of future troubles. In the first place, for some reason unknown to us, they were few in number; and secondly they were so vaguely worded that unscrupulous chiefs, or unscrupulous officers of the Crown, were able at a later period to maintain that the grants actually did give to the chief the landlordship of the clan lands.
With the reign of Mary we come to the first actual case of confiscation accompanied by the dispossession of the occupants of the land, since the days of the invasion.[1]
The territories of Leix and Offaly lay near to the borders of the Pale, touching for a considerable stretch the lands lately subject to the Earl of Kildare. Leix, the south-eastern portion of the modern Queen's County, had been occupied, in part at least, in the early days of the conquest. In the division of the great Marshall inheritance it had come to the Mortimers. But as Friar Clyn tells us, Lysaght O'More "had forcibly expelled the English from his lands and patrimony, for in one night he burned eight castles of the Englishmen, and destroyed the noble castle of Dunamaise belonging to Lord Roger de Mortimer, and usurped to himself the dominion of his fatherland. From a servant he became a lord, from a subject, a prince." Lysaght died in 1342. The Mortimer
- ↑ Of course when, in the fourteenth century the Irish recovered lands from the settlers they slew or expelled the foreign occupants. This was the case notably in north Tipperary, in Leix, and in most of Carlow also. This of course from the settlers' point of view was "confiscation."
Namara, MacGillapatrick, and the O'Tooles of Powerscourt and of Castlekevin. Earl Hugh O'Neill claimed that the grant to Con O'Neill made him landlord of all Tir Owen (see Cal. St. Papers, 1606, p. 210). O'Shaughnessy in Cromwell's time appears as owner of the whole clan territory.
