Sample of what to do in your parish histories

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The Restoration Land Settlement in Ireland: a statistical view

In this lecture I will give you a statistical overview of  the Restoration Land settlement as this should serve to give you ideas as to what you should be doing in your local parish or barony studies.

After that I will take a particular parish and show you what to do with it and what to look out for while doing it.  While I have emailed your parishes to you already, next week I will give you additional information from all of the other records that will come up in relation to the Cromwellian Confiscations and restoration land settlement.          

Using a computerized profile of landholding patterns (based on the Cromwellian and Restoration land records) for all 32 counties of Ireland, I  re-examined this  rare revolution in land tenure and, among other things, answer many pertinent questions about land tenure in the period. What group gained the most from this revolution in land tenure? What affiliation or alignment was most likely to result in the loss or gain of land? Race? Religion? Nationality? Or, perhaps, those with experience in Ireland, as opposed to adventuring newcomers, had better chances of attaining or retaining land? Where the Protestants who lived in Ireland before 1641 better placed to oust the  soldiers and adventurers who came to Ireland as a consequence  of the civil wars of the 1640s; or did  predatory speculators (who might have come from either group) take advantage of the unsettled situation to acquire vast estates? 

These are the more important questions that you should attempt to answer in your  local studies.

The Books of Survey and Distribution , of which there are five surviving sets (the most important and complete being that of the Quit Rent Office set which are now in the National Archives) are accounting exercises par excellence and are, in themselves, one of the most revolutionary items to appear from the upheavals of the period. (See lecture 4 for a description)

            What I have done was to take these sources and enter the data from them into a data base. I have given you information under the following headings.

FIELD IDENTIFICATION AND INTERPRETATION

Field 1 Contains the Modern Surname of the landholder. The modern spelling (from MacLysaght) is given.

Field 2 Contains the Christian name of the landholder.

Field 3 Contains additional biographical information. For example if the BSD gives the landholders name as Donagh Mac Shane Mac Tadgh O’Byrne, then Mac Shane Mac Tadgh will appear in this field.

This field is also used to identify titled nobility (eg Earl Ormond, Lord Dunsany etc) and, in instances where field 2 contains Glebe land, field 5 will be used to indicate the parish the glebe land is situated in (eg of Clonmore, etc). Finally, in stances where people in the same parish had similar surnames and Christian names,  the Books of Survey distinguished between these by indicating the address of the person. That info is included in this field also.

Field 4 Gives the Gender of the landholder. This field is coded as follows;

M    Male               F       Female           X       Unknown

C     Church            B      Bishop           G       Glebe

P      Corporation    O     Commons

Field 5 Gives the title or status of the landholder. This field is coded as follows;

BIS      Bishop              ALD    Alderman

CLK    Clerk                CPT     Captain                    DKE    Duke               

DSS     Duchess           DME   Dame                          DOC   Doctor

ENS    Ensign              ERL    Earl 

ESQ    Esquire             GNT    Gent                         ICM    Incumbent

JUS     Justice              LDY    Lady                        LEU    Lieutenant

LRD    Lord                 LTC    Lieutenant-Colonel

MAJ   Major               MIN    Minister                    MQS   Marquess         MSS    Marchioness

PAR    Parson              SIR     Sir                            VIC     Vicar                WID    Widow.

Field 6 Gives the religion of the landholder. This field is coded as follows;

C         Catholic          P          Protestant          U      Unknown

Field 7   Unprofitable acres. (All figures are  in plantation acres and

Field 8   Profitable acres.        are rounded to the nearest whole).

Field 9   Total acres.

Field 10  Gives the forfeiture status of the subject’s land. It is coded as follows;

FF     Forfeited.

NF     Not Forfeited  This is used in any of three situations:

(A) If the person listed in the Book of Survey's column for 1641 landholders was a                         Protestant, whose land was not forfeited (or if the person was a Catholic whose land was forfeited  during the Commonwealth but  was restored to them during the Restoration.

(B)   If the land was Bishop or Church land.

(C)  If the person listed in the Book of Survey's column for 1641 landholders was a                         Catholic but whose name (or a member of the family) also appears in that same                       source's column for post 1660 landholders  (whether by decree of Innocence or                        some other such instrument of title).

