History of Irish tenant farmers

FURET

I'm looking for a good social history of Irish tenant farmers, ca. 1500-1900. I want to learn how the majority of farmers were situated pre-plantation and post-plantation. Especially interested in the 18th century. Any tips / suggested bibliographies welcome.

laoch na mona

Ireland before the famine by Gearóid Ó Thuathaigh covers all aspects of 19th century Ireland, not sure for the pre plantation period, but a good bit of general advice is to look at the relevent books in the 'new history of Ireland series'. Hope this helps if I think of anything else I'll post it up for you ( I have a book in my mind but the title escapes me at the moment)

Missent

Have a look at 'A History of Irish Farming, 1750-1950' by Jonathan Bell and Mervyn Watson, published in 2008. It's more a dissertation on the technical aspects of farming rather than on landlords and tenants, but it might contain the odd item of interest.

Emme

Realities of Irish Life, by William Steuart Trench.

Trench's book gives a good account of Irish farmers of the 19th century but he carried out a form of ethnic cleansing of Irish tenant farmers on the ascendancy estates where he worked. He made many physical and structural improvements to ascendancy estates at the expense of tenants and tenant farmers.

Here is a link to a short piece on Trench from the Irish Emigrant:

"Tenants who married without his permission were evicted; even the exercise of ordinary hospitality by tenants was forbidden, ostensibly to prevent vagrancy. Fines were imposed for a variety of offences, including trespass, damage to woods and lack of punctuality in payment of rents."

My ancestors were evicted from the Digby estate in Offaly for selling a load of hay.

http://emigrant.scoilpac.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=36660&Itemid=296

tabbey

Arthur Young's Travels in Ireland, is an eye opener in relation to social history of Ireland in the 1770s. He was shocked at how the rich treated the poor, much harsher than in England. Young made his money by writing, but by profession was a farmer, so has an interest in agriculture.

laoch na mona

Improving Ireland by Toby Barnard is a good account of how Ascendancy landlords sought to change the physical nature of their Irish estates. That's the book I was thinking of, hope this helps

convert

There have been a few PhD theses in UCD library which look at specific estates. Also, David Dickson's Old World Colony is a great study of Cork, and TP Power has a similar, though shorter, book on Tipperary. I've done some work on C18th estates, so if you've any specific questions, let me know and I'll try to help.

Jellybaby1

May I ask a sort of related question please? Would I be right in thinking that before Plantation, Irish tenant farmers would have been farm owners? And if so, was the land obtained by tribal warfare, or in any case by purchase? Sorry for my ignorance, I'm just trying to understand life in Ireland before Plantation. Would the above book recommendations give me information on this part of history?

FURET

I'd assume they were subject to various earls and their vassals in the case of Old English-dominated areas, and subject to Gaelic lords and vassals in other areas. But I'd also be interested to see suggested bibliographies for this period.

Another question I have relates to how tenant farmers with 20+ acres around the time of the 1840s famine acquired holdings of this size in the first place. Would their ancestors in the 1600s and 1700s have started from a very low base as tenant farmers (with just ca. 5 acres) and gradually increased their farm size, or were such families just fortunate in the 1650s to have been allowed 20+ acres, which they then maintained right up to the years after the Famine, when their holdings typically increased two or three-fold due to depopulation?

I have in mind farming families a bit like my own in Tipperary. Some Catholic farming families are associated in a long-standing way with particular townlands for centuries. My family have been present in a particular townland since at least the 1720s, holding 20 acres in 1851, which then increased to 100 by 1920. Other families in the locality are even longer established - from the mid 1600s. How or why did the Ascendancy allow some Catholic families to a) acquire relatively large tenancies and b) why were some families able to acquire so much more than other families and persist in this holding throughout Penal times?

laoch na mona

Jellybaby1 wrote: »

May I ask a sort of related question please? Would I be right in thinking that before Plantation, Irish tenant farmers would have been farm owners? And if so, was the land obtained by tribal warfare, or in any case by purchase? Sorry for my ignorance, I'm just trying to understand life in Ireland before Plantation. Would the above book recommendations give me information on this part of history?

not in the way we understand ownership, they would have been on land that belonged to the clan, with the chieftain and his family being in control and others being similar enough to serfs.

in the period immediately prior to the plantations the clan system had broken down somewhat due to previous invasion and population growth. By this time the system resembled most other feudal systems with lords, vassals and serfs.

the system of extend families holding land was seen in the rundale system which existed after the plantation(up to the 19th century), in this system extended kin groups rented land and grazed it in common

I'm not an expert on this by any means but I hope this helps

Jellybaby1

So are we saying that the poorest of the farming population were always tenant farmers? Tenants on land held (but not necessarily 'owned' in our sense) by Gaelic lords in the first place. Then the Gaelic lords were ousted by Scots/English lords, and so the poor tenant farmers would continue to remain tenant farmers. They had always been and would continue to be reliant on the lords to keep them in work and fed. This is very interesting.

