Charlie, The technically correct answer to your question as to when Catholics could (again) own land is that some of the strictures that had been in place during the Penal Laws were removed during the last quarter of the 18th century and that all legal constraints disapeared finally in 1829 when Catholic Emancipation legislation was enacted by the Westminster Parliament. However, it was not quite as simple as that. It had been the settled policy of the English/British government to create and maintain a landowning class in Ireland that owed its position to the monarchy and that would therefore be loyal to the interests of the latter, since to do otherwise would severely undermine the security of holders of royal land grants who were tempted to stray from the dictates of government policy. This approach went back to the original conquest of Ireland (1170) and had never worked very reliably, but the English kept trying--for centuries for want of a better idea. In the beginning the strategy was on borrowed time because the conquerors were relatively young unattached males who proceeded to take Irish wives. In a generation or two, their descendents were often indistinguishable from the native Irish and did not, in fact, even speak English in any meaningful sense. (The 14th century Statutes of Kilkenny, which forbade Irish dress, language, and other cultural practices by the "Old Engli! sh" in Ireland were an abortive effort to deal with this problem.) However, in the Middle Ages, there was no religious division between landlord and tenants: they were all Catholic and, only to a diminishing extent, of dissimilar ethnic background. The former was to change radically with the Reformation, although not altogether for sectarian reasons. The problem of the Reformation era was that, with the unification of powerful, competing nation states, difficult-to-govern, discontented Ireland became a potential launching platform for an invasion of the Mother Country itself, as anyone who could read a map could easily discern. Nor should worry about this possibility be seen as a figment of an overwrought Tudor imagination: both the French and the Spanish seriously considered military excursions in Ireland, and periodically tried to mount them. The king and the Westminister Parliament also had to acknowledge that the "Old English," who were descended from the Anglo-Norman invaders of the original conquest, could no longer be relied up to defend Ireland against foreign invasion by the two most likely contenders: France and Spain, both of which were Catholic powers. (The "Old English" were uniformly Catholic and saw no reason whatever why they should change their religion; since they furnished the armed force of the Bri! tish Cr own in Ireland, there was no enforceable way to make them do so.) This situation rocked along reasonably calmly until the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth I, who seems to have had no very decided theological preferences herself, but who had to contend with the fact that the Catholic world held her to be illegimate and thus not entitled to wear the crown at all. (She was born to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn while his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was still living.) Therefore, Elizabeth had no real choice but to accede to the pressure of the Protestant faction at home and in Ireland and to agree to a number of anti-Catholic measures. Things were not helped much in 1585, when the Pope formally excommunicated her. This was not purely a spiritual sanction. It absolved the queen's Catholic subjects (who were still very numerous at that time) from their allegiance to her as their anointed ruler and served as an invitation to Catholic powers to attempt to overthrow her. (Both of the more probable ones--see above--would have been happy to try to do just that and put their own favored candidates on the English throne. France, however, was deep into its own religious wars and could scarcely have done so. Spain, on the other hand, was actively fighting England by proxy in the Low Countries and on the high seas directly; within three years, it was to launch the Spanish Armada against England.) Order and control in Ireland was absolutely imperative from the English point of view. But how to achieve it with the stubbornly Catholic (and, it was suspect, potentially disloyal) Old English still in charge? The answer was the "planting" of Protestant population in Ireland. However, Ireland was very much an agricultural country, and the arable land there already belonged to someone. Even with Reformation defections, over 75% of Irish land was still in Catholic hands at the time of the Elizabethan Settlement. Land therefore had to be confiscated from its Catholic owners to provide incentive grants to Protestant colonists to settle in a country that presumably offered opportunity to those without other good options in the Mother Country, but that was backward compared with the life of the gentry in Great Britain. Principal Elizabethan plantations were Offaly (King's County), Laois (Queen's County), and