DES KEENAN'S BOOKS ON IRISH HISTORY online version |
Pre-Famine Ireland LINKS TO INDIVIDUAL CHAPTERS CLICK PRE-FAMINE TO RETURN TO BOOK LIST; CLICK HOME PAGE TO RETURN TO HOME PAGE Pre-Famine
The Primary Sector IISummary of chapter. Other aspects of the Irish economy are described. Of the greatest importance was the recurrence of famines which had largely died out in the rest of Europe. Another was the tenure of land which had its origins in the Middle Ages. Despite the issue made by Catholic nationalist agitators, the tenure of property in Ireland was no different from that in Britain or the United States. Drainage and land reclamation was very important in a boggy country like Ireland.
(v) The Study and Improvement of Agriculture
(vi) Bogs and Land Reclamation
(vii) Crop Failures and Scarcities ***************************************************************************** It
was calculated in 1790 that an income of £30 a year could be obtained from 11½
Irish acres from mixed farming, i.e. £2 12/6 an acre. This calculation was
probably optimistic. A cow in 1820 needed two Irish acres or two and a half
statute acres of grass per year. It gave a profit of £8 a year from a yield of
two gallons a day and a price of 8 pence a gallon. A lactation of 480 gallons
is implied, this being the total quantity of milk given between calvings (IFJ 28 April 1820.) This would work out
at £3 4/- an acre. Being a 'Forty Shilling Freeholder' did not imply a lease on
a large number of acres. Some
figures were given in 1820 that indicated that the best return came from sheep.
One claimed a gross return of £7 16/- an acre from wool, and another claimed
that Lord Lismore got a return of £10 an acre gross from a merino cross (IFJ 17,24 June 1820). Wool brought about £1 a stone but
even at the intensive stocking of 11 sheep to the acre claimed a fleece of
nearly a stone weight per sheep is indicated. The price of wool varied from
19/- to 26/- a stone, and the normal stocking rate was 6 sheep to the acre.
Again the figures claimed seem optimistic.
In
1839 in These
were typical incomes of tenant farmers holding directly from the landowner or
at least from the head tenant. Where subletting went unchecked the amount paid
in rent rose sharply with each letting until the traditional half-and-half
shares of metayage was surpassed. A rent was accounted a rackrent when two
thirds of the annual gross return was paid. The
cost of maintaining a family was estimated at £10 a year. At the beginning of the century it was
estimated that on average a farm labourer was employed for 200 days each year
at 5d a day in winter and 6d in summer totalling £4 12/-. He had besides a
potato patch. Those farm servants in more secure employment like grooms,
gardeners, coachmen, etc. could get from £15 to £20 a year. Towards mid-century
the wages of a farm labourer or ploughman in full employment were put at £15 a
year. Public
attention was focussed on those who were not fortunate enough to get or inherit
good leases. Where subdivision or squatting went unchecked the holding became
tiny. So long as the potato could be relied on it was at least secure. The
tragedy came when the potato could no longer be relied on. Those without any
land at all, and their numbers seem to have been large, who survived by casual
labour or by begging, were in the worst state of all. How they survived was a mystery
to concerned observers.[Top] In
the eighteenth century there was dismay at the huge amount of fish imported and
every effort was made to develop the fisheries. The deep-sea fishery offered
great scope for development. The Government had the Nymph Bank off the coast of
Around
1800, Lord Cornwallis, the Lord Lieutenant, had the Nymph Bank re-surveyed, and
a Scotsman established a company in The
off-shore boats were between twenty and fifty tons. Trawlers had to have a
deeper keel to enable them to keep to windward when trawling, and so weighed
about seventy tons, costing about £600. Hookers were really cargo boats,
clipper-built and cutter-rigged but could be used for line-fishing. On the The
most popular rig was the cutter rig. A cutter had a single mast with a large
mainsail on a gaff, and at least two triangular foresails. Cutters were used by
the Revenue service because of their speed and their ability to sail close to
the wind. Fishermen who had to tack frequently off the rocky western coasts
appreciated this latter ability. The older lugger rig persisted in places.
