PLATE 7
Winding, Warping, with a new improved warping Mill, and Weaving …
WILLIAM HINCKS 1783
ULSTER, THE MOST NORTHERLY PROVINCE of Ireland, is surrounded on three sides by sea and separated from Scotland by only some twenty miles. Half of its surface lies more than three hundred feet above sea level while there are also extensive lakelands and bog. Little of the land is naturally fertile. Yet during the eighteenth century much land was reclaimed and brought under cultivation by an increasing population, and pasture gave way to tillage. By 1800 Ulster was the most densely peopled of the four provinces of Ireland so that its population of two million in 1821 almost equalled that of the whole of Scotland. Contemporaries believed that Ulster had also become the most prosperous province. So much economic expansion could not have been achieved by agricultural improvements alone, in spite of a major transfer from pasture to tillage. The real responsibility lay with the success of a single industry, the domestic linen industry. Its very prosperity had far-reaching consequences for the future of the province. It created a merchant class and financed industrial development. It was responsible for the initial creation and subsequent development of many market towns. Throughout the countryside the fact that the industry depended on yarn handspun from flax cultivated by local people, disseminated cash right down to the bottom of the social structure so that even small farmers could rely on a supplementary source of income to maintain the viability of their holdings: this was to prove a not unmixed blessing to Ulster society. Yet the relative prosperity of the poorer classes in Ulster was evident to every traveller.
In 1700 Ireland exported one million yards of cloth, and by 1800 the figure was 40 million yards (36.6 million metres), in addition to supplying an expanded home market. Why was the linen industry so successful in Ulster in 1800? Much of the answer lies in the timing of the industry’s development in Ulster on commercial lines. Whereas Irish society outside Ulster evolved along traditional lines so that local craftsmen could continue to meet the demand for textiles in Ireland, Ulster society was unstable and disorganised but enterprising and ready to experiment. The sudden influx of population into Ulster in the second half of the seventeenth century had compelled the immigrants to engage in a variety of occupations to earn their living. Their landlords had encouraged such enterprise in the hope of securing their rents. The new linen industry developed on the basis of local production of linen yarn that had been exported to Lancashire for very many years, and from the arrival among the immigrants of weavers experienced in producing for the commercial market. The new industry appeared at a time when the demand for cheap textiles was growing fast in Britain.2 Dublin merchants, in their search for goods to sell, provided capital and skill to promote Ulster linens until the Ulstermen were able in the long run to make their own capital and business contacts.
When the industry needed to expand production, especially in the 1730s and 1740s, it was able to obtain extra supplies of yarn from counties such as Roscommon and Sligo. Its own entrepreneurs adapted the technology of woollen tuck mills to mechanise the mills on their bleachgreens with rubbing boards, wash mills and beetling engines all driven by waterpower: their technology was introduced to Scotland in the mid-1730s.3 In the second half of the century the finishers of the linens were quick to adopt new bleaching materials and methods so that the output of a major bleachgreen was increased by a factor of ten.4 Throughout Ulster many landlords organised their market towns to attract both drapers and weavers. As demand increased throughout the century the industry expanded in its search for weavers as far as County Mayo. Farmers took up weaving in their spare time while the women of the family spun the yarn; farmers also employed journeymen to weave for them by providing them with the necessities of life. Agriculture became an adjunct of the domestic linen industry.
