of the private armies comprised mainly Gaelic soldiers). By the early fifteenth century, coyne was in general use in all of the main Anglo-Irish territories in the south and east of the country. Its widespread imposition was probably the main reason for the growing regional dominance of the Butler earls of Ormond and the Fitzgerald earls of Kildare and Desmond.
Coyne was notoriously oppressive. For lesser landowners and tenants in many parts of the country, it was understandably difficult to refuse hospitality to a lord and his men. The line between hospitality given voluntarily and hospitality taken compulsorily was a thin one, and, of course, repeated usage in time created the legal basis for its becoming a customary exaction. In some areas, particularly the Ormond territories in Kilkenny and Tipperary, the lord’s right to coyne and livery was usually controlled to some extent by his greater need to retain the support of the local gentry and to govern by consensus. Such constraints did not always apply elsewhere. Coyne was an especially heavy burden in the Desmond lordship, imposed as often as once a fortnight on the earls’ subjects, many of whom were reduced to subsistence levels of existence as a result. Especially onerous was the requirement of some lords that coyne and livery be offered not just to them and their troops, but "without limitation" to their friends and followers also. Efforts to regularize coyne by transmuting its exaction into a money charge sometimes backfired, if the soldiers themselves were allowed to collect what was due. Despite such problems, however, the imposition of coyne and livery brought more advantages than disadvantages for the lords. In particular, its arbitrary nature meant that additional forces could be hired and maintained at short notice.
In the sixteenth century, as the English crown reasserted its power, measures were taken to abolish coyne and livery across the island. Gradually it was abandoned, beginning with the Ormond lordship in the 1560s, and by the early seventeenth century it had entirely disappeared.