Luggers had four-cornered sails set on yards. Smugglers favoured the rig for
the sail could be rapidly lowered making the boat invisible if there was a mist
on the surface. The wherry rig consisted of lower sails, topsails and a jack. There
were no peculiarities about Irish nets. The inshoremen often used a seine in a
manner unchanged from the time of St Peter. The fishermen rowed a U-shaped
course out from the shore and in again paying out the net as they went. The
ends of the net were then grasped and the net hauled in a purse shape. The
trawl or beam-trawl net was shaped like a long narrow purse, with the mouth
held open with a beam. It was dragged along the sea-bed scooping up everything
in its course. Acts of the Irish Parliament forbade its
used in inshore waters. Drift nets and stake nets were suspended vertically in
the water, the latter in shallower waters, and caught the fish which swam into
them by the gills. In very deep waters lines with multiple hooks were used. (SNL 7 March 1848) Inshore
and inland waters were intensively fished, and there was not a square yard of
such waters which was not claimed but some person or group as their private
reserve. Rivers and estuaries were clogged with nets and traps of all kinds. The
boats used by the inshore men were about twenty feet long, without decks,
modelled on a Norwegian pattern or on whaleboats. On the western coast the
building of the 'currachs' of timber or wickerwork frame construction without
keel or deck continued. Among other things their shallow draught made them
suitable for smuggling. The fishing industry, though it employed
thousands, was only geared to local needs, and fishermen were often part-time
farmers. They would fish at night, sell their catch to cadgers (pedlars) on the
shore, and retire to the local pub for the day. Usually no attempt was made to
salt the fish or otherwise preserve them. The cadgers sold what they could
locally, and then with the fish in panniers on their ponies' backs, they set
off straight inland by the cadgers' paths often reaching inland for surprising
distances before the fish went bad. When they did not
arrive those who could afford fish for Fridays had to buy Scottish salted
herrings. When
the Marquis of Stafford was developing his Sutherland estates he regarded
harvesting the sea as important as putting a good breed of sheep on the
mountains. He built piers and fishing villages, and brought in skilled
fishermen and fish curers to instruct his tenants. In 1819 the Irish Government
followed his example and encouraged the county gentlemen along the coasts to
improve the local fisheries. A Fisheries Board was set up empowered to grant
bounties for catches for several years. The price thus guaranteed would enable
the fishermen to repay money borrowed to buy equipment. The numbers claiming to
be fishermen shot up rapidly to an estimated total of 63,421 with 253,704
dependants, and a further 300,000 engaged in ancillary industries like boat and
sail making, coopering, and fish curing. When the bounty was discontinued
eleven years later many drifted out of fishing. Nationalists argued that these
bounties showed what a native government could do. It was argued on rather
better grounds that the bounties were paid for too short a period to allow the
discharge of debts on major items like boats, and that in The numbers of
those engaged in fishing could only be estimated roughly. One estimate in 1798
put the figure at 60,000, and another in 1820 put it at 30,000. When the bounty
system came in the numbers claiming to be fishermen went over 60,000. Marmion
gives figures of 64,771 with 13,119 ships and boats in
1830 The
Government in addition constructed roads and piers in remote places along the
coast but refused to take over the duties of the county gentlemen on a
permanent basis. The poor quality and bad siting of some of the piers was
criticised, but this seems to have resulted merely from inexperience. The
county authorities made no provision for their upkeep. Nor, more importantly,
did to local gentry who stood most to benefit. The
further west one went the worse the system of markets became. Local fishermen
complained that they could not get salt, or had to pay in advance, or could
only get it in bulk. But often, it seems, local fishermen were more interested
in forming rings to restrict catches and so keep up the price. They could thus
get the same return for less work. The Government at one stage sent a revenue
cutter to protect independent fishermen against the rings, but it proved to be
too large to work close inshore and so was withdrawn. Co-operative associations
were not formed until the end of the century. Just as the efforts of the Linen
Board to establish the linen industry in the south of River
and inland waters were fished extensively for the markets. Numerous Acts were
passed from the eighteenth century onwards to try to prevent over-fishing and
to conserve stocks. Weirs were often built across the entire width of the
stream, or nets were stretched from bank to bank. The opening
of the rivers for navigational purposes greatly improved stocks.
[Top]
English
law does not recognise strict, ownership of land, but only an 'estate' in the
land, i.e. a legally defined series of rights regarding its use and disposal.