UF     Unforfeited Protestant Lands. The Books of Survey and Distribution often identifies               lands as unforfeited  Protestant Lands (no individuals are identified).

UD     Undisposed of. In certain instances the land of the 1641 holder was forfeited but it is               indicated in the BSD that the land was not disposed of to any particular individual.               In this event, it can be held that the 1641 holder retained the land.

Field 11  Restoration grantee’s surname (modern spelling).

Field 12 Restoration grantee’s Christian name

Field 13 The gender of the grantee is given here.

Field 14 Grantee’s rank/title. (The codes used in field 8 are used here).

Field 15 The religion of the grantee is given here.

Field 16 The parish name is given here (in full).

Field 17 The barony name is given here (in full).

Overall Statistical conclusions of the land settlement

            By given you the overall conclusions in relation to the land settlement, should serve to give you ideas as to what you should be doing in your local parish studies.

Attempts to tabulate the land settlement were begun by Sir William Petty who was a contemporary to the proceedings  and who was responsible for  surveying the land of Ireland between 1655 and 1657. In  the late restoration period he hypothesized that  the Catholics emerged from the revolutionary period with less than a third (2,280,000 acres) of the ‘good land of Ireland’.  Petty remained the accepted authority, statistically speaking, until early last century when W.F.T. Butler challenged his conclusions and suggested that Catholics retained only one seventh of Ireland’s  land (1,110,000 acres). Writing in the 1950s J.G. Simms, in a study of the Williamite land settlement (1689-1703), questioned Butler’s findings and concluded that the Protestant share of Irish land increased from the 41 per cent which they held in 1641 to a massive 78 per cent by 1688. 

            Let us analyse the statistics in the data base to see which of these were correct.

TABLE 2

There were a total of 9,084,111 acres that were surveyed and recorded in the various surveys of the  1650s. In 1641 Catholics held 66% of the land and, by the 1680s only 29% of the land was in their hands. It would seem then that both Butler and Simms were way off the mark and that Petty, a contemporary to the period, was not that far away when he held that Catholics emerged with less that a third of the land.

J.G. Simms, held that the Protestant share of Irish land was 41% in 1641 and that this figure had risen to 78% by 1688.  As we can see from the table, both these figures are incorrect. Interestingly enough however, it seems that both his figures are deficient by exactly 11%

This table also provides answers to many other pertinent questions that have only been guessed at. Of particular note is that the landholding situation was virtually reversed along sectarian lines between the two periods. For example the Protestants, who held 30% of the land in 1641 emerged with 67% of the land in the Restoration period; almost exactly the portion held by Catholics in 1641. Similarly, the percentage of land retained by Catholics in the Restoration period (29%) almost mirrored that of what the Protestants had held (30%) in 1641.

My data base will also be able to answer another importation statistical problem that has only being speculated upon since Sir William Petty and that is the number of Catholic landowners in Ireland in 1641. Petty himself first indicated that there were 3,000 Catholic landowners in Ireland in 1641. This remained the accepted figure until it was challenged by WFT Butler in his Confiscations in Irish History who indicated that the figure was at ‘least 8,000 and may have been as many as 10,000 or even 12,000’. Robert Simmington, the person responsible for publishing 3 volumes of the Book of Survey and Distribution analyzed this problem and could only conclude that the only way to resolve this problem was ‘through the careful examination county by county, of the Books of Survey and Distribution’. That is exactly what I have done. The following table 3 shows the number of landholders in Ireland, not only in 1641 but also in the Restoration period. 

TABLE 3

Here it can be seen that Petty, W.H. Harding, and W.F.T. Butler were way off the mark. Petty’s estimate of 3,000 Catholic landowners was 3,756 less than there actually was in Ireland in 1641. Butler’s estimate of 8,000 was closer to the mark but was still out by 1,300 people.

This table also reveals other important statistics that we are looking at for the first time in history. By the middle of the Restoration period the number of Catholic landholders had decreased from 6,756 to only 1,353 in the period under review. Another very interesting statistic is that whereas there were no less than 1,042 Protestant landholders in 1641, by the 1660s that figure had only increased by a further 1,380 people. This is interesting because the Cromwellians intended to settle over 1,000 Adventurers and 30,000 soldiers on Irish land yet my statistics clearly show that there were only 1,380 more Protestant landholders in Ireland during the Restoration period than there had been in 1641. (I must point out, however, that the number of Protestant holders in 1641 is not as exact as I would like it. To obtain absolute certainty I would need to analyze and compare another set of the Books of Survey and Distribution – that of the Annesley set, which tends to give more information for Protestant landholdings in 1641).  

