freeholders, and as freeholders they have been empanelled on juries since the King's time.[1]
The number of freeholders who had made a surrender of their lands was 440, but the inhabitants declared that the true number was 667. Fourteen of them had patents from the Crown. Of the claimants only fifty-seven had got any lands, and no one had got any who failed to make out a title to 100 acres, or in some rare cases 60 acres. The vast majority of the former owners were thus deprived of their lands. The total population left in the condition of mere tenants at will is said to amount to 14,500. It is not very clear whether this number includes the dispossessed owners and their families. If it does, allowing five persons to a family, we find that the landowning class in Wexford numbered a little over 3000 persons, out of a total population of about 15,000.[2] This is interesting as being almost the only information we have as to the proportion among the Irish of the free landowning classes to the semi-servile dependent population who had no claims to land.
- ↑ This report is very inaccurately summarised in Cal. St. Paps. It is printed from Harris' Desiderata Curiosa Hibernica in Miss Hickson's Ireland in the Seventeenth Century. It says that 35,210 acres had been allotted to fifty-seven of the former inhabitants. Of this about 10,000 to Sir R. Masterson.Of the fifty-seven named, eight are said to be old patentees (one being a certain Richard Cromwell). Two other patentees are mentioned as having got no allowance under the scheme for the lands surrendered by them. The fifty-seven names include Sir Richard Masterson and about twenty-two "old English."
- ↑ If they are not included the total population would have been, roughly, about 18,000.
