CHAPTER III
THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND—SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF THE LAND SYSTEM OF IRELAND TO THE YEAR 1870
Great importance in the history of Ireland of the conditions of land tenure—The ancient Celtic land system and its characteristics—The Norman conquest of Ireland—Norman feudalism in the Irish land—The policy of Henry VII., and especially of Henry VIII.—The era of the conquest and confiscation of the Irish land—The possessions of the O’Connors of Offaly wrested from them—Forfeiture of the domains of Shane O’Neill, and of the Earl of Desmond—Attempts at colonisation—All Ireland made shire land—The extinction of the old Celtic land system—The Plantation of Ulster—Progress of confiscation during the reigns of the two first Stuarts—The Civil War—Immense confiscations made by Cromwell—His scheme of colonisation a failure—The era of confiscation closes after the battle of the Boyne and the fall of Limerick—The Penal Code of Ireland—Its fatal effects on the Irish land—Dismal period in Irish landed relations—Gradual improvement—The period described by Arthur Young—Evil traces of the past remain—Whiteboyism and agrarian disorder—State of Irish landed relations up to the rebellion of 1798, and after the Union—Over-population and the results—Distress after the Peace—State of Irish landed relations up to 1844—The Report of the Devon Commission—The Famine and its effects on the Irish land—The Encumbered Estates Acts—State of Irish landed relations from 1848 to 1868.
The fortunes of many communities, it has truly been said, have been decisively affected by the conditions of the ownership and the occupation of the soil. The social, even the political, life of modern Europe has been, in a great measure, moulded by the land tenures that have grown out of the feudal system; I need only refer to the history of England, of France, and of Germany. This remark, however, especially applies to the events that make up the annals of Ireland; that long and unhappy tale of misfortunes and errors is intimately associated, all through, with the land, and with the relations connected with it. Modern research has shown how grotesque and mischievous was the ignorance of the Tudor lawyers and statesmen, who described the ancient organisation of the Irish land as a medley of barbarian and pernicious usages; it was an archaic and imperfect specimen of the feudal system, with differences indeed, but marked with its essential features. Norman feudalism, lawless and ill-ordered, was for centuries, after the first Conquest, placed beside this primitive form of society, in parts of a country not half subdued; the results were seen in incessant strife and discord, and in social anarchy, which prevented civilisation growing up. The Irishry had well-nigh driven the Englishry into the sea, when Henry VII. tried to make his authority felt in Ireland; his successor, partly a Celt in blood, and a real statesman, devised a noble scheme for bringing an ill-governed dependency within the domain of order and law, by planting an Anglo-Norman and native aristocracy in the soil, subject to a strong monarchy that would have protected the community as a whole. Most unfortunately the policy of Henry VIII. was not carried out; in the great conflict of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, Ireland was drawn into a long struggle with England, and was repeatedly made a place of arms for her foes; an era of savage conquest, accomplished piecemeal, with ruthless confiscation following in its train, was protracted during nearly a century and a half; and at the close of the reign of William III., nine-tenths probably of the land of Ireland had been wrested from its former possessors, and the old Celtic land system had been destroyed by the sword and by law. Race and religion made this position of affairs much worse; the age of Protestant ascendency in Ireland began; in infinitely the greatest part of the island the land was parcelled out among a caste of owners distinct in blood and faith from the children of the soil, and lording it over an oppressed peasantry; and the system was propped up by a code of cruel laws, which maintained and, so to speak, stereotyped these evil divisions. The lines of the land system of Ireland were thus finally laid down; a variety of economic and social causes increased and deepened their extreme harshness; and though they have gradually been softened, and are now all but effaced, their traces and the results are still to be seen. The last thirty years have witnessed repeated attempts to effect radical changes in the modes of the ownership and the occupation of the land in Ireland; they have wrought a revolution in Irish landed relations, and have well-nigh turned them upside down; but the consequences have assuredly not been fortunate. The land system of Ireland has been made a chaos of economic disorder, of dissensions of class, of legalised wrong, absolutely incompatible with social progress and the general welfare.