We are now beginning to come close to the question as to who benefited the most in the scramble for land so characteristic of the restoration land settlement. Before finally answering that however, let me delve deeper into the two tables already shown to see what was happening on a county level.

Table 4 shows the Protestant landholdings for each of the 32 counties of Ireland in both 1641 and the Restoration period. Whereas the time limit imposed on this paper can only let me briefly introduce you to these figures I would be more than happy to sit down with any of you later to show a more in-depth analysis of what I am showing here.

TABLE 4

Table 5 shows the same information for Catholic landholdings.

TABLE 5

Another major question is the number of Acres that were forfeited in Ireland during the period. The absence of records for the Cromwellian period, when the land was confiscated, makes it almost impossible to know exactly how many acres were forfeited in Ireland. Table 6 shows the acreage that was initially forfeited and not restored to the original owners by the Restoration legislation.

TABLE 6

These islandwide figures can be broken down by County, Barony or parish. Table 7 gives the county breakdown.

TABLE 7

In  an article, called a question of survival; the O’Farrells of  Longford in the seventeenth century, Raymond Gillespie convincingly argued that the Cromwellian and Restoration confiscations did not serve as the principle mechanism for change. Instead the ability to evolve and implement survival strategies in the face of religious and political change depended on more than simply religious belief.  Rather it was determined by a whole set of attitudes to land, including knowledge of law, access to capital, economic ideas and political manoeuvring. Raymond was looking at the O’Farrells of Longford to see what mechanisms they employed to retain their land. The following table shows the extent of Catholic ‘survival’ in Longford after the Restoration.

TABLE 10

There were 52 members of the O’Farrell family who held land in County Longford in 1641. This amounted to just over half the total number of Catholic landholders in that country in 1641. These 52 O’Farrells held a total of  42,232 acres in County Longford in 1641. Again this was just over half of the total number of acres held by Catholics in this period.

By 1665 however, the situation had changed dramatically for the O’Farrells.  Their landholdings had decreased from the 42,232 acres they held in 1641 to 12,242 by the mid Restoration period.  The following table is based on information from two other data bases I have constructed, one of the Submissions and Evidence submitted to the first court of claims and the second from the Patent Rolls of the Acts of Settlement and Explanation.

TABLE 11

Here is a prime example of how this statistical analysis can complement local studies as most of the conclusions here, with one or two exceptions confirm what Dr Gillespie has already written about in his article.

What of the fate of the O’Farrells who disappear from the landholding scene. Table 13, based on yet another data base,  shows that some of them benefited from the transplantation policies of the Cromwellians.

TABLE 12

            During the seventeenth century, Ireland was transformed from a tribal, feudal kingdom into a recognizably ‘modern’ state. The forces of change that facilitated this were not all compressed into the decade 1649-59, but were also at work during the early and later decades of the century. The upheavals of the 1650s and 1660s significantly  accelerated the destruction of the ‘old order’,  making Ireland more receptive to  mercantilist ideas. In other words, what the ‘Cromwellian’ upheavals laid to rest was not so much Catholic landholding patterns, as  the last vestiges of Gaelic tradition and custom that had  prevented that society from  modernizing.

The failure of Cromwellian policy in Ireland to colonize large numbers of people on numerous small estates became a blueprint for a house that was never built. We can not see from the restoration land settlement statistics that a very much smaller number of people settled on much larger estates than was originally intended.

What group gained the most from this revolution in land tenure?  Without a doubt Protestant settlers who had been domiciled in Ireland prior to the rebellion gained most from the scramble for land so characteristic of the Restoration period. They did so by engaging in predatory speculation and this enabled them to acquire vast estates from soldiers and adventurers who were only to happy to hurry home to England with ready cash in their pockets. This landed power-base enabled the Old Protestant settlers to emerge into the ascendancy in Restoration Ireland.

Example of a local parish study