him starve. The copy holder, and even the inferior tenants on the English manor, had certain rights of pasturage, etc. But in Ireland the wood, the turf bog, the mountain pastures belonged to the landlord.[1] Each tenant dealt as an individual with the owner of the soil. He was personally free, for under James I. the last traces of serfdom had been abolished; but on the other hand, as a tenant at will he stood absolutely at the landlord's mercy. Different conditions, of course, prevailed in Ulster from the first, amongst the Protestant settlers, and in that province after bitter struggles the "Ulster custom" was recognised at least as regards Protestant tenants.
It is curious to find results such as these arising to a certain degree from the personal freedom of the Irish peasant; and it is worthy of remark that in Spain where serfdom never took root, almost the same unlimited power of the landlord existed as in Ireland.
As to the actual economic position of the mass of the population after the confiscations there is a certain conflict of evidence and of opinion. But when we consider the famines of the first half of the eighteenth century, one of which is said to have caused the death of 400,000 people, and when we read the accounts of the condition of the lower orders given by Swift, Berkeley and others, we are led to the conclusion that the economic condition of the peasantry was as bad if not worse than that of the French peasantry in the darkest days of the closing years of Louis XIV.
- ↑ See Bonn, Vol. II., pp. 177—179. In Ireland there seems to have been very little common land, such as we find in England.
