Munster plantation

Munster plantation. Following a small private colony established at Kerrycurrihy near Cork in the late 1560s, opportunity arose for a major plantation after the second Desmond War, with the confiscation of rebel lands in a wide arc from Cork to Limerick. In a project directed from London, undertakers would receive seigniories up to 12,000 acres, remove the Irish, and bring in a set number of English settlers. Thirty‐five undertakers (soldiers and officials serving in Ireland and courtiers, merchants, and country gentlemen recruited from England) were granted 298,653 acres.

Inaccurate and incomplete land surveys led to a torrent of complaints after the inclusion of Desmond freeholders and those who had been promised pardons. There was large‐scale litigation which dragged on after special commissions in Munster in 1588 and 1592. By 1611 the locals had regained 70,000 acres.

Some undertakers were content to take rents from existing Irish tenantry; others invested brought in settlers, enclosed lands, and introduced new breeds of livestock. The plantation had a population of 3,030 by 1592 and the crown was receiving c. £1,900 in rent by 1594 When the Nine Years War broke out sporadic killings of settlers began; in October 1598 the scattered seigniories were overrun and reoccupied by former owners led by James FitzThomas FitzGerald. With the settler militia only a fifth of its paper strength of 1,575, the colonists fled to the safety of the towns and to England.

After 1601 the colony was re‐established and eventually prospered. Eleven seigniories changed hands between 1598 and 1611. Richard Boyle bought out Sir Walter Raleigh and went on to own six seigniories and portions of four others. Towns developed, notably Boyle's at Bandon‐bridge, and outside the formal plantation considerable settlement occurred along the coast. Youghal and Kinsale encouraged English settlers and Baltimore, with its flourishing pirate trade, was incorporated in 1612. In the early days the colonists asset‐stripped their lands of exhaustible supplies of timber and iron ore, but in the longer term success lay in the export of wool and cattle. By 1632 Youghal's custom returns from exports were second only to Dublin's. The plantation's population has been estimated at 14,000 in 1611 and 22,000 in 1641. A wealthy, influential, and Anglicizing Protestant minority had thus been established in Munster, but there was some intermarriage, with four of the original undertaker families, including Edmund Spenser's descendants, having become Catholic.

Bibliography

McCarthy‐Morrogh, Michael , The Munster Plantation (1986)

Hiram Morgan