ABSTRACT
Plantation in Irish history means the assignment of crown or commonwealth land to head-tenants chosen for their political qualifications, in practice generally for their English nationality. These tenants paid very low rents but were bound by unusually specific conditions imposed by the government of the day with a view to the future maintenance of law and order. One such condition was that the land should be peopled by under-tenants who were also subject to political screening. Another was that defensible buildings should be erected on the new estates. Similar agreements may have existed among the lords and tenants of medieval Ireland: what distinguished the so-called plantation period is not so much the fact of plantation as the evidence relating to it. From the early years of Henry VIII onwards there was an apparently unprecedented wealth of Anglo-Irish official correspondence, memoranda, statistics, surveys and maps referring to this subject, without any diminution in the flow of purely legal and fiscal documentation relating to landed property initiated by the Anglo-Normans. Schemes for settling Englishmen in Ireland are recorded as early as 1515, but the first spatially detailed proposal was the plantation of Leix and Offaly in 1556. The last was the plantation of Ormond in 1630. These are the limits of the plantation period for the purposes of the present chapter.
