natives." And in his letter to the Earl of Salisbury dealing with the Plantation of Cavan he declares—"When the English Pale was first planted all the natives were clearly expelled, so as not one Irish family had so much as an acre of freehold in all the five counties of the Pale." Sir J. Davies is an authority not always to be blindly followed. We can, however, check his statements from the lists of forfeiting proprietors in 1641. From these we find that in Louth, Meath, Dublin, Kildare, South Wexford, Waterford, there were practically no landowners of Irish descent.
In the beginning, no doubt, the process of confiscation—expropriation as some modern writers prefer to call it—was not complete. Mac Gillamocholmog was left in possession of much of south County Dublin. The country round Ferns was left to Murtough Mac Murrough.
The Irish proprietors were not expelled from portions of Westmeath, Ossory, and Leix.[1] But their tenure was precarious. They were allowed to retain the more inaccessible and barren districts until such time as the settlers might feel able and willing to occupy them. Dr. Bonn declares that the law held all the Irish, except "the five bloods," to be villeins, and so incapable of holding freehold estates.
The position, in fact, of those whose lands were not occupied by the settlers was singularly like that of the natives in Rhodesia at the present day. As long as it suited the ruling class they might
- ↑ Orpen: Ireland under the Normans, Vol. II., p. 133.
