THE PLANTATION OF ULSTER
At the closing years of the Elizabethan period, a prolonged war aimed at bringing the Ulster chiefs into submission had laid waste large tracts of the country. Upon the surrender of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, the chief general of the Irish forces, Ulster came under English law. The new King, James I, at first took a conciliatory approach. The Ulster chiefs retained their titles and were recognised as landowners of huge areas. The generous pardon infuriated those who had fought for the Crown in the long wars in Ulster. One of them complained: ‘I have lived to see that damnable rebel Tyrone brought to England, honoured, and well liked … I adventured perils by sea and land, was near starving, ate horse flesh in Munster, and all to quell that man, who now smileth in peace at those who did hazard their lives to destroy him.’
The new English officials, however, undermined the Ulster chiefs at every opportunity. The lord deputy, Sir Arthur Chichester, and the attorney general, Sir John Davies, eroded the Earl of Tyrone’s authority to the extent that, in the lord deputy’s words, ‘now the law of England, and the Ministers thereof, were shakles and handlocks unto him, and the garrisons planted in his country were as pricks in his side’. This policy worked even better than the English officials could have hoped. In 1607, Tyrone, Rory O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, and Cuconnacht Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh, together with their followers, wives and families, left Ulster and went to the continent, an event now remembered as the ‘Flight of the Earls’.
The departure of so many of the principal chiefs and landowners offered the English government an excellent opportunity for a change of policy that would end all possibility of future trouble in Ulster. The lord deputy wrote to James I in September 1607: ‘If his Majesty will, during their absence, assume the countries into his possession, divide the lands amongst the inhabitants … and will bestow the rest upon servitors and men of worth here, and withal bring in colonies of civil people of England and Scotland … the country will ever after be happily settled.’ It was the perfect time to take such an initiative, for ‘the whole realm, and especially the fugitive countries, are more utterly depopulated and poor than ever before for many hundred years’.
Flight of the Earls, by Thomas Ryan.
A revolt in April 1608 led by the formerly pro-English Sir Cahir O’Doherty in north-west Ulster underlined the importance of settling the area and provided the opportunity for extending the area of confiscated land designated for plantation. The King’s enthusiasm for the venture had already been kindled by the success of pioneering settlements in County Down. Shortly before the Plantation, two Scottish adventurers named Montgomery and Hamilton had established a community of lowland Scots in County Down which were to form the bridgehead through which Scots settlers spread out into Ulster for much of the seventeenth century. With surnames such as Calderwood, Agnew, Adair, Cunningham, Shaw and Maxwell, they arrived to find the country ‘more wasted than America (when the Spanish landed there)’, and between Donaghadee and Newtown ‘thirty cabins could not be found, nor any stone walls, but ruined, roofless churches, and a few vaults at Grey Abbey, and a stump of an old castle at Newtown’.
County Antrim too had a strong Scottish presence. Immigration from Scotland had been fairly continuous for centuries before 1609. In 1399 the heiress of the Norman lordship in eastern Antrim married John Mor MacDonnell, the Lord of the Isles. Antrim was absorbed in the MacDonnell kingdom and this situation lasted until the fifteenth century. More recently, a strong English presence had established itself in South Antrim under Sir Arthur Chichester, a Devon man, who was to be responsible for the new plantation scheme. He was determined to lead the way by setting a good example on his own lands in and around Belfast. Many of his supporters secured estates to the south of Belfast, particularly in the Malone area, ensuring that north Down was noticeably English in character. In 1635 an English traveller recorded that Chichester’s house was ‘the glory and beauty of the town’. No mention is made of the town itself except that ‘many Cheshire and Lancashire men were planted in the neighbourhood by Mr. Arthur Hill, son of Sir Moyses Hill’. Belfast itself was peopled with Devonshire men, and a number of Scots settlers.
Planning for the Ulster Plantation got underway shortly after the ‘Flight of the Earls’ in September 1607. The initial 1608 survey of confiscated lands was discovered to be so imperfect that a second survey was required during 1609. Both Down and Antrim, with a strong Scottish presence already, were not included in the scheme. County Monaghan was the only other entire county of Ulster to be excluded from the official scheme. In 1591 land tenure in Monaghan had been anglicised through the transference of extensive Church lands to English servitors and by granting land to loyal Irish landowners.
