population. Few Irish were to receive estates there, so that it was hoped that the territory might become an almost exclusively British settlement.[1] In the original scheme certain Irishmen were to have got 8,000 acres in this county on the petition of the Lord Deputy; but only 6,000 acres were actually allotted to them.[2]
Of course this attempt at segregation failed in the long run.[3] The new landowners could not cultivate their demesne lands without Irish labour; Irish tenants offered higher rents than could be obtained from British; these last could not always be obtained. At first extensions were obtained of the time limit before which the Irish occupiers were to remove. Then the new owners, by a policy of passive resistance, succeeded ultimately, in spite of numerous efforts on the part of the government, in evading this, one of the fundamental conditions of their grants. Finally in 1626 permission was given to take Irish tenants on a quarter of the
- ↑ In all documents dealing with plantations under James I. the term "British" is consistently used in contradistinction to "Irish." Scots, Welsh and English are of course all included under British. This is interesting in view of present day attempts to show that British includes Irish. The character given to these British settlers by one of their own clergy, the Rev. A. Steward, circa 1645—71, has often been quoted: "From Scotland came many, and from England not a few, yet all of them generally the scum of both nations,—who from debt, or breaking, or fleeing from justice, or seeking shelter, came hither, hoping to be without fear of man's justice in a land where there was nothing, or but little as yet, of the fear of God." Sir H. Maxwell's book The Tweed vastly also be consulted for the light it throws on the savagery of the Scottish borders at this period.
- ↑ Cal. St. Paps., 1647—60, p. 204.
- ↑ Even in Derry there were a few Irish landowners in 1641: in 1622 we read of 1,824 Irish tenants, among them 300 gentlemen, on the lands of the Londoners. Sir John Davies himself, that pillar of the law, had no British tenants on his Armagh lands at the time of Pynnar's survey.