It is difficult to conceive what eighteenth-century Ulster would have been like without the linen industry. Much of the province was still in its primeval state, mountain or bog, while the climate, especially in the west, could rarely ripen crops like wheat, peas and beans. It would have been able to support an increasing population at no more than bare subsistence level, vulnerable to years of shortage. The first half of the eighteenth century reads like a catalogue of woe with tales of famine and food shortage and epidemics among both men and cattle: fear of the future and resentment against rents and tithes too high to be paid from farming drove many to listen to tales of a promised land across the Atlantic and induced some to uproot themselves. A pamphleteer in 1740, writing on the eve of the worst decade in the century, recorded:
But the scarcity of bread (especially in the North) by the badness of the seasons and crops for several years past, and the loss in two years, viz. ’28 and ’33 by shaking winds has reduced the case of multitudes very mournful before the present year, and contributed much of the distress in it. Nay, for above a dozen years past, we could scarcely be said to have plenty …5
In contrast to this pessimism was the optimism displayed by contemporary commentators about the districts where the linen industry was flourishing. One pamphleteer in 1732 reckoned that ‘the lands of Ulster, though naturally very coarse and for the most part the worst in the kingdom, yet by help of this manufacture are come to be valued almost equal with the best.’6 Walter Harris, in The Antient and Present State of the County of Down (1744), a volume designed to be the model for a series on all the Irish counties, decided ‘the staple commodity of the country is linen, a due care of which manufacture has brought great wealth among the people. The Northern inhabitants already feel the benefit of it, and are freed from much of that poverty and wretchedness too visible among the lower class of people in other parts of the Kingdom, where this valuable branch of trade has not been improved to advantage.’7
In the early years of the industry weavers had prospered under the patronage of landlords: most of them were craftsmen weaving finer linens and living in those towns and villages that administered and serviced the compact estates created by the plantation scheme. Because the structure of linen marketing was primitive in the early years of the eighteenth century many weavers’ families supplemented their incomes from farming and their success attracted farmers to weaving to improve their economic status. Landlords were anxious to accommodate these weavers on their estates by offering them long leases of smallholdings convenient to the major market towns. In 1739 a commentator had remarked on ‘the happy success which this method of dividing the land into small partitions and encouraging the cottager and the manufacturer has had in enriching both landlords and tenant’.8 On the expiry of leases of lands held by middlemen or by substantial farmers who had profited by subletting their land to weavers, landlords in the major linen-weaving districts seized the initiative by leasing farms directly to those weavers who occupied the land. The result was that by the closing decade of the eighteenth century on several estates in the ‘linen triangle’ (the district lying between Belfast, Dungannon and Newry that specialised in the weaving of fine linens) thousands of weaver-farmers leased land directly from the owners of the estates. Leases to Protestants lasted for three lives while those for Catholics ran for 31 years; although this distinction did not disappear until the 1793 Catholic Relief Act, it had never been of much significance because landlords readily renewed leases to such weavers on the termination of the leases.9
The security of tenure that these weavers enjoyed was coveted by many occupiers of land in other parts of the province but their hopes were often disappointed. Outside the linen triangle earnings from the coarser linens were lower so that landlords were not tempted quite so much to take weavers on as direct tenants instead of leaving them as subtenants to the farmers. Even landlords who tried to obtain security of tenure for subtenants were outmanoeuvred by the tenants. On the Abercorn estate in north-west Ulster, for example, the landlord in 1771 instructed his agent to pressure the tenants into giving subtenants a form of lease that might be renewed to them directly when the main lease expired. The agent reported later the same year after only one success:
It is plain by all their agreements that they guard against that, for they set five or six years short of the tenure they have. Besides they bind them under a penalty, and sometimes by oath, to give up peaceably when their term is expired and that they are not to petition or otherwise apply for any tenant right. Was I to lean to either side it would be to that of the under tenant who generally labours with great industry, and pays exorbitantly, for his earnings and improves much more land I am sure than the immediate tenant, and if he was found on the land at the end of the lease I would wish him to be continued. But if he bargains and obliges himself to give it up, I think his pretension [i.e. claim] is the less. The case of such is certainly hard; they must, if not by the merest chance they become tenants themselves, go on with much hardship and lose the fruits of their labour.10
During an economic depression two years later the same agent was forced to report that tenants were more reliable in paying rents than the subtenants. In the long term the tenants solved the problem in their own favour by refusing to grant subleases, while permitting their undertenants to remain. This solution amounted to the creation of a specific ‘cottier’ status where the undertenant obtained, in return for his labour, no more than a yearly occupancy of a ‘dry cot-take’ on which crops, especially potatoes and perhaps flax, were planted, or a ‘wet cot-take’ which included also feeding for a cow or two. He was to have no security of tenure against the very tenant farmer who insisted on his claim to tenant-right against his landlord.