I must glance, for an instant, at the distinctive features of the land system of Ireland in the Celtic age, for despite the effects of confiscation and conquest, faint traces of it may still be seen, and have a kind of influence.[36] As was the case in all communities of the Aryan stem, the land originally was largely held in collective ownership; but agriculture developed individual ownership by degrees, though less so in Ireland than in more progressive countries. The people were settled on the soil in tribes, clans, and septs, these being the larger and the smaller units; the modes of the tenure of the land, misinterpreted by Elizabethan sages, differed widely from each other, but revealed the traditions of old patriarchal usage and power, especially in their canons of descent and succession. The feudalisation of the land, as it has been significantly called, a process which took place in nearly the whole of Europe, was also witnessed in Ireland, to a certain extent; but this was not so complete and strongly marked as in France and England. The land, nevertheless, was, throughout the island, held ultimately from a supreme monarch; it was divided, under him, among families of princely chiefs, who ruled vast tracts with scarcely controlled authority; inferior chiefs were subject to these; the organisation of the land had much in common with the organisation of the Anglo-Norman manor, and with the position of the Lord Paramount of every manor, the head of the English State. The Irish kings and chiefs had lands in demesne; they had a landed and a personal noblesse; the territories they ruled were held by classes strongly resembling the free tenants, the villeins, and the serfs of the feudal system. All this, however, was not as perfectly defined as it was in lands feudalised to a higher degree; and though the Davieses and Spensers were wholly in error in representing the dependents of the Irish kings and chiefs as little better than a horde of fighting men and slaves, Ireland never fully possessed the liberties feudalism secured. The Ceile of substance, who had lands of his own, seems to have been in an inferior position to the English freeholder; the Saer stock and Daer stock tenants held their lands by a tenure like that of the metayers of France; the Fuidhirs were kept in complete subjection, and had not even the rights of the villein. The land, too, was still largely held in collective ownership; in its occupation this is even now seen in backward and poor districts; and, curiously enough, distinctions were drawn between what was a ‘fair’ and a ‘rack rent,’ words still common in the mouth of the Irish peasant, and to which recent legislation has given its sanction.
As in the case of most lands where anything resembling feudalism prevailed, with the single exception of England, under her strong Monarchy, Ireland in these circumstances was torn by continual discord, increased by the recurring struggles with the Dane. The Celtic kings and chiefs, nevertheless, were beloved by their people; the land system fell in with Celtic tribal ideas and sentiments. I pass over the incidents of the first Norman Conquest; in the course of time, an Anglo-Norman colony was established, within a Pale ever-varying in extent, and held parts of the country under feudal conditions, the remaining, and by far the greatest, parts being left in the possession of the Celtic kings and princes. Anglo-Norman feudalism, however, was completely different, in Ireland, from what it was in England; it was not subject to vigorous kingly rule; it was confined within comparatively small limits. In these circumstances the Pale fell into the hands of a few leading and great families; these, as had been largely the case in Scotland, formed a domineering and oppressive noblesse, continually engaged in quarrels between themselves, and in petty wars with the Celtic chiefs, and completely superior to the royal power in England. The Geraldines, the Butlers, the De Burghs, and other great houses, had no law but their own wills in their vast lordships; their exactions and tyranny became a byword; their lives were spent in savage feudal strife, and in ‘hostings against the Irish enemy.’ Strange to say, too, these scions of a mighty conquering race fell under the spell of the Celtic genius, and, as it was said, ‘became more Irish than the Irish themselves; they were at least largely assimilated to a Celtic model, and they adopted many of the usages of the Celt. It was not much otherwise in the Celtic region outside the Pale; the Irish chiefs often blended in marriage with the Anglo-Norman settlers; but they were continually at war with them, and with each other. Under these conditions, feudalism, in its best aspects, could take no root, in the land, in Ireland; and there is much reason to believe that the archaic Irish land system was gradually changed and almost broken up, the power of the kings and chiefs being greatly increased, and the position of their dependents being made essentially worse. It is obvious that in a land, a scene of such disorder and misrule, civilisation and all that the word implies could not exist; Ireland was probably more barbarous at the close of the fifteenth century than she had been when she first saw Henry of Anjou. The Pale had been restricted within ever-narrowing bounds; generations of colonising ‘Englishry’ had entered the country, and had left it in angry despair; the ‘Irishry’ had encroached on their conqueror’s domain; the work of Strongbow and Fitzstephen appeared to be undone. Especially it was observed that nothing like a middle class, even then the best element in the social life of England, had been able to develop itself in Ireland, and that the humbler classes were always in a state of wretchedness, ground down by exaction, and exposed to incessant wrongs of all kinds. ‘What common folk of all the world’—these were the words of a State paper of the age—‘is so poor, so feeble, so evil be seen in town and field, so greatly oppressed and trodden underfoot, fares so evil, with so great misery, and with so wretched a life, as the common folk of Ireland?’