south coastal areas; Catholic land ownership declined overnight to! less t han 50%. At the beginning of the reign of James I--who actually had a Catholic wife and who married his successor off to a French Catholic princess, proving that private religion and public policy are not always congruent--Elizabethan land policy in Ireland was extended to Ulster with the plantation of Derry, Donegal, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Armagh, Monaghan, and Cavan. Fast-forward to the mid-seventeenth century (the time of Cromwell). Cromwell seems to have been a very slightly less rabid sectarian than many of his Puritan followers, but he had a problem that could easily be solved by an even more ambitious round of Irish land confiscations and plantations. Charles I, whom he had overthrown and executed, had had overwhelming difficulty getting money out of Parliament to defend his realm, and Cromwell was in danger of the same problem, since the pay for his armies was in arrears. The loyalty of unpaid armies is certainly questionable, and they can always turn their weapons on their erstwhile employers. The solution: expulsion of the native Irish to inland areas west of Shannon, specifically to Counties Mayo, Galway, and Clare, although other western counties had to absorb many refugees as well. By this time, only about 20% of Irish lands remained in Catholic hands. The final mass confiscation occurred in the 1690's after the Battles of the Boyne and Aughrim and the siege of Limerick. The Catholic soldiers on the losing side were allowed to leave the country and were, in fact, given free transportation by the Royal Navy. Most became mercenaries in continental armies. Theoretically their lands should have been protected by the Treaty of Limerrick, but once they--the Irish leadership--were out of the country, the government of William III moved quickly to consolidate their hold, and they hoped, to bring law and order to Ireland. Confiscations took place on a massive scale, leaving only about 7% of Irish land in Catholic hands. Restrictions on Catholic ownership, inheritance, and leasing of land were then solidified into law by the passage by the Dublin Parliament of the Penal Laws in 1703. The Penal Laws governing the ownership of land by Catholics remained in force until the Catholic Relief Acts of the late eighteenth century. During the Penal-Law period, one of the few ways that Catholics could hold onto their land was to convert to Protestantism, which not a few did through conversions of "convenience." I saw what appeared to incontrovertible evidence of this strategy when I was extracting information from parish records for Longford town. Right after the Catholic Relief Acts, there were very long lists of adult baptisms with the notation that these were persons who had foresworn the Protestant religion and accepted Catholicism--either the results of a remarkably effective piece of missionary work or, more likely, a return to the Catholic fold of persons who had conformed outwardly for the sake of holding onto their possessions, but who had been crypto-Catholics all along. After the Relief Acts and Catholic Emancipation, the problem for Catholics who wanted to own land was no longer legal, but economic. The rural population was dependent on agriculture, but the descendents of the "planters" held all of the arable land. Even tenants who had leases of reasonable size (a small minority) had little chance of saving enough to buy land even if any had been for sale. Rents were not infrequently equal to the entire value of the land of the lease each year, and any improvements made by the tenants to the property raised the land value and hence the rents assessed. In addition, until the late 1830's, Catholics were required to pay a Tithe to support the (Protestant) Church of Ireland. Between 1815 (the end of the Napoleonic Wars) and the onset of the Famine, there were regional crop failures on an average of every two years; more widespread agricultural distress occurred about every five years within this time frame, leading to chronic arrears, esp! ecially for tenants on marginal lands. It was a hand to mouth kind of life. The Famine made landownership fade even more into the background. It's true that leases became somewhat easier to get because of the precipitous decline of the population, but most landlords had had to mortgage their estates to the hilt and were bent on increasing their profits to stay financially affloat. Higher rents were an obvious way of doing this. (Their efforts in this regard ran into heavy weather immediately because of increased competition from such mega-producers of agricultural commodities as Canada, the US, Argentina, and Australia, but that is another story.) Tenants still couldn't save any money under these circumstances, and crop failures of one kind or another continued to plague Irish agriculture, driving tenants ever more deeply into debt. Consequently, more and more tenants were farther and farther in arrears and subject to eviction. This situation largely fueled the flood of emigration from the 1850's onward. By