Lecture Three (part one) Wednesday 2nd February

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Follow this link to the BBC History site about Ireland before the plantation

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/plantation/index.shtml

An examination of the theory and practice of plantation in Ireland, 1603-1640.

In today’s lecture we are going to look at the plantation of Ulster and how it effected the locality between the years 1608 and 1641.

In doing so we will look at the following.

(1  (1) Planning and design of the plantation.

(2  (2) Recipients of land in the plantation.

                  i           Undertakers

                  ii           Servitors

                  iii          Deserving Natives

                  iv          College Lands

                  v          The London Companies.

(3) Social and economic aspects of the plantation.

(4)  Case study of north-west Ulster.

(5) Reaction of the Natives

(6) Consequences of the Plantation

(7) Conclusions

Planning and design of the plantation

Click this link for more information

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/plantation/planters/es03.shtml

As we have seen in a previous lecture, the plantation of Ulster was facilitated when, in 1607, some of the major Gaelic chieftains left the country in an event that has since obtained the romantic title of ‘Flight of the Earls’. These chieftains along with many of their supporters were immediately declared guilty of treason, a sentence which allowed the escheat to the crown of their lands, which included most of the counties of  Londonderry, Tyrone, Armagh,  Donegal and Fermanagh.

The other Ulster counties had already been modernised by the arrival of new settlers from England or Scotland or by the elevation of the Gaelic people from their subservience to their chieftain, to freeholder under English Common Law. This had taken place mainly in Cavan and Monaghan where a lot of 100 to 300 acre freeholds had been created.

Planning for the Ulster Plantation got underway shortly after The Flight of the Earls in September 1607.

As the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell were expected to seek to return to their lands, bringing foreign military assistance, time was of the essence. The planning and implementation of the Ulster Plantation was carried out as a matter of urgency, though with undue haste as it turned out.

In 1608 an Irish committee of the English privy council drew up plans for the planting of this confiscated land. The initial 1608 survey of confiscated lands was discovered to be so imperfect that a second survey was required during 1609.

To facilitate the intended division of land, in 1609 commissioners travelled throughout the escheated areas obtaining information about each of the baronies from the inhabitants. This information was then compiled into a series of maps  by Sir Joseph Bodley, with the help of which, land proportions were grouped into ‘precincts’, varying in sizes from a half barony to a barony.

The escheated lands were to be divided into great, middle and small proportions (2,000, 1,500 and 1,000 acres), each of which was to be passed, under dramatically new land tenures, to one of these classes - undertakers, servitors, deserving natives, college land, London companies.  

Recipients of land in the Ulster Plantation

1                    Undertakers (divided into those from Scotland and those from England)

2                    Servitors  (army officers and crown officials).

3                    Deserving natives.

4                    Trinity College Dublin and other college lands.

5                    The London Companies.

Click for map of plantation or this link www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/plantation/transcripts/sm01_t01.shtml

The undertakers, who came from Scotland and England, had to adhere to some very stringent conditions that were laid down for them.

Individual undertakers required a cash sum of between £500 and £1500 to carry out all the conditions of their Plantation grant.

Proportions allocated varied from 2,000, 1,500 to 1,000 acres.

Undertakers were expected to settle 24 British males per thousand acres of lands granted. On lands allocated to English and Scottish undertakers, the native Irish population was to be cleared off these estates.

Stipulated building conditions were also scaled according to the size of the proportion granted.

Undertakers who were granted the largest proportions, 2,000 acres, were expected to build a castle on their lands whereas stone bawns (walled fortifications) were required to be built by undertakers with smaller proportions. Building and settlement had to be completed within three years.

The Plantation strategists had grossly overestimated the capacity of the undertakers to fulfil their obligations, not least because of the continuing political uncertainty in Ireland.

A survey of the Plantation lands undertaken by Sir George Carew in 1611 discovered that relatively little progress had been made.

The reason for this was that planters hesitated when it became common knowledge that the King was contemplating a reconciliation with the exiled Earl of Tyrone during 1613 so for a time some consideration was being given to effectively abandoning the Plantation scheme.