It was the struggle for holdings that was responsible for both subletting and subdivision. In a rural society characterised by family farms, subdivision was the commonest strategy for transmitting property to posterity. In certain sections of the Ulster community partible inheritance was practised among the males of a family while in others all the children shared in their father’s property. It was the involvement of all the members of a family in different processes in the domestic linen industry that encouraged families to hold together into adulthood. Then, however, all the individuals would have had to be provided with portions. Subdivision of a farm by successive generations would soon have reduced the family group to beggary if participation in the domestic linen industry had not provided a supplementary source of income. It is likely therefore that subdivision was both a consequence of the prosperity of the linen industry and a pressure on individuals to take up spinning or weaving to make ends meet. Dependence on the domestic linen industry to maintain such tiny farms was dangerous for the future of the society because any reversal of the process was bound to be painful. Emigration to the American colonies provided a potential safety valve, but until the later decades of the century it attracted mainly single men rather than families.11
A related phenomenon was the colonisation of the marginal lands. This provided an opportunity to land-hungry families to carve out holdings for themselves instead of remaining undertenants. Estate rentals and leasebooks indicate that rents of marginal land began to rise from a very low base only after 1750 when arable land was becoming scarce. Attention to the potential of the more sparsely populated districts had been drawn by the new technology of the bleaching industry based on the use of water to power wash-mills and beetling-mills. In search of water supplies men moved into the marginal lands. This was especially true of the Callan valley south of Armagh city. According to a document dated 1795:
The manufacture gaining strength, about fifty years ago they began to push their improvements into the mountains which separate the low country from Louth, and by the assistance of turf fuel being convenient, and good constant rivers for feeding bleachyards and working machinery, they were enabled to extend their improvements into the mountains. And many wealthy farmers and manufacturers were induced by the low price of them —about a shilling to half a crown an acre —to take farms, lime and burn them although the limestone quarries were distant from the centre of the mountains, measuring from the quarries at Armagh or those on the Louth side towards Dundalk, at least eight or nine miles either way …12
The successful colonisation of the marginal lands in south Armagh encouraged families elsewhere to move to the uplands so that new townlands were marked out on the mountainside, divided among tenants, and converted into farms by hard labour.13 The crop that made feasible the cultivation of marginal land was the potato. Whereas land for grain, crops and flax had to be well prepared, rough ‘scraw’ or top sods could be levered up and turned over with the native ‘loy’ into ‘lazy beds’ resembling broad drills. The potato not only produced a better crop than grain on poor land but it also broke up lea ground and cleansed it of weeds. The other attraction of marginal land was an unlimited supply of turf to provide cheap fuel. As land became more scarce and expensive in the lowlands, more of the poorer people migrated to the mountain valleys and the shores and islands of the loughs and converted them into the farmsteads seen across much of Ulster today.
Capital for the development of marginal land came from the linen industry in the form of increasing demand for food and linen yarn for the linen triangle. As early as the 1720s northerners were buying yarn in County Sligo and it was recorded that ‘about the year 1735 the inhabitants of the North growing too numerous for its produce, in their visits for yarn bought wool in this country, soon after beef and mutton, and corn was sometimes exported from Sligo.’14 By 1770 Sligo was part of the Ulster economy and many Ulster people had moved there in search of land. An agricultural revolution from pasture to tillage was recorded for County Monaghan in 1739 so that it was supplying ‘some of the neighbouring counties with bere [cereal resembling barley], barley, and oatmeal’.15 Later in the century it was said that absentee landlords from Connacht found that their rent remittances were sent to them in bills of exchange drawn on London merchants by Ulster linendrapers and used by them to purchase ponies from Connacht for their businesses.16 Oatmeal was transported to Ulster from many other parts of Ireland: during periods of scarcity this led to local outcries.17
The tremendous explosion in the population of Ulster was in its relatively early stages when a census was taken for the Irish House of Lords in the mid-1760s as part of an inquiry ‘into the state of Popery’ in Ireland.18 The project was entrusted to the local gaugers, or excise men, in 1764 but the results seemed so defective that it was given in 1766 to the clergy of the Church of Ireland. However defective these returns may be, they do distinguish between Protestants and Catholics. They can be used to map both population density (Figure 7.1) and religious affiliation (Figure 7.2) throughout the province.
