CHAPTER VIII
THE RESULTS OF CONFISCATION
To sum up the story of Irish confiscation. At the accession of Henry VIII. about two-thirds of the island was still in possession of the native race. But these lands were held in defiance of the_law, which looked on the Irish as alien enemies. The legal ownership of the greater part of the lands held by them was vested in the descendants of the Anglo-Norman barons among whom the island had been parcelled out in the thirteenth century, or had come to the Crown as the heir to the immense Mortimer estate.
As regards the remaining third held by the descendants of the settlers, here too a certain amount, notably in Connaught, had come to the Crown through the Mortimers.
Henry seems to have realised the inconveniences of this state of affairs; his policy appears to have been to enfranchise the Irish, and to settle the land on the basis of giving a legal title to the actual occupier. On his death there was a short reversion to the older policy of conquest and extirpation. But Elizabeth, as far as she had a fixed policy, followed on the lines of her father.
These lines, however, involved a breaking down of the old clan organisation, and the substitution of English law for the Brehon law. Above all they