With time, and particularly after the Earl of Tyrone’s death in 1616, the immediate threat to the Plantation was lifted.

The second group to get land were the Servitors (ex-army officers and governmental officials).

There were not required to introduce British tenants, although they were strongly encouraged to do so. They could if they wished, retain Irish tenants on their estates.

The servitors were the main beneficiaries of the financial predicament the undertakers found themselves in.

They were able to buy up grants of Ulster land very cheaply in the 1610s and 1620s. Little is known of the financial circumstances of this group.

Most were English and had served in Ireland in the late 16th century, either as soldiers or in the civil administration and had accumulated whatever money they had through their Irish employment.

Some also had property interests in other parts of Ireland and only a small number took up residence on their Ulster estates.

Deserving natives.  

The natives were granted lands only in those baronies set aside for the servitors. It was the intention to keep an eye on them so to speak which is why they were settled in close proximity to the military servitors.

 College land

In addition to this general pattern of allocation, land in Donegal was set aside for Trinity College, Dublin.

London Companies.

Securing adequate finance to underpin the Ulster Plantation was one of the key problems affecting the success of the grandiose plans to colonise six of the nine counties of the province of Ulster. Seeking to ensure a cornerstone for the entire settlement project, the Plantation strategists in London devised a plan to ensure that substantial private funding was invested in an early version of a private-public partnership.

A large tract of land consisting mainly of what was known as "O’Cahan’s country" was set aside to lure investment by a syndicate of 12 London Companies which later became known as ‘The Honourable The Irish Society’.

The companies associated with the settlement of what was then County Coleraine

                                                                Clothworkers Company                Drapers Company   

                                                                Fishmongers Company                 Goldsmiths Company

                                                                Grocers Company                        Ironmongers Company

                                                                Mercers Company                        Salters Company

                                                                Skinners Company                        Tailors Company

                                                                                        Vintners  Company

Click this link for more information on the London Companies

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/plantation/companies/index.shtml

‘O’Cahan’s country’ was chosen because of its abundant natural resources, raw hides, tallow, beef and iron ore. The fishing stocks of the Bann and the Foyle were an additional allurement, offering vast quantities of eel and salmon. The area was also heavily wooded and this was going to be cut down and used as pipe staves, one of the biggest industries at the time.

Despite such early signs of progress, the London Companies soon ran foul of the crown authorities for failing to meet their Plantation commitments.

Year after year, the native Irish populace was allowed to remain working the land, whereas it had been stipulated that they should have been transplanted elsewhere for security reasons.

By late 1612, King James I had had enough, notifying his Irish viceroy that he had learned that while the Londoners ‘pretend to great expenditure…there is little outward appearance’. The London Companies were accused of being more interested in profiteering than in fulfilling their settlement commitments, cutting down vast swathes of forest to export as pipe staves.

While such criticism was to some extent justified, in other respects the sluggish progress of the Plantation reflected the fact that realisation of the Ulster Plantation greatly exceeded expectation in the short term.

It was a measure of the difficulties involved that labourers on the estates of the London Companies worked ‘with the Sworde in one hande and the Axe in thother’, such was the fear of attack.

With time, the London Companies made substantial progress, leaving a profound mark on the area. For instance, the infant ‘city’ of Derry was renamed Londonderry and the county also became known as Londonderry as a result of its association with London. The impact of the London Companies remains in many ways, in place names such as Draperstown, but most conspicuously by the walled city of Londonderry.

Social & economic aspects of the Plantation

Click this link for economic background of planters

or go to the BBC website below

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/plantation/planters/es07.shtml

The majority of British tenants on the Plantation were Scottish and were attracted to Ireland for economic reasons.

Many were living in poverty in their home areas as an expanding population, rising prices and increased unemployment led to serious economic problems in Scotland, particularly in the 1630s when the numbers of Scottish people coming to Ireland soared.