Peregrinus

Jellybaby1 wrote: »

So are we saying that the poorest of the farming population were always tenant farmers? Tenants on land held (but not necessarily 'owned' in our sense) by Gaelic lords in the first place. Then the Gaelic lords were ousted by Scots/English lords, and so the poor tenant farmers would continue to remain tenant farmers. They had always been and would continue to be reliant on the lords to keep them in work and fed. This is very interesting.

No, they weren't tenants. They didn't pay rent, and they couldn't be evicted.

Basically, land belonged to the clan, not the chieftain. It was administered by the clan chieftain - but not at a whim; there were well-established rules and principles that he needed to apply. Once a (male) member of the clan reached adulthood and married, it was accepted that he had rights to farm the clan land along with other clan members. Typically, he'd have rights to cultivate certain plots (separated from one another to ensure that everyone got mix of better and worse land) and also a right to graze a certain number of beasts (cattle, sheep, goats) on common land.

A common pattern was that a group of families lived in dwellings built closely together, with each family responsible for constructing its own dwelling. This settlement was surrounded by common grazing. Further out was a "doughnut" of land divided into individually-farmed strips. In some cases the cultivated land was the hole in the doughnut, and the common grazing the doughnut, but this made supervising the beasts more difficult.

As more men reached adulthood and married, cultivation strips and grazing space had to be found for them, and it was accepted that other families might have to lose some land or grazing rights to make space for this, but this had to be done fairly - the more closely you were related to the new entrant, the greater the onus on you to share the burden of accommodating him. When people died, their rights were generally inherited by their children, but if they had few or no children, or their children were already well-provided with land and grazing, some or all of the rights might become available for redistribution.

The system was flexible, but much depended on the good sense and moral authority of the chieftain.

FURET

How is "clan" defined? How does this system consider the practicalities of scores or even hundreds of different families living within a single parish? I don't see how the cohesion and order you describe could be sustained for very long as families expand exponentially in number over the course of two-three generations.

Peregrinus

FURET wrote: »

How is "clan" defined? How does this system consider the practicalities of scores or even hundreds of different families living within a single parish? I don't see how the cohesion and order you describe could be sustained for very long as families expand exponentially in number over the course of two-three generations.

There's a finite quantity of land in any country,and if the population grows then pressure on the available land is increased. This is true no matter what particular system of land tenure/occupation/use is in operation.

But the key point is that this pressure is experienced if the population grows. Have a look at the chart on this page. As you can see the (estimated) population of Ireland grew very slowly until the seventeenth century. So your assumption that "families grew exponentially in number over the course of two or three generations" is not born out.

To answer your specific questions, clan membership is inherited; you were a member of your father's clan. This doesn't change. A woman who married remained a member of her father's clan. If she married a man of a different clan, she would normally leave her own clan territory and go and live in his, but this didn't affect land occupation or use since, as a woman, she would have had no land allotted to her anyway.

The population was much less mobile then than now. It's likely that all the people settled in any clan territory were members of the clan, or the dependents of members. Thus, basically everyone in the settled community had a claim to occupy and use the clan lands.

It could happen that you'd miss out. Say, because of some scandal or offence, you have to leave your clan territory - they don't want you, or you don't want to stay. You have no right to land in any other clan territory. So your options are (a) become a day labourer working for a (relatively) large landholder in some other territory, or (b) become an itinerant tradesman/craftsman/whatever, and make a living that way. There were also other options for people at the higher end of the social scale - they could become bards, or enter the church, or enter the "court" of some relatively power figure to serve in a clerical or administrative capacity. And from the time of the Viking settlements onwards there were towns where landless people could settle, and try and earn a living and build up a position for themselves.

If the number of people with claim or a potential claim to farm the clan lands was growing, there was increased pressure and encouragement to adopt an alternative career path like this. Plus, of course, as more and more people had to share the available land, the expected returns from farming the smaller and smaller rights allotted to you would fall, making other careers relatively more attractive. So to some extent this was basically a self-regulating system.

But only to some extent. When it was replaced by English-style feudal tenancy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one Gaelic feature which was carried over was the expectation that every (male) family member, and not just the eldest, had rights and expectations in the land (but now in the land occupied by the immediate family, not in the entire community's land). The result, as we know, was increasingly subdivided and unviable tenancies, increasing poverty, and eventual catastrophe under the pressure of the Famine. Had the Gaelic system of land tenure remained in place, its greater flexibility might have meant this could be managed slightly better, but given the scale of population growth I still think disaster would not have been avoided.

laoch na mona

while they didn't pay rent would there have been payments in kind such as labour, men at arms, a percentage of crops ect?

convert

laoch na mona wrote: »

while they didn't pay rent would there have been payments in kind such as labour, men at arms, a percentage of crops ect?

