Official reaction to native land claims in the plantation of Munster

Abstract

The historiography of the Munster plantation has not been extensive; in the ninety-five years since Robert Dunlop published the first proper study of the greatest of all the Tudor settlements in Ireland, only D. B. Quinn has treated the subject in any detail. In the absence therefore, of any full-scale study of the plantation, it is fair to say that it has usually been characterised as the process of driving the native Irish off their lands and settling them with English colonists. In this scenario, the administrations, both in England and Ireland, are seen as backing the settlers judicially and extra-judicially, and the natives come off distinctly the worst; as Quinn puts it, the native population greatly resented the ‘presence and domination of the planters who were felt to twist the law in favour of a minority’. Yet, a study of the extant evidence does not support this simple stereotyping; rather, both the privy council (to which many of the native land claims were directed) and the government commission of 1592 were quite willing to consider cases against the undertakers and their tenants and to rule in favour of the native claimant. For instance, Hugh Cuffe, who had originally been granted a seignory of 12,000 acres in Cork, lost most of it to appeals by Ellen Fitzedmund Gibbon and James MacShane to the privy council in 1591, and had to make do with a new grant of a mere 1,953 acres in the same area.