Migration to Ireland offered the possibility of immediate escape from dire poverty and the prospect of future prosperity. The response of rural inhabitants in Scotland to the Plantation was in sharp contrast to that in rural England where relatively few people opted to move to Ulster.

The English tenants who did take up residence came from the northern borders of England or had gone to Ireland to work temporarily on the building programme of the Plantation but had been inveigled to stay on as tenants by landlords desperate to fulfil the tenancy terms of their agreements.

The majority of the new settlers lived in rural areas and earned their living through farming.

The main form of agriculture was pastoral with cattle and sheep being grazed on unenclosed lands.

Some land was tilled, mainly for the cultivation of oats that formed a staple part of the diet of the settler community. In Antrim and Down, the economy was a little more progressive but on the whole the new tenant farmers continued the existing agriculture economy of Gaelic society.

This is not surprising given that most of the Scottish tenants would have been familiar with a similar form of agriculture in their home areas and that the natural environment of the escheated (confiscated) lands was more suited to pastoral than arable farming.

It should also be remembered that the poverty of the incoming tenants hindered the introduction of any major innovations in the form of new agricultural methods.

Population

One variable determining the population of any estate in north-west Ulster was determined by its relative distance from a suitable port of entry.

Consequently, the further one gets from the major port of Derry, the less densely populated the area becomes. Click for population map

In 1622 Counties Tyrone and Derry were more densely populated by settlers than was Donegal.

This is accounted for by the easier access to these two counties from the major ports of Derry and Coleraine. This pattern is also observable in County  Donegal, where the major concentration of settlers was around Lifford and Raphoe, towns which were relatively close to the major port of Derry.

The distribution of the settler population on the Plantation was uneven with the more fertile lands and the hinterland of the port towns, particularly of Derry and Coleraine, attracting a higher density of settlement than more remote and poorer lands.

A striking feature of the early years of the Plantation was the mobility of tenants as they moved from unattractive areas (to which they may have been brought initially by an undertaker) to regions which they identified as more likely to bring them greater prosperity.

Although agriculture formed the mainstay of the Plantation economy, urbanisation was central to the ideology underpinning the Plantation scheme.

The planners envisaged a network of large and small towns, distributed throughout the province.

Lack of adequate economic resources meant, however, that the growth of large urban centres was slow with only Derry, Coleraine and Armagh achieving the status of medium-sized towns by 1641.

In the long term the Plantation initiated the emergence of an impressive urban network in Ulster and by the late 17th century, it has been estimated that there were over 100 towns in the province.

Small market towns serviced the rural hinterland with a range of commercial and administrative services. Craftsmen plied their trades as cloth makers, shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, butchers and malt makers while weekly or monthly markets provided an outlet for surplus agricultural produce.

Tradesmen in the towns also sold a miscellaneous collection of manufactured goods, which they imported from English and Scottish towns. The list of items imported into Ulster towns in the early 17th century testifies to the consumer revolution which was taking place in the province.

Among the goods imported were a wide range of household goods such as brass pots, frying pans, glasses, tables, sheets and pillows as well as food including marmalade, spices, prunes, wine and whisky; and large quantities of tobacco.

The new settler population, particularly the women, also dressed differently from the local Irish population and Spanish silk, bone lace, as well as less exotic cloth and a miscellaneous collection of accessories such as gloves, hats and shoes regularly feature in the import list

There is some evidence to suggest that a significant number of the incoming population learned the Irish language, or at least learned sufficient Irish language to facilitate commercial interactions with the native population.

Perhaps some of them abandoned their Protestantism, in the same way as some of the Catholic population on the Irish side abandoned their Catholicism in that sense. There does appear to have been some degree of inter-marriage between the two populations, probably relatively low, but nonetheless some interaction was occurring at that level.

Let us now look more closely at north-west Ulster, specifically the counties of Derry, Tyrone and Donegal.

Case study of North-West Ulster.

If we take as an example, the three counties of the north-west of Ulster, there were a  total of 74 undertakers and servitors who received land in this area.

By 1641, however, only 34  of these estates remained in the original grantee’s possession.