These rights could therefore be removed by the crown, for adequate reason,
following due process of law. Estate or real estate has come to mean immovable
goods like lands, shops, factories, or houses, while personal estate means
legal interest in moveable goods or valuables. When the owner of a piece of
real estate such as land, a house, a mill, or a shop leases it (or lets or sets
it) he is referred to as the landlord (landlady), and the person to whom it is
let is called the holder or tenant. That is the meaning given to landlord and
tenant in this section. In
The
term 'tenant' or 'holder' applies to the person (or institution) holding the
lease. (Legal terms were often derived in the Middle Ages from French; tenant
simply means holder.) The terms were
ambiguous for the holder of a long lease could and frequently did sub-let. The
original owner was called the head landlord, and the original lease the head
lease. It is not always clear in The
original grant of an estate in land implied a contract with the crown, a foedum (Latin) or fee (French). If no conditions were attached to it was called fee
simple; otherwise in was called entailed, or in fee tail. As legal contracts
strong and binding in law they could be called contracts in fee farm (French) (foedum firmum in Latin. From the common
lease of land for agricultural purposes in fee farm was derived the name of the
holding, namely the farm. (The history of the word given in the Oxford English Dictionary would seem to
suggest that the essential point in fee farm was the paying of a fixed rent as
opposed to sharecropping, metayage, or tithes, which were based on fractions of
the actual annual crop.) Apparently only on Church lands, for reasons connected
with canon law and the laws of Mortmain did older forms of tenancy like
copyhold survive. A
tenant in fee farm might be a freeholder, a leaseholder, or a tenant at will.
The first two were held for specified periods, the third for an unspecified
one. Originally the term freeholder meant that the tenant had no customary dues
to pay or services to render to the land lord or lord of the manor beyond what
was specified in the lease for the renting of the land or other property. By the nineteenth century in In
England freehold meant ownership in fee simple, but Peel observed that
gentlemen wishing to create freeholder tenants for voting purposes could always
cheat, for example by giving the freehold of a piece of bog while reserving all
rights of turbary, grazing and shooting to themselves. In An
estate was normally divided into two unequal parts, the demesne lands and the
lands leased to the tenants. The demesne lands were kept by the estate owner
himself, and on it he built his house and farm buildings, and planted his
woods, gardens and orchards. The farm and gardens were worked by hired labour,
farmhands, stable boys, gardeners, shepherds, etc. whether the owner was
resident or not. The numbers employed varied. The landowner might be interested
in farming or estate improvements, or he might not. He might only require
enough grass for his horses. The demesne lands on the Foster estate in Collon
occupied about a thousand acres of which about half was given over to woods,
shrubberies, waters, gardens, etc. Several thousand acres, nearly all of it
recently reclaimed land, was leased out to tenants. Some estates, on the other
hand, were small, perhaps not exceeding a hundred acres in total. This system
had remained virtually unchanged since the Middle
Ages. But because of subletting the holdings of individual tenants in some
parts of The
holdings of tenants too varied enormously in size. Some of the 'extensive
graziers' might have thousands of acres of grazing land on long leases. Others
might have only a few acres of potato ground. The backbone of the Irish
economy, at least as far as exports were concerned, was formed by the tenant
farmers with some hundreds of acres of tillage land, the strong farmers. A
lease specified in detail the duties of the tenant besides listing the nature
and size of the holding and its term. The 'accates' due to the landlord were
listed. These were extras, such as a calf at Christmas, to be given to the
landlord. Subletting was excluded. If any landlord in the past had failed to
evict every subletting tenant the courts regarded him as assenting to it. The
result, as noted earlier, was that it could not be legally abolished until the
head lease had to be renewed. The lease usually specified that no crops should
be planted in the last year of the lease. In practice the landlord and tenant
