absentees

absentees. Concern over the failure of Irish proprietors to reside in the country has a long history, somewhat misleading in its apparent continuity. In the medieval period, particularly in the 14th century, Irish parliaments denounced absentee proprietors for taking resources out of the lordship, neglecting their lands, and failing to play their part in defence. In 1360 a council at Kilkenny complained to Edward III that ‘five sixths of the land and more’ were in absentee hands. This was an exaggeration, but a pardonable one: the greatest absentee, Edward's son Lionel of Clarence, was by marriage earl of Ulster and lord of Connacht, and had further lands in Kilkenny and Munster. Between 1297 and 1380 a series of royal ordinances threatened absentees with sequestration of anything from a proportion of their revenues to the lands themselves if these were not defended. Such measures were patchily applied, for many absentees had influence at court. This produced added friction.

The ill repute of absentee landlords in later times has given these medieval criticisms resonance. They need careful handling. From 1171 some of those who acquired Irish lordships—such as the Marshals, Lacys, and Verdons—already had extensive lands in England and Wales, and even Normandy. Like all medieval magnates, they were peripatetic, and hence absent from most of their estates most of the time. This was taken for granted; possession of widespread centres of influence was a mark of status, and one of the ways in which regional societies were tied to the court. Many lesser proprietors, both lay and ecclesiastical, also held lands on both sides of the Irish Sea. Consciousness of absenteeism as a problem appeared later, in particular circumstances. From the 1240s English law, which in the absence of a male heir divided lands equally between heiresses, led to repeated partitions. The Marshal heiresses, for instance, carried diminishing fragments of Leinster to other English noble families, to whom they might be of limited significance. A clearer distinction emerged between lords who were normally resident and those who were usually absent; the former resented the latter and used them as scapegoats when explaining the condition of Ireland to the king. This happened at a time when frontiers were contracting, revenues declining, and defence costs rising. Absentee lordship became a problem as much for absentees as for their critics. Economic and political pressures in the later 14th century led many, including the Despensers who sold Kilkenny Castle to the Butlers, to liquidate their assets. The Mortimers, whose vast Irish lordships retained their interest, were the major exception.

The supposed ill effects of absentee landlordism reappeared as a major cause of concern in the 18th century. Absentee landlords, generally assumed to be resident in England, were pilloried as a parasitic class who neglected their estates and drained the country of capital. Estimates of the sums remitted annually in rents to absentees rose from £325,000 in 1729, when Thomas Prior's A List of the Absentees of Ireland, and the Yearly Value of their Estates and Incomes Spent Abroad first appeared, to Arthur Young's 1779 estimate of £730,000. Yet this latter figure was still less than 14 per cent of the total annual rental of over £5.3 million. Absenteeism was also a prominent part of the more radical assault on landlordism mounted in the mid‐ and late 19th century. Yet a return of 1872 showed that 46 per cent of estates had resident landlords, while the owners of another 25 per cent lived elsewhere in Ireland.

Absenteeism was in any case a complex phenomenon. Owners of more than one property had no choice but to be absentees somewhere, while others were called away by the demands of politics or office. Many landlords who were absentees from their main Irish estates remained either seasonally or permanently resident elsewhere in Ireland. Most important of all, absenteeism was not synonymous with bad estate management: levels of landlord investment depended on personal attitudes, not residence.

Bibliography

Frame, R. , English Lordship in Ireland 1318–1361 (1982)
Vaughan, W. E. , Landlords and Tenants in Mid‐Victorian Ireland (1994)

RFF/ and Robin Frame