securing fixity of tenure; and as Catholics formed nearly everywhere the mass of the population, this was equivalent to the introduction of tenancy at will, or at the most for short periods, over the whole island outside Ulster.
As a result of the various confiscations we find among the tenants, over and above the descendants of the original "churls" whose ancestors, as Bonn points out, had been serfs perhaps since the time of the Firbolgs, descendants of men who a few years before had owned land and ranked as gentry. A common misfortune drew the two elements together, and ultimately welded them into one. To this admixture Bonn ascribes the curious combination of servility and passionate fierceness which is a marked feature in the character of the Irish peasant.[1]
The outstanding result of confiscation in Ireland was to establish an almost complete divorce between the owner and the tiller of the soil. There are other European countries, as for example, some of the lands under the rule of the Habsburgs, in which confiscation based on religions grounds was carried out during the seventeenth century in a manner almost as sweeping as in Ireland.
But in most of these the mass of the people had either never accepted the new doctrines, or, if they had, they soon returned to the older faith. And, with the one exception of Bohemia, there was nowhere such a difference in race and language between the new landowners and the old as there was in Ireland. In Styria and other Austrian
- ↑ Jene Heftigkeit und Wildheit, die neben der Schmiegsamkeit eines der merkwurdigsten Kennzeichen der unterert Klassen Irlands ist. Vol. I., p. 389.