divided between them whatever crops grew of themselves. Grass therefore was the
most likely crop planted in the second last year of the lease. Owners
of leases can ask for a renewal fine. This was not a punishment but a sum of
cash paid in advance into the landlord's hand, with the annual rent lowered in
proportion. Landowners resorted to this when the wanted large sums of ready
money. An old man could virtually beggar his heir by this means. Fines were the
rule on Church lands because the rents had been pegged in the seventeenth
century, and the fine was a compensation for the low rent. At the beginning of
the nineteenth century most land in In
the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries before markets were developed
long leases were granted at low rents, except to Catholics who were subject to
legal restrictions. As prices for farm produce improved in the eighteenth
century in the eastern part of the island landlords tended to shorten leases
and raise rents both of which were for obvious reasons disliked. But improving
landowners argued that they needed a fair return for their outlays. Leases
could be granted to groups in common, the group being responsible for paying
the entire rent. This was called a runrig lease, perhaps recalling common
ownership of plough and oxen. In the nineteenth century such leases were
invariably associated with spade cultivation. Each tenant however had his own
patch of land, his own tools, seeds, and livestock, and profits were not
pooled. Customarily the work was done in common, but on a strict basis of owing
days of labour. A day's work assisting a neighbour brought a strict
'obligation' to repay it in kind. The phrase 'I am much obliged to you' meant
the favour had to be repaid, perhaps at a distant date. Both landlord and
tenant benefited to some extent by the system. The landlord had an assurance of
sorts that the whole rent would be paid. The tenant had an
insurance in case of sickness that his rent would be paid for him. The
Irish system to some extent obviated the great drawback of communal system,
namely that nobody particularly exerts themselves for the common good. The
practice of working in common was probably a greater hindrance to personal
exertions. The system also apparently lent itself to subdivision. From 1820
onwards landlords began to discontinue such leases. Rents
were paid at half-yearly intervals at the spring and autumn quarter-tenses.
Tenants normally expected to have enough cash in hand for the Michaelmas
quarter-tense, the last week in September. This involved selling the crop
immediately, and every farmer doing this at the same time, with a resulting
lowering of prices to the farmer. The rent was not demanded at the end of the
first half-year but was always considered due. The rent for half a year was
called a 'gale', and the suspended half-year's rent
was called a 'hanging gale'. The landlord could call for the hanging gale at
any time, and if it was not paid he could go to court to get a writ allowing
him to auction the tenant's goods and chattels to realise the required sum. A
lease was a legal contract binding on both sides. A tenant could not surrender
his lease and try to make some composition with the landlord. If he could not
pay he was liable for imprisonment for debt. If he absconded the landlord had
to go to court to get a legal eviction order to secure the return of his property
so that he could let out the land again. It would seem that most, if not all,
the cases for eviction brought before the courts during the Famine resulted
from this legal requirement. Unless a legal eviction were
obtained the land would have to remain derelict. Rents
were not considered high by English standards. This reflected both low
productivity and distance from markets. Some rents were very high and
subletting caused this. If a tenant sublet he could live off the rents and did
not have to work. Each subletter had therefore to let at a higher rent until
the rack was approached. Strictly speaking, the rack was the annual return from
a piece of land. In practice a rackrent equalled two thirds of the annual rack. Evictions,
apart from those caused by consolidation of sub-divided holdings, seem to have
been fairly rare. Because of the general opprobrium in When
evicting, for whatever reason, the greater landlords usually remitted all
arrears of rent, and allowed the evicted tenant to take all his crops,
livestock, tools and implements, and even the manure from the farm to sell.