To focus attention on the practical implications of population density it is more effective to measure not the number of people per square mile but the number of acres of land per family. This reveals that as early as 1766 the size of family farms was already less than 30 acres (c. 12 hectares) and in a few parishes was smaller than 12 acres (4.9 ha.). At this time, therefore, there still existed a balance between the linen manufacture and agriculture since 30 acres of land could provide a decent living by contemporary standards, farmed by traditional methods. An increasing population after this date was compelled to turn to the linen industry to supplement its income. The marginal lands — mountains and bogs — are clearly distinguished: in the west, Donegal, and in the north-east, the Antrim plateau; the Sperrins running south through the centre of the province to Monaghan; and the heavy soils of Fermanagh and Cavan. Cavan was to become much more densely populated, with hosts of cottiers working and weaving for the weaver-farmers: it became part of the linen country. Fermanagh, on the other hand, never became a significant weaving county although it produced much yarn for weavers elsewhere. Notable at this time was the relatively low population of west Donegal, especially in comparison with the eastern side of Inishowen whose economy was linked with that of north Londonderry and Antrim around the ferry at Magilligan, for sales of both yarn and barley. The major problem for those colonising the mountains was that they could not share in the prosperity of the linen industry because they could not produce crops of quality flax on their poor lands. They were forced to concentrate on rearing young stock to sell to the lowlanders and their major cash crop became barley that was always in demand by distillers.19
One of the most important factors in opening up the marginal lands for colonisation was the development of communications. Even in the first half of the eigheenth century Ulster benefited from two major projects. The most spectacular and one of the earliest feats of its kind was the construction of the Newry Navigation linking Lough Neagh with the sea at Newry by 1742. Although Parliament was disappointed in its intention that the canal would provide cheap Irish coal for Dublin, mid-Ulster was opened up to the influence of Dublin while the canal saved many thousand lives by enabling great quantities of grain to be carried into the heart of the province during the hungry Forties.20 About this time too the linen country benefited from the construction of many miles of turnpike roads under the sponsorship of the local landlords.21 These roads were essential to cope with the traffic generated by the linen industry but until the 1765 Road Act permitted grand juries to tax the occupiers of land to provide for the construction of roads and bridges, county funds could not be used to meet the challenge. The 1765 Act itself was the government response to the Hearts of Oak agitation against the earlier system that had required every landholding to supply six days of free labour to mend the roads in each parish. Yet so radical and far-reaching was the 1765 act in its implications for society that it encountered severe opposition, culminating in the Hearts of Steel agitation in the early 1770s. In essence, it placed responsibility for the construction and maintenance of major roads and bridges on the county grand juries and provided capital from a county cess or tax. As the collection of this tax became more efficient and the prosperity of the province increased, the funds available to the grand juries enabled them to execute a great programme of road- and bridge-building. Most impressive was the series of three timber bridges thrown across the Lower Bann (Toome, Portneil, and Agivey) and the great timber bridge built across the Foyle at Londonderry by the American firm of Lemuel Cox of Boston in 1791.
In Ulster road projectors were encouraged by two acts passed in the 1771–2 session, the first permitting Ulster parishes to raise an extra parish cess to maintain minor public roads and the second enabling grand juries to raise money ‘for the making of narrow roads through the mountainous un-improved parts of this Kingdom’.22 New roads opened up land for development and increased its value while they made possible the transport of lime and other commodities essential for its exploitation. Too little notice has been taken of the great expansion of the road network in this period. Because the law ensured that roads could be made only between market towns or between market towns and the seacoast, road building stimulated the development of the whole urban network and diffused prosperity through the byways.
