deduction of a fourth, saw his acreage reduced below 100 acres was liable to lose all: no one got less than 60 acres.
The dispossessed landowners were to obtain leases from the Undertakers, or from their more fortunate kinsmen. But none of the natives were to sell to any of the old Irish, or to give leases to them for more than forty years or three lives; provisions clearly against James' policy of making no distinction between the two races in his early days.
In the end 142 of the natives received estates. But amongst them we find about thirty names of old English extraction, men like the Earl of Westmeath who received the largest grant, the Earl of Kildare and several Nugents and Fitzgeralds.
Finally "it fell out so that divers of the poor natives or former freeholders of that county, after the loss of all their possessions or inheritance there, some ran mad, and others died instantly for very grief, as one James Mac William O'Farrell of Clangrad, and Donagh Mac Gerrot O'Farrell of Cuillagh, and others whose names for brevity I leave out, who on their death-beds were in such a taking that they by earnest persuasions caused some of their family and friends to bring them out of their said beds to have abroad the last sight of the hills and fields they lost in the same plantations, every one of them dying instantly after.[1]
At the same time as the plantation of Longford a similar project had been set on foot for the territory of Ely O'Carroll, and for Leitrim, and
- ↑ Memorial from the inhabitants of Longford. Hickson: Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, p. 283, Vol. II.