Nineteen of these settlers were of Scottish origin and the remaining fifteen were of English descent. 

This depreciation of the original grantee numbers was brought about as a direct result of estate consolidation where an enormous land market evolved.

An elite planter society soon materialized from the fluid land market, and constituted, in effect, a new economic order.

Raymond Gillespie saw the new market economy of settlers as being  ‘ruled by the "invisible hand" of impersonal market forces’. The use of land, for example, was traded for a price (rent), negotiated between landlord and tenant, guided by the laws of supply and demand.

Surplus output from estates were redistributed through the market for a price, which was then used to pay for other goods and at least some profit was ploughed into the exploitation of the land.

In contrast to this, the old native model took the form of a barter economy where goods and services were supplied to the lord in return for protection and other such incentives. The need to adapt to this market; money-orientated economy, which threatened the traditional values of many Gaelic septs, led to an, as yet unmeasured, turnover of land in various parts of the island.

Between the initial plantation of Ulster lands in the early decades of the seventeenth century  and the outbreak of rebellion in 1641, there was a large turnover in actual occupiers of the land.

The following two tables shows the sum of individual land acquisitions or land losses during this period.

The tables show  that by 1641, 198 (48 per cent) Protestants from England comprised the largest ethnic group of landholders in the three counties, and that they held 234,703 acres, or 54 per cent of the  total area. A further 119 Protestants from Scotland, representing 29 per cent  of the total number of landholders, held 23 per cent or 99,626 acres, and formed the second largest ethnic group The landholders also included eight Irish Protestants, of either Gaelic or Old English. descent and one Dutch Protestant, Wilbrant Olpherts, who held a sizeable estate of 1,166 acres  in the barony of Kilmacrennan, County Donegal. 

There were a further  ten Protestants holding land whose ethnic origin cannot be discovered.

The Catholics of the area are divided into three separate ethnic groups -  Scottish Catholics, Old English Catholics and Gaelic Catholics.  Of the 66 Catholics accounted for, only two (George Dowdall and Henry Hovendine), who held  681 acres between them, were Old English.

Six  Catholics from Scotland  held 14,891 acres in the barony of Strabane. 

The remaining 58 Catholics, all of Gaelic Irish descent, had remained in Ireland after the flight of the earls in 1607, and  obtained grants in the baronies set aside for ‘servitors’ These Gaelic Irish held 47,710 acres which represented 11 per cent of the total area, and they comprised the third largest ethnic group.

Their distribution throughout north-west Ulster can be seen in the following table, which shows the landholding patterns of the major Gaelic septs.

This table illustrates that the  early seventeenth-century plantation scheme, which confined the native Irish to those baronies which were allocated to the ‘servitors’, determined the distribution of Gaelic Catholic landholding in 1641. 

The MacSweeneys held all their land in the barony of Kilmacrenan, County Donegal, the O’Neills and O’Hagans primarily in Dungannon barony, County Tyrone, and the O’Cahans in three of Derry’s four baronies.

The policy of segregation proved, with a single exception, successful, as neither Gaelic Irish nor Old English Catholics held any property (freehold or otherwise) in any area not specifically set aside for them in the original plantation of Ulster.

This only refers to land owners as there were many Gaelic tenants in the areas planted by the English and Scots.

Perhaps the clearest distinction between the tribal holdings of the Gaelic lords and the settlers who replaced them can be seen in the estate system which evolved in the area. This system was produced, not only by the initial plantation scheme, but was also as a result of the land market generated in the wake of the plantation of Ulster.

The following table, which shows the size distribution of settler estates in north-west Ulster in 1641, illustrates this in statistical terms.

Seventy-four planter estates in north-west Ulster were 99 acres or less, estates small enough to be farmed by one family. In contrast, 56 per cent of the land surveyed in the area (194,296 acres) was held by 36 individuals in estates of 3,000 acres or larger. While the initial plantation scheme doled out estates nominally ranging in size from between 1,000 to 3,000 acres, consolidation led to the creation of much smaller holdings. The largest proportion of land was held by 94 people whose estates ranged in size from between 100 to 299 acres.