It was said of County Tyrone, for example, at the end of the eighteenth century that it was as well supplied with market towns as any county in the kingdom,23 and yet many of these towns had been created, or revived, only in the eighteenth century. They owed their creation to energetic landlords anxious to secure some of the prosperity generated by the linen industry. Although neither linen nor cloth paid tolls, these markets and fairs attracted buyers and sellers of other goods as well, especially oatmeal for food and candles for light. As early as the 1740s linendrapers were making it known that they would attend regular well-organised weekly markets in preference to the haphazard seasonal country fairs.24 In response landlords provided markethouses and tried to ensure that markets were properly conducted while some offered premiums or inducements to attract buyers and sellers. Such concern could make all the difference between the success or failure of a market. The whole atmosphere of this period is caught in a letter from Nathaniel Nisbitt of Lifford in County Donegal reporting in his capacity as agent to the Earl of Abercorn in April 1758:
We had the 17th inst at St Johnstown a very fine market for the first; there was about £100 worth of green [unbleached] linen bought, a large quantity of yarn; there were also several other sorts of goods, such as suit the markets of this country; our next is the 15th of May for we were obliged to make it the third Monday in the month, to steer clear of other markets; I would allow neither cockfight, nor horse race, though the people of the town were for it, as all towns are indeed, but I satisfied them by saying that an inch gained by honest industry was worth a yard otherwise, and that we did not want to gather idle folk at all.25
This letter contains one of the earliest references to a monthly market in Ulster — later to be known as the ‘fair day’ — and illustrates how the date in the month was selected. St Johnstown (or Altacaskine) had been granted a patent in 1618 for a Monday market and two fairs in the year on Easter Tuesday and the Tuesday after Michaelmas respectively. By the time this letter was written the fairs had increased to four, a common occurrence in Ulster at that time. Although St Johnstown had been incorporated as a borough, it had not been able to sustain a weekly market and this letter records the efforts of the Abercorns to found a monthly market that would take advantage of the increasing prosperity of the district. To create a reputation for the conduct of the markets, the agent had refused to permit either cock-fighting or horse-racing, both of which sports were associated with the traditional fairs. These monthly markets got their greatest fillip from the expansion of the cattle trade after 1760 and they extended rapidly through the bleaker countryside of Counties Tyrone and Donegal. Successful markets attracted shopkeepers and tradesmen while a professional class began to appear in many of the larger provincial towns. This was reflected in their domestic architecture, notably in Belfast, Newry, Armagh, Dungannon and Londonderry.26
Although the sudden flowering of towns and villages all over Ulster was one of the most notable characteristics of the late eighteenth century, it has to be admitted that in almost every instance they were no more than market towns with primitive organs of administration. Only the city of Londonderry appears to have had an effective corporation with wide-ranging powers that could be adapted to meet changing economic and social circumstances. Even the corporations of the boroughs created in the seventeenth century had been neutered by the practice of packing corporations with non-residents who could be relied upon to maintain the landlords’ control over the boroughs’ parliamentary seats. The legality of this practice had been confirmed by the Newtown Act of 1747 and case law in the courts recognised the rights of these self-perpetuating oligarchies. For local administration, therefore, the boroughs had to rely on corporation grand juries which had no legal status, manor courts held by the landlords, or parish vestries, or a combination of all three.
The legal limitations of these courts rendered them a potential source of political trouble in the closing years of the century. In Belfast, for example, the sovereign was the nominee of the landlord but he had to act as clerk of the markets, chief magistrate and coroner, as well as superintending the paving, lighting, and cleansing of the town. The initiative in local government came from outside the corporation of Belfast: town meetings could be called by a public notice instituted by influential inhabitants and published in the newspapers. The parish vestry was the instrument used to assess and collect rates but when some people refused to pay, the legality of the rate was questioned. The problem was exacerbated when the economic crises of the 1790s caused an increase in crime and poverty, so that in 1800 Parliament was compelled to pass a special act for the reform of the government of Belfast. The other towns in the province had to await local government reform in the nineteenth century to give expression to the wishes of the townspeople and to free them from landlord domination.27
In fact landlord power in Ulster reached its peak in the late eighteenth century. Before that time very few of them had been titled but many were then ennobled and exercised considerable influence in the Dublin Parliament. The zenith of their power coincided with the success of the Irish Volunteers movement when they mobilised the Protestants for the defence of the country against French invasion and for the protection of property rights. Such an assertion, however, would greatly oversimplify the complexities of Ulster society. Although outside Dublin itself Ulster was the great stronghold of the Volunteering movement, it was not the landlords but the middle class of merchants and professional men who had created it. The landlords did manage to gain control of the leadership of the movement but only at the cost of recognising the strength, and representing the aspirations, of their supporters.28 It was not a mere coincidence that in 1782, the same year that the Volunteers held their first great convention at Dungannon, the linendrapers of Ulster met at Armagh to compel the withdrawal of new regulations by the Linen Board in Dublin and secured their ends with the support of several great landlords who represented Ulster on the Linen Board.