The ‘Printed Book’ of conditions for successful applicants for Ulster land was published in London in April 1610. Much of the land was confiscated in the six Ulster counties of Armagh, Cavan, Donegal, Coleraine (later Londonderrry), Fermanagh and Tyrone. Undertakers had to be English or Scottish who had taken the Oath of Surpremacy – that is Protestants – and who were to pay rent of £5 6s 8d to the King for every 1,000 acres. They were assigned the lands at favourable terms. Proportions allocated varied from 2,000, 1,500 to 1,000 acres. They were expected to clear their new estates completely of native Irish inhabitants. Undertakers were also expected to settle 24 British males per 1,000 acres of lands granted. The undertakers who were granted the largest proportions, 2,000 acres, were expected to build a castle on their lands, whereas stone bawns were required to be built by undertakers with smaller proportions. Building and settlement had to be completed within three years.
Some native Irish were exempt from the Plantation, the most notable being Conor Roe Maguire in east Fermanagh, Sir Tourlough MacHenry O’Neill of the Fews, and in Armagh and Tyrone, the heirs of Sir Henry Og O Neill, who had been killed in the campaign to suppress O’Doherty’s revolt. A total of 280 Irish obtained Plantation land grants, which amounted to about 20 per cent of the planted counties. They were given reduced holdings, often shifted to place them under local servitor supervision, and forbidden to buy additional land. Some received life grants only. On the eve of the Plantation Sir Toby Caulfied reported that there was ‘not a more discontented people in Europe’.
The new Plantation’s chances of success were considerably boosted when the Crown secured the support of the city of London in the enterprise. In return James I granted the London Companies not only all of County Coleraine, but also the barony of Loughinsholin, detached from Tyrone, together with Culmore and the towns of Coleraine and Derry.
Settlers began to arrive in Ulster as the Plantation scheme gradually took shape. They levelled the forests and devoted themselves to arable farming, built towns and villages of neat timber framed houses and thatched or slated stone cottages, established markets, churches and schools. The English tenants who were attracted to Ulster 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 Welsh too settled in considerable numbers in Dungannon, County Tyrone and in County Donegal. The Scots came in greatest numbers from the eight counties that lay either along the border with England, or up the west coast of Scotland. Most came from south-west Scotland, Lanark, Renfew and Sterlingshire where land was hard to come by and lairds evicted tenants unable to make the down payments required under the ‘feuing’ land-letting system. Surviving records suggest that Tyrone and Fermanagh attracted relatively large numbers of settlers from the Border counties. The most common surnames were Johnson, Armstrong, Elliot, Graham and Beatty. In Donegal, Londonderry, Cavan and Armagh, the majority of settlers came from the western Lowlands.
After a slow beginning, during the 1630s a second wave of Scots was attracted to Ulster 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. Migration to Ireland offered the possibility of immediate escape from dire poverty and the prospect of future prosperity. Sir William Brereton, an Englishman travelling through Ayrshire in 1634, wrote: ‘Above ten thousand persons have, within two last years past, left the country wherein they lived … and are gone for Ireland. They have come by one hundred in company through the town, and three hundred have gone on hence together, shipped for Ireland at one tide …’.
The records
The government commissioned four surveys between 1611 and 1622 to investigate the progress being made in the Ulster Plantation. These surveys are located as follows:
• 1611 – survey carried out by Sir George Carew, Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts, 1603–24, pp. 68–69, 75–79, 220–51;
• 1613 – survey carried out by Sir Josias Bodley, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Hastings Mss, iv (London, 1947), pp. 159–92;
• 1618–19 – survey carried out by Captain Nicholas Pynnar. The findings are held by Trinity College, Dublin, F.1.19. The survey is printed in full in G Hill, Historical Account of the Plantation of Ulster (Belfast, 1877);
• 1622 – survey carried out by commissioners appointed by the government. The official reports for each county were published as follows:
Dunluce Castle, The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland, drawn by W H Bartlett (1841).
Armagh: V Treadwell in Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 3rd series, 23 (1960)
Cavan: P O Gallachair in Breifne, vol. 1 (1958)
Donegal: V Treadwell in Donegal Annual, vol. 2 (1951–54), vol. 3 (1954–57)
Fermanagh: P O Gallachair in Clogher Record, vol. 2 (1958)
Londonderry: Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Ireland, 1615–25
Tyrone: V Treadwell in Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 3rd series, vol. 27 (1964).