Seventy one per cent, or 228 individuals, held estates of less than 1,000 acres.

Under land law, how were these estates held?

In every category the more  common method by which land was held was that of the freehold. Of those estates ranging in size from between 1 to 99 acres, there was a total of 45 freeholds. A further 21 estates of this size were leased from the church. A noticeable characteristic of these leases from the church was that the majority of the lessees were of Scottish descent.

Landholders of the larger estates usually obtained holdings of this size by leasing land from the church to enhance their original estates.

While the church  leased the greatest amount of land, the London companies were not that far behind.

Some examples of these are Elizabeth Holland, a wife of an English planter, who  leased 1,963 acres from the Fishmongers’ Company.

Another major lessee of the London Companies’ lands was Lady Ann Cooke, whose 10,097 acres was partly comprised of 2,910 acres leased from the Skinners’ Company. She leased a further 714 acres from the church, on top of the 6,473 acres in freehold she held in County Derry.

Estate consolidation and/or losses

Between the original plantation of Ulster in 1608 and 1641, the date of the rebellion and the date which a survey of the 1650s used as a marker to determine landholdership, a significant amount of land changed hands.

Why was this so?

To begin with some Protestant newcomers mortgaged their farms to British merchants and land speculators who had established themselves in the city of Derry or  in Coleraine. Cash was in short supply as the plantation progressed, mainly due to the large investment required to fulfil the original terms of the land grants.

Many planters were also unable to exploit their estates’ potential, as they were unable to get British tenants to come and settle there.

The migration of these people from Britain was much smaller than the scheme had  anticipated. 

Catholic landholders, especially the native Irish, suffered even greater financial hardships.

The Gaelic system that predominated in north-west Ulster was perhaps more varied and complex in its manifestation than that found in other parts of Ireland.

The imposition of more individualized and commercial concepts of landholdership introduced by the new economic order represented a change which the Gael, who had traditionally received loyalty  rather than rent  from his lands, had problems adopting to.

No matter that many Gaels had been given freeholds free from the traditional impositions of the chieftains, found it hard to adopt to this new way of life.

For the first time they owned the property they farmed so it was not surprising that when they became aware that they could get money (HARD CASH) into their hands for making their mark on a piece of paper, they readily took it.

It is hard to know whether they realised what it was they were putting their mark too, and that they were in fact entering into a mortgage agreement.

Mortgage foreclosure and escheatment  became particular burdens for native landholders. The biggest example of this can be seen in Sir Prelim O’Neill, one of the leaders of the 1641 rebellion. He borrowed extensively, even on the very eve of the insurrection, using his estates as collateral.

This caused major problems in the 1650s and 1660s when his property was being disposed of, as his creditors had first to be satisfied before his acres could be settled on a local ‘younger son’ of an established planter family. 

Debts also encumbered the patrimony of Randal MacDonnell, second earl of Antrim and the Catholic  Hamiltons from Scotland, who had mortgaged their estates to their British neighbours in the decade before 1641.

It must be said, however, that this kind of debt was not confined to Ulster.

In County Wexford, for example, 124 native Irishmen received patents for land in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries.

By 1640, however,  that number was reduced by about two-thirds, largely due to mortgage foreclosure.

Similarly,  in counties Cavan and Monaghan, large planter estates quickly absorbed the Gaelic freeholds.

Those whose estates survived.

Even though bankruptcy troubled many members of the Gaelic Irish community, others became  adept at retaining their lands by adopting progressive  economic policies.

The O’Cahans, for example, reorganized and rationalized their property, selling off extensive tracts of their land, while simultaneously attracting many non-Gaelic tenants on to the estates they retained.

The earl of Antrim exhibited similar survivalist strategies, going so far as to engage one of Ireland’s foremost Catholic lawyers, Patrick Darcy, ‘in order to draw up new leases that would put his estates on a nice stable footing’.