These years introduced Ulstermen to the techniques of politics — public meetings, resolutions, lobbying — and some of them proved to be enthusiastic students. Even after the close of the American War of Independence when the majority of the Volunteers put away their equipment, some radical spirits continued to diagnose the ills of their own society. They resented the dominance of the landlord interest in politics and in the control of all the organs of government but they could not convince their fellow citizens to break what they viewed as the shackles of oppression.
This continuing movement for reform was consolidated and developed by the foundation of the Society of United Irishmen in Belfast in October 1791. (A similar association was established in the following month in Dublin.) Influenced by the more radical ideas of the French Revolution, the Society, which had initially endorsed a programme of moderate constitutional reform, moved steadily toward the advocacy of a republican constitution, to be established through revolutionary change. By 1796 it had experienced considerable success in establishing branches outside Belfast, particularly in Counties Antrim, Down and Londonderry. Moreover, its alliance with the Catholic agrarian movement had given it a popular base and contributed greatly to its potential force. Its gathering strength, however, convinced the government that Ulster was the centre where rebellion was most likely to begin. Therefore in 1797 General Lake was authorised to enforce a policy of severe repression throughout the province. Within a year political opposition in Ulster had been so weakened through Lake’s campaign that when rebellion actually broke out elsewhere in the country, the attempts by Henry Joy McCracken and Henry Munro to raise the United Irishmen in Antrim and Down failed after brief campaigns.
Blame for the ’98 rebellion was in large part laid upon the republican shopkeepers for misleading the countryfolk. Yet several Presbyterian clergymen also played a part. For political dissent in Ulster – even if it was tempered by the spirit of the French Revolution and couched in radical language – represented in essence a further expression of the ancient resentment nursed by certain elements in the Presbyterian congregations against the Anglican aristocratic ascendancy.29
Though it is clear that the rebellion of ’98 did not impinge greatly upon general life in the province between the 1780s and the early 1800s,30 it nonetheless convinced the London government of the need for a union between Britain and Ireland in 1800: they had lost confidence in the ability of the Anglican aristocracy to rule Ireland. The union concealed the developing political vacuum but, with hindsight, we realise that it was inevitable that in three provinces the Catholics would succeed to power whereas in Ulster they would not be in a position to challenge the Protestants.
In Ulster it was not just that Catholics were in a numerical minority. They were also at a severe social disadvantage. The sequence of wars in the seventeenth century had deprived not only the native landowners of their freehold property but also the farmers of their leaseholds. Over much of the province, wherever the British landlords were able to attract immigrants, the natives were reduced to the status of subtenants. In such a subservient position they posed no threat to the new social structure and were able to continue in their traditional lifestyle. Although many of them adapted to the expanding commercial economy by buying and selling around the country or taking up weaving for the linen export market, their lack of capital and business connections prevented them from securing a significant share of the prosperity generated in the middle years of the century. They did benefit, however, from the readiness of the landlords to exploit the potential of their estates by negotiating leases with those who could afford to pay regular rents and many of them obtained leases for thirty-one years, placing them almost on a par with their Protestant neighbours. Especially in ‘the linen triangle’ many landlords pursued this policy of dividing up holdings among the original subtenants to such an extent that the class of substantial farmers that could have maintained order, was seriously weakened. In the egalitarian society that ensued, men were forced to band together to cultivate new group loyalties that would protect their local community interests.31
The most reliable guide we possess to the relative strength of Catholics and Protestants across the province is the previously mentioned 1766 census of religion by parishes. Contemporaries would have associated Protestantism with the descendants of British colonists and Catholicism with the native Irish even where they knew about exceptions to the rule. In order to emphasise the significance of the ratios, it is best to distinguish those districts that were predominantly (i.e. more than 60 per cent) Catholic from those that were predominantly Protestant, and those that were only marginally one or the other. (It might he objected that since the count was made by Anglican clergymen it would be biased either in favour of Protestants or against Catholics: if the census was taken during a period of a Catholic ‘scare’, then the numbers of Catholics would he inflated, but if it was taken during a period of Protestant confidence, Protestant numbers would be increased. It is likely, however, that Protestant numbers were overestimated simply because the clergy would be more able to identify Protestants than Catholics, especially in those areas where Protestants composed only a small minority.)