In December 2006, the Irish Manuscripts Commission published Victor Treadwell’s book which contains the papers of the commission of enquiry sent to Ireland in 1622. This volume details the daily functioning of the commission and has substantial indices of persons and places.
There is also a significant amount of original documentation relating to the 1622 survey in the National Library of Ireland under Ms Manuscripts under DD/M. This material includes many of the original certificates presented by the undertakers or their agents. Names of tenants are provided as well as information on the buildings on the estate and who had built them.
State papers concerning Ireland are preserved in the National Archives, London under SP/63. Microfilm copies of the original state papers, covering the period 1509–1782, can be found in PRONI (MIC/223).
Plantation records of the London Companies
In 1609 the city of London was invited to undertake the corporate plantation of Derry and Tyrone. It was an acknowledgement by the government that the scheme was attracting settlers to O’Cahan country, and that holding the strategically important towns of Derry and Coleraine would likely be beyond the resources of the average adventurer. After difficult negotiations the government granted to the City practically the whole of the county of Coleraine (later Londonderry) and the Tyrone barony of Loughinsholin. In return the corporation undertook to spend £20,000, and within 2 years to build 200 houses in Derry and 100 in Coleraine. A new body was also created to supervise and manage the running of the Plantation, to be called ‘The Society of the Governor and Assistants, London, of the New Plantation of Ulster, within the Realm of Ireland’, known later as The Honourable The Irish Society.
In total fifty-five London Companies were ordered to contribute to the Plantation, at rates determined according to their wealth and prestige. Although prison and fines were used by the government to encourage the payment of arrears, some Londoners preferred these punishments to participation in the scheme. Some of the unwillingness to pay up may have been due to the fact that the Crown delayed in formalising title to the lands: to remedy this, the Charter of Londonderry was ratified in March 1613. The Charter created the county of Londonderry – so named to emphasise the connection with London – by combining the former county of Coleraine, most of the barony of Loughinsholin detached from Tyrone, Derry and its north-west liberties and Coleraine and its north-east liberties.
The Irish Society’s and London Companies’ interest in their Ulster estates lasted until the land-purchase legislation at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. John Towgood left an account of his visit to the Company lands at and near Newtownlimavady in 1820 (PRONI reference MIC/9B/Reel 17):
Saturday, 1st April. We proceeded after breakfast on a further view of the estate in company with Mr J Given, Junior, in the course of the day we entered, as we had before done, many very wretched hovels, called cabins. The following picture will apply with variations to most of them. On entering the cabin, by a door through which smoke is perhaps issuing at the time, you observe a bog peat fire, around which is a group of boys and girls as ragged as possible, and all without shoes or stockings, sometimes a large pig crosses the cabin without ceremony, or a small one is lying by the fire with its nose close to the toes of the children; perhaps an old man is seen or woman, the grandfather or grandmother of the family with a baby in her lap – two of three stout girls spinning flax, the spinning wheels making a whirring noise, like the humming of bees; a dog lying at his length in the chimney corner perhaps a goose hatching her eggs under the dresser and all this in a small cabin full of smoke, an earth floor, a heap of potatoes in one corner and a heap of peat turf in another, sometimes a cow and sometimes a horse occupy the corner.
Relief of Derry, by William Sadler, Ulster Museum.
The records relate to the administration of their extensive estates and include rentals, title deeds, maps and correspondence. The originals of many of the Irish Society and London Companies’ records are held by the Corporation of London Record Office, the Guidhall Library in London, or by the Companies themselves. PRONI holds microfilm copies of much of this material. In the 1980s the Drapers’ Company deposited records relating to its County Londonderry Estates at PRONI. This archive, consisting of about 500 volumes and about 15,000 documents, is now fully catalogued, PRONI reference number D/3632. PRONI also holds records of the smaller companies – the Barber Surgeons (associated in the 1613 division of estates with the Ironmongers), the Cordwainers (associated with the Goldsmiths), Cutlers and Joiners (associated with the Salters), the Wax Chandlers (associated with the Haberdashers) and Weavers (associated with the Vinters).
In addition to the records of the individual companies, PRONI has a wide range of records relating to the various individuals who acquired land through or from these companies.
The Guide to Records of the Irish Society and the London Companies has been published by PRONI. It is arranged alphabetically by Company with a final section on the Irish Society.