In short, the pattern of landholding in north-west Ulster (both Gaelic and settler) on the eve of the rebellion in 1641 was a mixed one of success by some and failure by others.

Reaction of the natives

Click this link for historians views on the native's reaction

The natives were affected in a number of ways:

The upper classes were decimated by the Plantation of Ulster.

The native lower-classes, in the first instance benefited from the Plantation, in the sense that the tyranny and the exactions of their local lords is removed from them; so that in the first ten or 15 years of the Plantation they are in a quite advantageous position, and one of the great themes of Gaelic literature in the Early 17th century is the ‘uppity Catholic’ - these lower classes who are making their way.

But the thing is that as large numbers of settlers come in the late '20s and Early '30s, these Irish are themselves forced out of tenancies onto bad lands so that they suffer by the 1630s.

The native reaction to the Plantation of Ulster was essentially hostile. However, in the early stages after The Flight of the Earls there is evidence that a restructuring of land ownership in Ulster was welcomed by many.

A Royal proclamation issued in September 1607 was designed to ‘assure the inhabitants of Tyrone and Tyrconnell that they will not be disturbed in the peaceable possession of their lands’.

Lord Deputy Chichester believed that a window of opportunity had been opened up to reconcile many of the native inhabitants of Ulster to English rule, if an equitable redistribution of land could be implemented, combined with the infusion of a Protestant settler element into Ulster as a guarantee of security.

For some time, Chichester’s views held considerable currency and the prospective Plantation in the early stages envisaged the preponderance of the lands available being allocated to native grantees.

The outbreak of O’Doherty’s revolt in 1608 was to change everything, resulting in the native inhabitants of Ulster receiving less than a quarter of the confiscated lands.

The so-called native ‘freeholders’ who were being courted by crown officials prior to The Flight of the Earls were to be particularly disappointed.

While 200 freeholders had been identified when the settlement of Co.Monaghan was implemented in 1606, a total of only 280 native Irishmen were allocated land grants when the Plantation allocations were announced in 1610 for six entire counties in Ulster.

Even the so-called ‘deserving natives’ who were allocated proportions of land were decidedly unhappy with their lot, believing they were entitled to much larger grants.

Not surprisingly the native Irish in Ulster bitterly resented their treatment.

An English commander articulated their sense of acute grievance when he remarked of the native Irish population of Ulster that ‘there is not a more discontented people in Christendom’.

Lord Deputy Chichester signalled the potential danger arising from such resentment, remarking that the native inhabitants would endeavour ‘at one time or other to find an opportunity to cut their landlords’ throats’.

To undermine the potential threat to the Protestant settlers, Chichester resorted to a large-scale transportation strategy, claiming that he eventually shipped some 6000 malcontents to Protestant Sweden, the majority from the province of Ulster. Even this tactic was insufficient to quell discontent.

Overall, in the early stages, there was little in the Ulster Plantation that proved attractive to the native population. That the government largely failed to ensure that Catholics were transplanted from the lands of Scottish and English undertakers reduced the sense of displacement that might otherwise have occurred.

Those who were dispossessed had a very wide range of fates. Some of them decided they could no longer stay in Ireland, some of them left for Continental Europe.

Some of the more famous figures (Owen Roe O’Neill, for example) comes back in the 1640s to fight during the Irish wars of the 1640s.

Others stayed at home and basically become bandits in the countryside - the English refer to them as ‘wood kerne’. These are people who are perceived as a tremendous threat to the Plantation.

But it would be wrong to over-stress the number of people who were dispossessed because the population of Ulster in the late 16th century was the lowest of any part of Ireland.

So there were enormous areas where there simply weren’t any people and it’s these areas which are colonised very heavily by the new settlers.

Consequences of the plantation

Click here for historian's views on the consequences of the plantation

The 1641 rebellion halted but did not stop the progress of the Plantation settlement and British (and particularly Scottish) migration to Ulster resumed after the war.

In 1659, almost a third of the population in the province were of British origin; and by the mid-18th century Protestants were in the majority.