There are quite a few leases I've come across between smaller tenants and their landlords where, in addition to paying a specified amount of rent in cash, the stipulation that tenants should provide X number of days work of man or man and horse were quite common, as was paying in kind, such as a specified number of chickens/pig/bushel of corn, etc.

Peregrinus

laoch na mona wrote: »

while they didn't pay rent would there have been payments in kind such as labour, men at arms, a percentage of crops ect?

Under the Gaelic system? I don't know. But, even if there were such obligations, they wouldn't necessarily have been seen as a quid pro quo for land occupation; rather, both were incidents of membership of the clan.

The key difference, I think, is that our concept of tenancy crucially involves A, and landlord, who owns the land, and who grants B the right to occupy and utilise the land if return for payments, usually in cash but sometimes in kind. But under the Gaelic system the cheiftain didn't own the land; it was communally owned. And he didn't grant rights to clan members to occupy and utilise the land; they had those rights by virtue of clan membership, which was an inherited status, not a granted one. The chieftain's job was to administer those rights,and to reconcile the competing claims arising out rights of different clan members. He had a lot of authority in this field, but it wasn't an authority arising out of ownership of the land.

This is one of the reasons why the "surrender and regrant" programme of Henry VIII was relatively successful. By surrendering clan lands and having them regranted under English feudal rules, clan cheiftains substantially enhanced their own rights, at the expense of the rights of individual clan members.

pedroeibar1

Emme wrote: »

Realities of Irish Life, by William Steuart Trench.

Trench's book gives a good account of Irish farmers of the 19th century but he carried out a form of ethnic cleansing of Irish tenant farmers on the ascendancy estates where he worked. He made many physical and structural improvements to ascendancy estates at the expense of tenants and tenant farmers.

Here is a link to a short piece on Trench from the Irish Emigrant:

"Tenants who married without his permission were evicted; even the exercise of ordinary hospitality by tenants was forbidden, ostensibly to prevent vagrancy. Fines were imposed for a variety of offences, including trespass, damage to woods and lack of punctuality in payment of rents."

My ancestors were evicted from the Digby estate in Offaly for selling a load of hay.

http://emigrant.scoilpac.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=36660&Itemid=296

That is a highly inaccurate post. I also disagree with some of the other comments above.

For starters, the named period 1500 to 1900 is much too wide for generalisations to be made. Between the 1550’s and the 1650’s there were four distinct Plantations in Ireland. Laois/Offaly in 1556 by Mary I; Munster in 1586 by Elizabeth I; Ulster 1609 by James I; Ireland 1652 by Oliver Cromwell. There also was “Surrender & Regrant” which happened 1540- 1600 that transferred ownership of the land from the collectivity of ‘tribal ownership’ to individual local lords who could – and did- then pass it on through inheritance to their sons.

As a rule of thumb very few Irish people owned land prior to the 1550’s - they were like occupiers at will of the local lord/family head; following the Brehon tradition they paid in kind, usually a percentage of crops, animal births, etc. A charge of about 25% was common, so one calf in four born was paid as “rent”. Also stock could be given at the outset as a sort of seed capital. On the death of an occupier the land reverted to the ‘lord’ who then re-granted it, usually to the same family. Very little land was held privately – under Brehon law some professionals (lawyers/poets/doctors) did have a right to private ownership. After the various Plantations life went on for the average farmer. While the Plantations were damaging to all and harmful to landowners, not one actually achieved its designed purpose as the Planters could not attract English workers (who in England wanted to come to live among ‘savages’ in war-torn Ireland?) and the new occupiers had to use/employ the local native Irish, so the average tenant farmer simply had a change of landlord/boss. In the Cromwellian transplantation that is the reason why it was mainly the ‘big name’ people who went to Connaught, accompanied by a few of their retainers but leaving most of the ‘tenant labourers’ behind.

In the decades after the Cromwellian settlement it was usual to grant a head-lease for +/- 100 years, usually to the dispossessed former owners – e.g. in S. Kerry Sir William Petty of Down Survey fame granted long leases of much of his Kerry estate to a branch of the O’Sullivan Beare and to the O’Connells (which is how the Catholic Daniel O’Connell family had a large estate). They were middlemen and sublet to smaller locals, collected the rents, etc.