Sometimes they gave a gratuity to allow the tenant to get to It
is obvious that there was nothing unusual in Perhaps
no topic in the whole history of agriculture was subjected to so much
distortion and misrepresentation as estate management in One of the problems in As
was customary in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, both in In
It
is not evident that absenteeism thus defined was worse in Those
who advocated improvement of agriculture and of estates condemned the system of
middlemen (or tacksmen as they were called in Estate
improvement involved three major items, agricultural improvement on the demesne
lands, re-structuring the tenancies into a smaller number of larger units, and
the replacement of the traditional head tenant or 'middleman' by a land agent
often trained in Scotland. Improvement
began on a large scale in As
farm incomes increased in the eighteenth century the landowner usually tried to
take advantage of this. Leases were shortened, and rents increased, and every
effort was made to encourage the improvement of fertility of the soil and
output. Rundale leases, where they existed were terminated. The prohibition of
subletting was increasingly enforced. Better quality bulls were purchased for
the benefit of the tenants. Quite often too the landowner applied to the Lord
Chancellor for permission to hold a market in a village on or near his estate,
for sales in a market increased the profitability of the tenants' farms. (For a
well-documented example see Macartney of Lisanoure, P. Roebuck ed.,
By
far the greatest influence on estate owners and managers in the nineteenth
century was however the enormous success of the Marquis of Stafford in
improving his wife's unpromising estates in Sutherland in the far north of He
first built roads into the The former barren
estates became very profitable and the new tenants too were able to earn a
comfortable livelihood by the standards of the times. Paying the new higher
rents meant much hard work that was not always popular. Nearly all landlords
with estates in the It
is sometimes alleged that Irish landlords 'cleared' whole estates in order to
devote the land to cattle ranching. This may have been done when all the
tenants in a joint lease were hopelessly in arrears, especially if this latter
was the result of an agrarian conspiracy against rent-paying and re-letting to
outsiders. But a landlord would normally be reluctant to do this because he
would have to forego revenue for several years while at the same time laying
out a great deal of money. The process of changing over from intensive
cultivation to profitable cattle-rearing was slow and expensive. The soils were
almost always in an exhausted state and it was estimated at the time that
several years manuring was necessary to produce sustained swards suitable for
fattening cattle. It was easier to encourage the tenant to make the change that
was also more profitable for himself. Tenants were not
always willing to make the change. Firstly they would be faced with paying
higher rents. Secondly, to re-establish the exhausted soil as a rich pasture it
had to be heavily manured for several years. This manure could not therefore be
spread on the other crops and output fell (IFJ
16 Oct 1819) In fact, 'clearing' in In
In
theory, the dispossessed could get jobs as day labourers on the demesne lands
or on other farms, or take the cash they could realise and go to the towns, or
to the manufacturing districts in By
1840 there came a shift in emphasis. It was noted on all sides that the tenants
were not in fact making as much effort to improve their farms as their
landlords wished. This was to some extent a matter of appearances for Irish
tenants had for centuries deliberately cultivated a dilapidated appearance on
their holdings, bushes in gaps instead of gates, etc. The fear was if the farm
looked too prosperous the rent would be increased. In In
In
the 1840's many people, especially clergymen, set themselves up as experts on
land improvement. Tenant right, a rather vague slogan or policy with
innumerable variants became a popular bandwagon to jump on to. The most
favoured option to encourage tenants to make improvements was 'fixity of
tenure', by which was meant that a landlord should not be allowed to refuse a
renewal of lease to a satisfactory tenant. Peel, when Prime Minister in the
1840's appointed a commission under the experienced improving landlord, the
Earl of Devon, to examine the question. If Peel had not died prematurely
earlier solutions might have been found to the problems of Irish landholdings.
Thirty years later a terrorist campaign led As
often in (v) The Study and Improvement of Agriculture
In
the year 1800 a group of improving farmers, including John Foster of Collon and
the Marquis of Sligo, founded the Irish Farming Society because they felt that
the Dublin Society was not active enough. The new society imported improved
farm machinery, new varieties of seeds, and the best specimens of livestock. It
set up its own factory to manufacture the improved machinery. It held two shows
annually, one in Though
the Irish Government considered it was the duty of the landowner to improve his
estates it was not backward in giving additional assistance. To this end it
formed the Fisheries Board in 1819, and began to construct roads in the far
west and south. Government money was provided though roads were a
responsibility of the counties. Some Irish landowners took their duty of
improving the condition of their tenants seriously; other less so. A wealthy
landlord like Lord Palmerston could afford to spend much on his Irish estates
and did so. So landlords were heavily in debt. Under Irish law a mortgage even
for a small sum was held against the whole estate, so that a part of it could
not be sold to pay off the debt. The Encumbered Estates Act (1849) remedied
this. At
the beginning of the century the Government was giving an annual grant of
£21,000 to the Linen Board, under the direction of John Foster, for the
advancement of the linen industry. Some maintain that Foster slowed down the
introduction of machinery by his distribution of hand-looms. The grant was
discontinued and the Board itself wound up after Foster's death in 1828.
Co-incidentally, machinery was then introduced into factories in
In
1806 Sir John Newport got the Government to pass its Corn Interchange Act,
which together with the Corn Laws gave Irish farmers a virtual monopoly of
imports into In
1821, following the collapse of some private banks, the Government reorganised
the banking system. It proceeded too with the dismantling of remaining tariffs
against the importation of Irish goods into From
time to time periodicals devoted to agriculture were launched in Farming
Societies seem to have been in decline in the Thirties, but in the Forties were
being revived. In 1840 the Royal Agricultural Society of Ireland was founded by
the Duke of During
the Famine the Government employed special agricultural instructors to go into
the most remote areas to explain and give practical demonstrations to the
illiterate cottiers.