By the late 17th century also, the population in Ulster was geographically divided with those of Irish extraction living on poor quality and marginal lands and the British community were settled on the better agricultural land.

The Ulster Plantation, thus, determined the long term division of the province into Protestant and Catholic communities.

The subsequent war of the two kings, William III and James II on Irish soil in 1689 further exacerbated the hostility between Catholics and Protestants, particularly in Ulster where William III was subsequently identified as a defender of Irish Protestantism.

The wars of the 1640s also strengthened the position of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. The first presbytery was established in Belfast in 1642 and from then on Presbyterianism began to develop its own institutional infrastructure.

The other interesting aspect, as far as the legacy of the Plantation is concerned, is that segregation was built into the Plantation at the start: we have this modern problem where you know segregated or divided societies. It’s just not a product of what has happened today; to a large extent, it actually reflects the fact that the Plantation itself enshrined the doctrine of segregation.

Unquestionably, the Plantation in the medium-term - the fact that it wasn’t a total success - means that you have the survival of a historical memory of dispossession. The fact that the Plantation was, after 30 years, followed by the insurrection of 1641, and all of the unpleasantness associated with that, means on both sides that you have the formulation of opposition statements, and the cultivation of historical memories resulting from the atrocities which occurred on both sides, if you proceed from 1641 forward to the Cromwellian confiscation of the 1650s.

None of these are unique to Ulster: the Plantation happened in many parts of Ireland other than in Ulster.

The principal ingredient that makes Ulster different is that the Plantation in Ulster was followed at the end of the 17th century, in the 1690s, and again continuing into the Early years of the 18th century, of a significant further influx of Scottish people.

So that it was at this juncture that the population balance in Ulster moves, in particular areas, particularly the north-eastern parts of Ulster, significantly towards Protestantism rather than Catholicism, and towards Scots rather than English.

Because you have this further in-migration which occurs because a Scottish population in Ulster already existed and because a calamitous collapse in the Scottish economy occurred during the 1690s. And Ulster was the principal place of outlet for people who were fleeing effectively from the collapse of an agricultural economy, and that dramatically transforms the population balance, particularly in the Ulster north-east.

And this would have been happening at a time when the Protestant population on the ground in Munster, for example, where plantation had also occurred, the Protestant population was probably declining through out-migration to the Americas at that point, and then you have this dramatic increase occurring in the particular Scottish element in the Ulster Plantation

Conclusions

One of the conundrums of the Ulster Plantation is how the Crown got away with it - how did the Crown, with a force in Ireland (the years between 1600 and 1610) a force of 1,014 men, how did they manage to seize the entire Province of Ulster, dispossess the native landowners and their followers, and give all the best land to newcomers?

I think that this can be accounted for by the  prevalence of martial law: in England, martial law is always a reactionary measure - it is used once rebels have rebelled.

From the middle of the 16th century in Ireland, martial law is rather different - it’s pre-emptive. It was used by the Government from the 1550s onwards to target suspect groups, groups who would not embrace the growth of English Royal power.

One of the myths of Irish historiography is that the government in the early 17th century was no longer militarised, the government was essentially civil, that the King’s writ ran from one end of the country to the next.

Early 17th century Ireland is covered in martial law, pre-emptive martial law, so that before the Plantation - even before The Flight of the Earls - there had been a marked increase in the use of martial law in Ulster.

In the years after the Treaty of Mellifont, and before The Flight of the Earls, Tyrone’s country and the territories of his confederates and so on, was treated by martial law commissioners and Provosts Martial. Now what’s so interesting about the behaviour of these men is, you have to understand again the mechanics of their authority: a martial law commissioner has a vested interest in killing; by the terms of a martial law commission, a martial law commissioner will identify suspect groups, execute them summarily, for which service to the state he is entitled to at least one-third of the moveable goods and possessions of those he kills.

Therefore it is in his interests to kill and kill a lot, he makes more money: also, to kill the elite, the gentry, the landowners because they’ve got the moveable goods and possessions that can really make you rich quick.

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