This head-lease method of estate management had a doubly negative effect on the landlord – it did not permit regular rent increases to take account of inflation but more importantly it transferred considerable local power to these head- tenants. By the 1760’s a reversal of this policy began on the more progressive estates and there was a switch to direct dealing with the smaller tenant farmers. On the larger estates, whether the landlord was present or an absentee, the day-to-day management devolved onto an agent. The bigger the estate, the greater the extent of work and the more important the prestige and power of the agent. Initially they were local lawyers, bankers, etc., but by the early 1800’s they were professionals, frequently younger sons of Anglo-Irish families. The role of the local agent was an important one – he knew the tenants, knew who was progressive or lazy and was better positioned to judge when to ‘go easy’ in years when there were diseases, epidemics or crop failures.

Usually for farm units of about 10 acres a lease was granted for a life or lives, the life often being that of an important person (they had easier lives and better care, so lived longer). Three lives usually was the max. and on some estates the average was 21 years. Some but not all leases contained a ‘no subdivision’ clause; often there was no written lease, but a tacit understanding of renewal with the landlord, not all of whom were “bad”. Regularly the same family existed on the same land for many generations, eventually buying it out c1900 under the Land Acts.

By early 1800’s what we today would call “progressive farmers” often owned just a few acres but leased many more for cash. Some of the smaller renters paid with a mixture of cash and labour. The big ‘game changer’ for these - the cottier class was the Famine. They were landless labourers who year to year managed to rent an acre or two for an 11 month period, sometimes having to go into partnership with another and survived at subsistence level. The Famine was the trigger that forced agents such as Trench to take dramatic action.

I’m not saying Trench was an angel, but the earlier post about him is factually wrong. Trench did not deny permission to marry, what he did was insist that any son who married could not continue to live on (subdivide) the family holding. Subdivision was a huge problem on almost all big estates, particularly so on the one managed by Trench where the previous agent had turned a blind eye to that practice. Often, three generations (sometimes as many as 30 people) of a family were living in hovels on less than a 10 acre patch, all of them dependent for survival on the potato. At harvest time the menfolk went working as labourers, saving crops for others, the wives and children went begging. They then saved their own potato harvest and eked an existence through the hungry months. That was not sustainable and explains why so many Lansdowne tenants begged for the free passage to America. It is a nonsense to state that tenants were “ethnically cleansed” by Trench. When the scheme started after the Famine there was a near-riot as the tenants were afraid that the cash allowed for the programme would run out before they got their tickets. Furthermore, records show the frequent intercession of the local PP on behalf of parishioners. In round figures the entire rent roll for Lansdowne’s estate was 10k and the cost of maintaining the destitute on indoor & outdoor relief was £15k. The population could not be supported locally. Tyler Anbinder’s book on the Five Points gives good detail on their subsequent (generally very successful) lives – he based his research on the deposit accounts held by them in the ‘Emigrant Savings Bank’ in New York.

With regard to the comment on Trench imposing a fine for cutting timber, the Lansdowne estate was deforested in the 17th and early 18th centuries and in the late 1700’s tree-planting was a priority set by Lansdowne for his then agent. A nursery was established in Kenmare; the tenants who planted trees were paid and those who protected them were favoured. The house of that nursery is still there, known locally as “The Shrubberies”.

Rent a house today and chop down a tree in the front garden, what do you think your landlord would do? For years banks, building societies and suppliers have been allowed to charge interest on late payment – what was different with a landlord doing that on arrears?

Read Trench’s book (Chapter “Exodus” is good), instead of depending on a biased, inaccurate report from the American website linked. Read Gerard Lyne’s book on “the Lansdowne estate under WS Trench”. Samuel Hussey’s ‘Memoirs of a Land Agent’ are more anecdotal on the life/activities of an Agent in Kerry but remain interesting. Terence Dooley’s books are good, as are those by Ciaran O’Reilly on the role of the agent and ‘big house’ estates. Trench’s book is here
https://archive.org/stream/realitiesofirish00trenrich#page/n15/mode/2up

FURET

Fascinating post above. Do any records survive for estates describing who the tenants would have been, along with any details of their holdings? I am particularly interested in estates in the parish of Knockgraffon in County Tipperary, the estate in question being nominally owned by O'Meaghers.

convert

FURET wrote: »

Fascinating post above. Do any records survive for estates describing who the tenants would have been, along with any details of their holdings? I am particularly interested in estates in the parish of Knockgraffon in County Tipperary, the estate in question being nominally owned by O'Meaghers.

Estate papers, such as the collections in the NLI, would contain a number of documents which would have that information. These items would include leases, which include the tenant's name and often their occupation, their address, the holding/property they're leasing, and the conditions of the lease. Some leases will also have a small map attached, so you can see the exact location of the property. Lease lists and letters regarding tenants can also be useful in this regard. If you know what estate(s) the area(s) belonged to, you can have a look at the collection lists in the NLI and see if the estate papers are there.

riffmongous

pedroeibar1 wrote: »

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No apology for jonniebgood since you blamed him wrecking the forum and refused to post here again until he was removed?