Very conspicuous on the map are two Protestant areas: the south Antrim/north Down region straddling the Lagan valley and the region stretching along the north coast from Lough Swilly in the west to the Giant’s Causeway in the east and including the lower half of the Foyle basin: it was from these bases that British colonisation had advanced in the seventeenth century. Just as striking is the broad Catholic strip running in depth all along the southern border of Ulster: this indicates that the colonisation thrust had been halted and contained before it reached either Leinster or Connacht. If the settlers had exerted serious pressure against Monaghan and Cavan it would have altered the religious balance and character of those two counties also. Pockets of colonisation around certain towns illustrate the success of certain landlords, such as the Abercorn and Brooke families, in promoting British tenants on their estates. In contrast is the apparent success of the Irish in the old O’Neill homelands around Dungannon on the Powerscourt, Ranfurly and Charlemont estates in County Tyrone.
Special attention should be paid to those districts such as the western shore of Lough Neagh where Catholics and Protestants occupied distinct neighbourhoods. In north Armagh, where faction-fighting (endemic in rural society throughout Ireland) first assumed a sectarian form, strong Catholic parishes faced Protestant parishes and the dense populations were well matched. Both parties were composed of weavers whose lifestyles differed little but they rarely intermarried. Throughout most of the century Catholics had been prepared to accept a subordinate role in society but by the 1780s they were confident enough to challenge this role and to assert their rights whenever necessary. These minor skirmishes were difficult to suppress. In the aftermath of the Volunteer period there were too many guns about the countryside and plenty of provocation to use them. Peace-keeping was in the hands of the local justices of the peace, but they could get little co-operation and in the absence of police or military aid had to depend on the local companies of Volunteers to keep the peace. Finally, the disbandment of the Volunteers in 1793 transferred the responsibility for keeping the peace from the hands of the landlords to government control.32 As a result both Protestants and Catholics organised themselves more effectively, copying freemasonry lodge structures and emblems, and created respectively the Orange Boys and the Defenders. The skirmishes between them, especially at fairs, continued until late in the nineteenth century.
In eighteenth-century Ulster the pace of change had been very rapid. So swift had been the increase of population that it was almost as large as that of all Scotland by 1821. The domestic linen industry had swept through the province dividing and subdividing the town-lands into myriad small farms, while cultivation had advanced settlements along the mountain valleys. The new farms were served by thousands of miles of new roads that linked a complex network of market towns and villages and imported the products of the new industrial culture. Urban life with its esteem for education and commercial progress introduced politics, organisation and administration that must serve as the hallmarks of nineteenth-century Ulster society. The Anglican ascendancy had been forced to share much of its power with the merchant classes in the towns and the more substantial farmers throughout the countryside, and it was they who set the tone for the new century.
1 First published in Ciaran Brady, Mary O’Dowd, and Brian Walker, (eds), Ulster: an Illustrated History (London, 1989), pp. 134–57.
2 See pages 9–12, 60–66.
3 See pages 31, 54 and 55.
4 L’Amie, A., ‘Chemicals in the eighteenth-century Irish linen industry’, MSc Thesis, Queen’s University, Belfast, 1984, p.174.