Henry VII. strengthened the authority of the Crown in Ireland; the Viceroyalty of Poynings marks an epoch in her chequered annals; but the conduct of the king was shifting and weak; the land fell under the control of the great House of Kildare; the Irishry were driven back, but in no sense subdued. Surrey, the victor of Flodden, intreated Henry VIII. to make the country his own by sheer force of arms; but his master refused in striking language; and proposed a scheme for bringing Ireland under the control of the Monarchy, for encouraging civilisation and promoting order, the wisest that has ever suggested itself to a British statesman. He made several of ‘the degenerate’ Norman noblesse peers; he extended the same dignity to several Irish chiefs; he assembled representatives of Ireland in a Parliament composed of both races; he appointed commissioners to go through the country and to punish crime; above all—and this deserves special notice—he tried to conciliate the Celtic community by bringing their usages within the cognisance of the law, and giving them effectual legal sanction; and he condemned the attempts being already made to force laws on them peculiar to England. Had this enlightened policy been steadily pursued, the history of Ireland would have run a wholly different course; but destiny, that has played so sinister a part in Irish affairs, interfered to thwart the admirable designs of the king. The great Geraldine rebellion broke out, supported by irregular Celtic risings; from this time forward, during five generations of man, the era of cruel but intermittent conquest, accompanied by wholesale confiscation, set in. The powerful tribe of the O’Connors of Offaly, closely associated with the fallen House of Kildare, was the first to feel the weight of the arm of England; its territories were forcibly overrun and annexed, given the name of the King’s and the Queen’s Counties, and peopled with a colony of settlers from England. Celtic Ireland ere long was brought into the conflict between Elizabeth and Philip II., the representatives of the faiths that were dividing Christendom; the princely chief, Shane O’Neill, fell a victim to the English conquerors, though their quarrel with him was not wholly one of seeking the assistance of a foreign enemy; his vast domains were, also, in part forfeited, in part handed over to a puppet of English power. The frightful Desmond rebellion followed; it was directly encouraged by the Pope and by Spain; after a protracted struggle approaching a real civil war, the immense lordships of the great Geraldine House were confiscated, and granted to a colony of English blood. Tyrone, the real successor of his kinsman, Shane O’Neill, a soldier and statesman of no ordinary parts, seeing, as he bitterly said, that his ‘lands were marked down by the spoiler,’ endeavoured, not without partial success, to combine a great Irish League against England; he entered into an alliance with Spain; a Spanish army landed on the southern coast of Munster; after a long and sanguinary contest, Tyrone yielded, but his resistance had been so formidable that he was allowed to retain his possessions.
The subjugation of a large part of Ireland, in the Elizabethan wars, was marked by incidents of a most atrocious character. The Government had no regular army to act in the field; it was compelled largely to rely on armed levies of the Englishry, and on bodies of the Irishry attached to the conqueror’s standards; for in this, as in nearly all instances throughout their history, the Irish Celts were at feud with each other; Celtic Ireland was a house divided against itself. The queen, it has been written, ‘ruled over blood and ashes,’ when Mountjoy sheathed his victorious sword; the memory of this period still lives in Irish tradition. A season of exhaustion and repose ensued after James I. had ascended the throne; but the time, in the phrase of Tacitus, had an evil aspect in peace itself. The Pale had long before this been effaced; conquest and confiscation had spread over nearly the whole island; the domination of England was felt almost everywhere. As the result, the whole of Ireland was made shire land; the old Celtic land system, which still widely prevailed, was swept away by decisions of the Anglican Courts of Justice; it was declared to be ‘a lewd and not law-worthy thing;’ all the Irish land was subjected to English modes of tenure; they were imposed on a people which detested these gifts of the stranger; innumerable tribal rights were destroyed. Ere long the work of confiscation began again; the domains of Tyrone and of his kinsman O’Donnell were pronounced forfeited for reasons that have never been ascertained; the Crown was placed in possession of nearly six counties of Ulster. Up to this time the settlements of English colonists, which had been made in Ireland by Tudor conquest, had failed; the colonists had been almost lost in the midst of the Irishry, who hemmed them around. This immense confiscation was, however, in part successful; it was carried out on comparatively enlightened principles; it has produced the famous Plantation of Ulster; and this, with other settlements in the counties of Antrim and Down, has established, in a large part of the northern province of Ireland, a hardy and thriving community, in the main, of Scottish blood. Confiscation, nevertheless, did not stop here; ‘the ravages of war,’ in Burke’s language, were ‘carried on amidst seeming peace;’ enormous tracts were torn from their former owners on pretexts usually of the flimsiest kind, and were flung to Court favourites, to jobbing speculators, to greedy adventurers of the baser sort. By this time three-fourths probably of the soil of Ireland had passed into the hands of a new race of possessors; the descendants of Anglo-Norman nobles and of the Celtic princes had been sufferers well-nigh in the same proportion. At last Strafford marked out the whole province of Connaught, for what has been called ‘his majestic rapine;’ this and other innumerable acts of spoliation and wrong unquestionably were the paramount cause of the great Celtic rising of 1641. Another and soon to be a most potent element of evils and troubles had already begun to make its sinister presence felt in Ireland. In the great religious schism of the sixteenth century, England had become Protestant, Ireland had remained Catholic, and each had taken opposite sides in the conflict that followed; though the Elizabethan wars were rather struggles of race than of faith. But as conquest and confiscation progressed in Ireland, the Anglican Church, a scion of the Norman Church of the Pale, was erected on the ruins of its Celtic Catholic rival; the land more and more became possessed by settlers alien in creed from the old owners, and from the vanquished children of the soil; and harsh laws had begun to deepen the distinctions between them. Nevertheless, though its signs had in some measure appeared, the era of Protestant ascendency and Catholic subjection had not been developed in Ireland, as yet, in its worst aspects.