landlords

landlords, the owners or leaseholders of property who rented some or all of this out to others. We may thus distinguish between landlords who were landowners, and who held a permanent fee simple interest in their land; those who held land on perpetuity leases or for terms of several hundred years, and whose property interests were, in effect, nearly as permanent (see land tenure); and middlemen. The term is, however, widely used as a synonym for the first group, and it is this usage which is adopted here.

Landlords have acquired a negative resonance in the popular historical imagination, reflecting the long‐standing emphasis, in nationalist writing, on their colonial origins and allegedly predatory attitudes. By 1703, the vast majority of Ireland's landowning landlords were of English or Scots origin, and had acquired their property during the plantations and subsequent land confiscations of the 16th and 17th centuries, at the expense of the existing Gaelic Irish and Old English landowners. These land transfers constituted a cultural as well as an economic revolution in landownership. Previously, land had provided the basis for complex social and familial ties which linked titular landowners and their dependants in ways frequently reinforced by their shared confessional and cultural identity. In contrast, the landlord class created by c.1700 was, for the most part, linked to its tenants by economic rather than social ties, and, in most parts of Ireland, separated from them by language (English), religion (Anglican or Episcopalian), ethnicity, and culture. Many but by no means all landlords were titled. By 1703, only 14 per cent of land remained in Catholic ownership, a figure reduced still further during the 18th century by the penal laws.

Despite these distinguishing characteristics, Ireland's landlords were neither homogeneous in wealth and attitude nor unchanging in number. As elsewhere in ancien régime Europe, they constituted a numerically insignificant elite who nevertheless derived enormous economic, social, and political authority from their virtual monopoly of landownership. Their numbers rose from an estimated 5,000 families in the 1780s, when they owned over 95 per cent of all productive land and could be accurately described as a Protestant or Anglo‐Irish ascendancy, to around 9,000–10,000 by the mid‐19th century. Their aggregate rent roll reflected the overall performance of the agricultural economy. Head rents rose from c. £5 million in the 1780s to c. £9 million in 1800, and more slowly to £12 million in the early 1840s. By 1870 they were around £10 million. Behind these figures lay extreme variations in the size and value of individual landlords' estates. The government returns of 1876 list 5,000 proprietors as owning between 100 and 1,000 acres; 3,400 as owning between 1,000 and 10,000; and 300 as owning over 10,000 acres.

Although individual proprietors such as Lord Farnham in Co. Cavan or John Foster in Co. Louth were active advocates of farm improvement, in general little landlord wealth was reinvested in agriculture; Ó Grádá suggests an average of 3 per cent by the mid‐19th century. More seems to have been spent on maintaining a social ‘seasons’, or on status‐enhancing projects such as the construction (or reconstruction) of country houses and their associated parklands, or on improving control of agrarian marketing by laying out estate towns and villages.

Irish landlords were also divided politically: between Whigs and Tories in the 18th century, and various shades of Conservative, Liberal, home rule and Unionist opinion in the 19th. They were at their most powerful during Grattan's parliament (1782–1801), when Anglican landlords saw themselves as the embodiment of (Protestant) Irish patriotism. By surrendering their political independence at the Act of Union, they consigned themselves thereafter to a progressively more marginalized role in the imperial British parliament. Here, the increasing challenge to the landlords' interests culminated in the passage of successive Land Acts between 1870 and 1909, which ultimately divested them of their land and the residual authority derived from it.

Bibliography

Ó Grádá, Cormac , ‘The Investment Behaviour of Irish Landlords 1830–75: Some Preliminary Findings’, Agricultural History Review, 23 (1975)
Vaughan, W. , Landlords and Tenants in Mid‐Victorian Ireland (1994)

Lindsay Proudfoot