5 Royal Irish Academy, Haliday Collection, vol. 151, no. 5, The distressed state of Ireland considered, more particularly with respect to the North, in a letter to a friend (1740), p. 4.
6 Slater, L., The advantages which may arise to the people of Ireland by raising of flax and flaxseed (Dublin, 1732).
7 Harris, W., The Antient and Present State of the County of Down (Dublin, 1744), p. 108.
8 Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (hereafter PRONI), Mic. 198, ‘Hints towards natural and topographical history of the counties of Sligo, Donegal, Fermanagh and Lough Erne by Rev. William Henry … 1739’.
9 Crawford, W.H., ‘Landlord–tenant relations in Ulster 1609–1820’, Irish Economic and Social History, ii, 1975, 5–21.
10 PRONI, Abercorn papers, James Hamilton to the Earl of Abercorn, August 1771,D623/A/39/135.
11 A summary of the argument in Crawford, ‘Landlord–tenant relations’.
12 PRONI, Massereene–Foster MSS, D562/1270, ‘Scheme of R. Stevenson 1795’.
13 McCourt, D., ‘The decline of rundale, 1750–1850’, in Roebuck, P. (ed.), Plantation to Partition (Belfast, 1981), pp. 122–6.
14 National Library of Ireland, O’Hara Papers, Charles O’Hara’s account of Sligo in the eighteenth century.
15 Armagh Public Library, Lodge MSS, ‘County Monaghan by Archdeacon Cranston and Mr Lucas, January 8th, 1738–9’.
16 Blackhall, J., Some Observations and reflections on the state of the Linen Manufacture in Ireland (Dublin, 1780).
17 Cullen, L.M., An Economic History of Ireland since 1660 (London, 1972), pp. 67–72; J. Fitzgerald, ‘The organisation of the Drogheda economy 1780–1820’, MA Thesis, University College, Dublin, 1972, p. 25.
18 PRONI, T808/14900, 15261, 15264, 15266, 15267, ‘Religious returns of 1766’.
19 McEvoy, J., Statistical Survey of the County of Tyrone (Dublin, 1802), p. 32.
20 Barton, R., A Dialogue Concerning Some Things of Importance to Ireland, particularly to the County of Ardmagh [sic] (Dublin, 1751), p. 14.
21 Crawford, W.H., ‘Economy and society in eighteenth century Ulster’, PhD Thesis, Queen’s University, Belfast, 1982, pp. 110–12.
22 Ibid., pp. 121–7.
23 See McEvoy, op. cit., pp. 53, 158–60, 207–9.
24 Belfast News-Letter, 11 November 1746.
25 PRONI, Abercorn papers, D623/A/33/23, Nathaniel Nisbitt to Earl of Abercorn, 20 April 1758.
26 See the publications of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society.
27 Crawford, ‘Economy and Society in Eighteenth Century Ulster’, ch. 6.
28 Smyth, P.D.H., ‘The Volunteers and parliament, 1779–84’ in Bartlett, T. and Hayton, D.W. (eds), Penal Era and Golden Age (Belfast, 1979), pp. 113–36; Crawford, W.H., ‘The influence of the landlord in eighteenth century Ulster’, in Cullen, L.M. and Smout, T.C. (eds), Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Economic and Social History, 1600–1900 (Edinburgh, 1977), pp. 193–203.
29 Crawford, W.H., ‘Change in Ulster in the late eighteenth century’, in Bartlett and Hayton, op. cit., pp. 199–202.
30 Jupp, P., ‘County Down elections 1783–1831’, Irish Historical Studies 18, no. 70, Sept. 1972, 177–206.
31 For a fuller treatment of this theme see Crawford, W.H., ‘The Ulster Irish in the eighteenth century’, Ulster Folklife 28, 1982, pp. 24–32.
32 See Bartlett, T., ‘An end to moral economy: the Irish Militia disturbances of 1793’, Past and Present 99, May 1983, 41–64; as well as Miller, D.W., ‘The Armagh Troubles, 1784–95’, in Clark, S. and Donnelly, J.S. (eds), Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest 1780–1914 (Manchester, 1983), pp. 155–91.
