Ireland under the Stuarts and during the Interregnum, Vol. I (of 3), 1603-1642. Bagwell, Richard
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Four years later there was yet another survey which may be taken to describe the state of the colony at the end of James I.’s reign. The commissioners, who divided the work among themselves, reported that much had been done, but that the conditions insisted on by the King had on the whole not been performed. Many of the undertakers were non-resident, their agents retained native tenants and the British settlers complained that ‘the Irish were countenanced by their landlords against them.’ But few freeholders were made, rents were too high, and covenants too stringent. Some promised leases informally ‘which giveth such as are unconscionable power to put poor men out of their holdings when they have builded with confidence of settlement.’ Much building was badly done, and instead of encouraging villages the undertakers dispersed their tenants ‘in woods and coverts subject to the malice of any kerne to rob, kill, and burn them and their houses.’ Copies of the conditions to which undertakers were bound could not be had, and so the humbler settlers were at their mercy and that of their agents and lawyers. The servitors were rather better than the undertakers, but their faults were of the same kind, and they also were ‘so dispersed that a few kerne might easily take victuals from them by force if they gave it not willingly.’ The Irish grantees as a rule built nothing, and their enclosures made with sods were valueless. They made no estate of any kind to their tenants, but kept to the old Irish exactions, and they ploughed in the ‘Irish barbarous manner by the tails of their garrons.’ The commissioners recommended that the King should give new patents instead of those which deserve to be forfeited. A full fourth part of the undertaken lands should be leased for twenty-one years or lives to the Irish on condition of living in villages, going to church, wearing English clothes, ploughing in English fashion, bringing up their children to learning an industry, and enclosing at least a fourth of their cultivated land. Undertakers were to be fined if they took Irish tenants or graziers on any other terms, and alienation for any longer term was to involve forfeiture.77
Whether as tenants, graziers, or labourers, the Irish inhabitants were found indispensable. Early in 1624 their stay was officially sanctioned, pending inquiry, and in 1626 there was a further extension to May 1628, and after that for another year; but neither then nor later was the transplantation really carried out. The undertakers, or some of them, had indeed their own grievances. Having been unable to perform their covenants strictly, and being afraid of forfeiture, some of them offered to submit to a double rent and other penalties, in consideration of a fresh title, but this arrangement was not carried out. The result of the uncertainty was that hundreds of British families gave up the idea of settling and went away, while the Irish held on desperately whether the legal landlords liked it or not.78
Sir Thomas Phillips, officially described as ‘a brave soldier all his life,’ kept O’Cahan’s castle at Limavady in good repair, with drawbridge, moat, and two tiers of cannon. His two-storied residence, slated, with garden, orchard, and dovecote, stood by, and a mile from it he had built a village of eighteen small houses. He was thus in a position to criticise both Londonderry and Coleraine, and was much disgusted at the Londoners’ proceedings. It seemed to him that they cared only for present profit, and made very little attempt to carry out the conditions of their grant. The new city was, indeed, well walled when Pynnar saw it, but the gates were incomplete and the inhabitants not nearly enough to defend so great a circuit. Phillips was employed both by St. John and Falkland to superintend the settlement, and in the survey of 1622 he was associated with Richard Hadsor, a practised official who could speak Irish. Thomas Raven, employed as surveyor by the Londoners, evidently thought Phillips right in the main, but was shy about giving information, though anxious to do so in obedience to actual orders. The number of inhabitants in Londonderry had slightly increased, but 300 more houses would be required ere the walls could be properly manned. There were actually 109 families living in stone houses, and about twelve more in cabins, but not more than 110 armed men were available in the town, and about half that number outside. There was no church except a corner of the old monastery which had been repaired before O’Dogherty’s rising, and it would not hold half the people, few as they were. Near it, however, was ‘a fair free school of lime and stone, slated, with a base-court of lime and stone about it built at the charges of Matthias Springham of London, merchant, deceased.’ Twelve guns were mounted on the fort at Culmore. At Coleraine the number of men was nearly as great as at Londonderry, but the walls or ramparts were of earth, not faced with stones, and subject to frequent crumblings. There was a small church with a bell. The great want at this place was a bridge, and it was thought by some that the Londoners were unwilling to supply it, because they made so much by the ferry. The estates of the twelve companies were perhaps in proportion rather better managed than those of the city of London itself, but there were the same complaints everywhere of insufficient encouragement to settlers, of leases withheld or delayed, and of Irish tenants who would promise any rent being preferred to British colonists. Phillips thought there were about 4,000 adult males in the whole county, of whom three-fourths were Irish. Of the remaining quarter not two-thirds were capable of bearing arms effectively, and in the last year of James’s reign Phillips declared his belief that the colonists were really at the mercy of the natives. The towns, such as they were, seemed ‘rather baits to ill-affected persons than places of security,’ and there were so many robberies and murders that fresh settlers were hardly to be expected.79
The original idea of the plantation was to settle English and Scotch undertakers in about equal numbers. The Scotch on the whole made the best settlers, in spite of, or possibly in consequence of, their tendency to intermarry with the Irish, and there can be no doubt that the ecclesiastical policy of James and Charles drove many Presbyterians from their own country to Ulster. The chiefs of the Hamiltons and Montgomeries might favour the official Church, but Strafford found his most determined enemies among the humbler Scots, and he seriously thought of banishing them all. Even under Cromwell they did not get on too well with the English, but in the long run Anglicanism and Presbyterianism combined sufficiently to give a permanently Protestant tone to the northern province. The rebellion of 1641 prevented the colonists from dividing their forces as they might otherwise have done, and the alliance held good in 1688, and even, after a very short hesitation, in 1798. By the partiality of James a very great quantity of land was given to the Church, and especially to the Bishops, most of whom did not do very much for the common defence. Of the whole land granted in the six escheated counties, little more than one-tenth was given as property to the natives; the rest of them lived chiefly as dependants on the undertakers, and without legal interest in the land which they were forced to till for a subsistence. And there were a large number whose business had been fighting, and who lived on those who worked when there was no longer any fighting to be done. Thus very few of the Ulster Irish had anything to lose by a successful revolt, and many might think they had a great deal to gain. The acreage of the grants was far less than the actual contents of the different counties, and thus there was still plenty of room for the nomad herdsmen whose descendants flocked to Owen Roe’s standard.
From what seems to be authentic abstracts it appears that out of a nominal total of 511,465 acres in the escheated counties rather more than two-fifths were assigned to British undertakers. Outside of the Londoners’ district at least, the shares of Scotch and English grantees were about equal. Rather more than one-fifth went to the Church, including 12,300 acres for education, and rather more than one-fifth to servitors and natives combined, about 60,000 acres to patentees outside the settlement, and something over 6,000 acres to individual Irishmen of whom Connor Roe Maguire’s share was the largest. To servitors and natives about an equal area was given; but the latter were many times as numerous, so that their lots were very small, often as little as forty or fifty acres. 8,536 acres were devoted to schools at Enniskillen and Mountnorris, and to sites for towns at those places, as well as at Dungannon, Rathmullen, and Virginia. Many sales, exchanges, and dispositions by will were made during the reign of James, but the proportional distribution remained about the same.80
The
Brief return of the 1822 survey in
The last volume of Russell’s and Prendergast’s Calendar
Three papers among the