but on the Statute of Absentees, he directed that the inhabitants were to be treated as intruders, and a plantation was to be made on the lines of that of Wexford.
It is noteworthy that, in this very same year, the King wrote ordering Letters Patent to be made out for their estates for all the landowners in Clare and Connaught, as had been intended by the late Queen at the time of Perrot's Composition of Connaught in 1585.[1] Three years later St. John prepared a scheme for a settlement. He estimated that there were 50,000 acres of arable and good pasture land in the county, besides lands of patentees and unprofitable land.[2] Incidentally we learn that many of the natives had built good stone houses and that they were "reasonably reclaimed by civil education." As a matter of fact in the Carew MSS. Vol. 625 we find an account of Longford which goes far to show that the distribution of land by gavelkind was not the uncertain and scrambling distribution which Davies in some of his pleadings represented it to be: but that what distribution there was was confined within the limits of the inheritance of one family. In Longford, as in Wexford, Fermanagh and Leitrim every acre had its owner, and each individual clansman knew what acreage he was entitled to. It is noteworthy that some of the
- ↑ Cal. St. Paps., July, 1615, p. 108.
- ↑ A survey given in Car. Cal., 1618, p. 381, states that there were 57,803 acres of arable and pasture and 8,387 of profitable wood in the county, besides 23,959 (profitable, unprofitable) either granted by patents, or abbey lands, 25,843 acres of bog, 12,459 acres of unprofitable wood and bog, 1,710 acres unprofitable mountain, and 195 acres glebe lands, in all 130,356 acres. The true area is 269,000 statute acres.