[Top] (vi)
Bogs and Land Reclamation The
fairly flat uneven surface of the country and the high rainfall produced many
bogs most of which were not extensive. Drainage and land reclamation had been
proceeding since the Middle Ages. The extent of bogs
was reduced by an estimated million acres between the surveys of Sir William
Petty in the seventeenth century, and the Ordnance Survey in the nineteenth. The problems of
growing crops on reclaimed bog were well known. By the year 1800 many thought
that the limits of feasible reclamation had been reached, pointing out that in
wet years reclaimed bogland turned again to rushes,
and that bogland lacked natural nutrients. Others said that nutrients could be
supplied by burning the topsod, and if lime was need it was everywhere locally
available. It was noted however that bog soil was naturally infertile and so
the crops it produced did not repay the costs of drainage. Heavy manuring was
also required. Early
in the century the Dublin Society commissioned a survey of bogs, and the Irish
Government too appointed Bog Commissioners to carry out a more extensive
survey. The Commissioners estimated that bogs covered 2.8 million statute acres
of which 1.5 million acres were red or raised bogs which could be turned into
fertile soils, and the remainder were mountain blanket bogs which could be
drained for mountain pasture or forestry. By 1845 the Morning Register claimed that not less than 174 committees and
commissions had studied the matter. Most of these, it is true, were routine
committees set up to examine proposed legislation but the number reflects both
the importance with which the problem was viewed and its intractable nature. It
became clear that while small local pieces of drainage were easy (and had
already been done) more extensive drainage faced many problems. The bog might
be caused by a cill of underlying rock that could only be removed by blasting.
But it might be several miles distant on someone else's property. The landlord
of that estate might not be interested, or have no cash, or the estate might be
in Chancery. Again, the exact bounds of an estate might not be known if, as
often happened, their boundaries were in the middle of a bog. The adjacent
landlords would have to agree to the drainage, if they happened to be on
speaking terms, and were solvent. Tenants might have common rights on the bog,
or right of turbary might be included in their leases. Nor was it always easy
to establish precisely who had such rights. Some rights, too, like those of
water for a mill, might have been established centuries before. Some
of the difficulties were resolved in time. The Ordnance Survey determined
boundaries and established the levels needed for drainage. The Encumbered
Estates Act (1849) freed much land from the hands of mortgagees. Archbishop
MacHale strongly believed in the possibilities of reclaiming bogs. So too did
the Bible Societies who made several attempts to form Protestant colonies on
reclaimed bogland. Such colonies remained only marginally profitable even in
(vii) Crop
Failures and Scarcities The
prices of cereals reached probably an all-time high at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, but by the time the Government had imported rice the crisis
had passed. Prices were nominally higher later in the War, but inflation had
eroded the real value of money. Napoleon's In
1816 came the first of the partial failures of the potato crop. The ending of
the war-prices had affected the commercial classes and their dependants; this
affected chiefly the cottier class. They had no potatoes and there was no work
locally to enable them to buy food. It had long been recognised that gratuitous
relief or simple hand-outs of food made a famine worse and longer-lasting as
those near to destitution flocked to get the free hand-outs. The hand-outs too
destroyed the fragile market system especially in the region of subsistence
agriculture as people deserted the shopkeepers who had themselves
bought at inflated prices in order to get free food. Many fled from areas of
scarcity to centres where food was being doled out with the result that labour
was not available at seed-time. These phenomena are observed during every
famine. (In It
was early recognised in Fever
was a great hazard associated with scarcities, and the Government took steps to
see that local authorities and relief committees had all powers necessary to
enable them to deal with fevers. A Fever Act (1819) was passed to enable mayors
of towns to prohibit strangers from entering the towns when fever was
prevalent. Various
relief schemes on the foregoing lines were passed during the Great Famine with
the unanimous consent of the Irish members. Why the schemes failed so
disastrously in parts of It
has always been noted that |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright Desmond J. Keenan, B.S.Sc.; Ph.D. ;.London, U.K.
|