ABSTRACT
Confiscations and Evictions.—The period of comparative quiet which followed the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland permitted the English government to complete its task of rooting out the old Celtic social system. In 1605, two judicial decisions declared illegal the ancient customs of tanistry and gavelkind. 1 In their place were introduced the English tenures of freehold and leasehold and the feudal law of primogeniture. The Celtic chiefs were compelled to surrender their lands to the Crown, receiving them back in freehold. This was the procedure known as ‘surrender and re-grant’. Little consideration was shown for the rights of the lesser tribesmen. The tribal land was either granted in full ownership to the chief or else divided between him and the principal clansmen. The lesser members of the tribe sank into the position of tenants. Their vague claims to a share in the ownership of the tribal land were overridden, and they were saddled with money rents payable to the chiefs in lieu of the food contributions and services formerly owed by them. Nevertheless, the change was on the whole a salutary one. The English system of landholding was immeasurably superior from the economic point of view to the Celtic, and the survival of old Irish customs in defiance of the written law prevented any undue disturbance of social relationships. Thus, in the seventeenth century, though few Irish tenants had written leases or agreements, yet they enjoyed security of tenure in virtue of an old principle of the Brehon law that occupation of land for a certain time gave the settler the right to remain as long as he pleased. This custom of tenant-right was universal in seventeenth-century Ireland, and it survived in the province of Ulster down to modern times. Its decay in the southern districts was one of the factors responsible for the grave land problem of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