the 1880's, agrarian distress was coming to a head. In Longford, this was the period of the so-called Land War in Drumlish, which followed three years of partial crop failures and a spate of evictions. However, the suffrage had by then been broadened to include all adult males, and the tenantry had greater access to the political process to seek redress of injustices. (If they still didn't know how to do this, the newly organized Land League was happy to instruct them.) As a result, two key pieces of legislation were enacted by the British Parliament: the Arrears Act (which protected those who had fallen behind from summary eviction) and the Ashbourne Act (which set up a system whereby tenants could buy the land they worked using publicly financed, long-term, low-interest loans). By then their heavily indebted landlords simply wanted out, so they were not disposed to fight the legislation. So, as you can see, from the mid 1880's on, Catholics who wanted land and who were already working the land finally had a reasonable means to acquire it. However, most of the ancestors of the Irish Diaspora around the world had already left Ireland by that time. Nancy Gray -------------- Original message from "king133@juno.com" <king133@juno.com>: -------------- > Hi Mike, > Thanks for the input. I keep forgetting that land ownership was a problem for > Catholics. > > Question: About what time period could Catholics own land in Longford? > > Thanks, > Charlie King > > > Mike wrote: > If you are researching Catholics, there is a great probability of movement, > as they were not > allowed to own property at the time, so you were at the mercy of a English > landlord and to the > ability to pay the rent.. In addition townlands are relatively small units, > so the bigger the family > the more likely the children, at the least, moved on. (some are not much > bigger in land area than a > suburban development of today, but dependent on farming not industrial work, > so there is > a limit on the amount of people it would support) > > Mike > > _____________________________________________________________ > Compete with the big boys. Click here to find products to benefit your > business. > http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2111/fc/Ioyw6iifXQ84y4ECNDv0TJt0lpETniwb21Dc > abRWdwhZrSyOmBmQeo/ > > > > ********************************** > Griffith's Valuations: > http://www.failteromhat.com/griffiths.php/ > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > IRL-LONGFORD-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes > in the subject and the body of the message

Dear Nancy, You did an excellent job detailing the various events in Ireland which explained land ownership. It was the Normans who became more Irish than the Irish. It is interesting to note that the Statutes of Kilkenny which forbid the Old English (Normans) from speaking Irish was written in French, the language of King Henry II. To continue past the time you detailed - Michael Davitt was instrumental in the agragarian reform with the established of the Land League in1879. County Longford and the other 25 counties of the Republic of Ireland (Republic of Ireland established in 1949) differed from the Six Counties of Northern Ireland after the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922 when the Six Counties were partitioned off under British control. As you pointed out financial means was necessary to own the land, unfortunately in 1922 after the separation of six counties of the Province of Ulster nothing changed regarding land ownership. The control was still in the hands of those who had planted the area from the 1600s. Some may not be aware that "one man one vote" did not exist in Northern Ireland until the Civil Rights Association was formed in 1967 and demanded reform. This was the time of Bernadette Devlin and the beginnning of the Troubles in the north. After many civil rights marches and much violence, Prime Minister Harold Wilson finally instructed Stormount to change the law to "one man one vote " in August 1969. Until August 1969 the government and land were in the hands of those who owned the most property. Until August 1969 depending on how much property you owned depended on how many votes you were able to cast in elections. Sometimes when we aren't able to find our relatives in the church records if you are searching Catholic records you might want to check the COI records because as Nancy stated some converted to the COI to maintain their land. The Irish Manuscripts Commission published THE CONVERT ROLLS edited by Eileen O'Byrne with Additional Material Edited by Anne Chamney.The book includes the Calendar of the Convert Rolls, 1703-1838 with Fr. Wallace Clare's Annotated List of Converts, 1703-78. It appears that those who converted were people mostly from Counties Dublin and Galway. There is no index of place names and the book is in alphabetical order by surname. I found one COUNTY LONGFORD person. #881 MULCHERAN, GERTRUDE, of Longford, Diocese of Ardagh Converted December 22, 1765 Wife of THOMAS COFFEY (q.v. - quod vide) Beannachtai, Margaret (Máiread)