Ulster Plantation Research Articles

‘No Friend for Sorrow but Memory’: Commemorating Children in Early Post-Plantation Ulster, Ireland

ABSTRACT This paper explores the social visibility of children from Gaelic Irish and settler families during the 17th and 18th centuries given the very significant economic and cultural changes which followed the Plantation of Ulster. Predominantly Protestant settlers from Britain ousted native Catholic congregations from traditional places of worship, which became Protestant churches, and graveyards were now shared with Planter families. Using information from the south and west of the province of Ulster, it examines how children’s memorials may signify the religious, social and/or ethnic identity their families wished to express. It explores how distinctive familial plots were perhaps one means of maintaining complex Gaelic Irish kin relationships in danger of erosion and may have helped settlers replace or strengthen social networks from their original homes. High status interments which included children in prestigious native burial grounds may also have been a means of control and a powerful symbol of subjugation.

Book Review: Society and Administration in Ulster's Plantation Towns by Brendan Scott (ed)

Book Review: <i>Society and Administration in Ulster's Plantation Towns</i> by Brendan Scott (ed)

Trade and traders in Plantation Ulster, c.1600–c.1650

Abstract The Ulster Plantation of the early seventeenth century introduced to that province not only new markets and marketplaces, but also a new community interested in buying and selling the goods now on offer there. The Ulster port books for 1612–15 not only offer a great deal of information regarding the products being bought and sold in the province, but also provide us with the names and activities of the merchants and the captains entrusted with the transportation of these goods. This essay investigates the traders themselves, their activities and the conditions under which they operated during this unsettled period.

The origins and development of an Ulster Plantation town: Belturbet, County Cavan, 1610–1714

Belturbet has since the twelfth century been the location of some form of settlement, due to its location as a fording point on the River Erne. But it was not until the early seventeenth century, when, under the aegis of the Ulster Plantation, Stephen Butler, an English undertaker, settled and developed the town as we know it today. This essay investigates the origins of the town but also how it developed along the classic Ulster Plantation lines, and continue to grow until the disasters of the 1640s. The article describes the building work which took place in the town during the period under examination and how the corporation and the townspeople contributed to this.

The origins and development of an Ulster Plantation town: Belturbet, County Cavan, 1610–1714

Belturbet has since the twelfth century been the location of some form of settlement, due to its location as a fording point on the River Erne. But it was not until the early seventeenth century, when, under the aegis of the Ulster Plantation, Stephen Butler, an English undertaker, settled and developed the town as we know it today. This essay investigates the origins of the town but also how it developed along the classic Ulster Plantation lines, and continue to grow until the disasters of the 1640s. The article describes the building work which took place in the town during the period under examination and how the corporation and the townspeople contributed to this.

Religion, Memory, and Materiality: Exploring the Origins and Legacies of Sectarianism in the North of Ireland

The early 17th-century Plantation of Ulster, in which the English Crown sought to plant loyal British colonists in the north of Ireland, is commonly understood as overtly religious in intent and action, and is viewed as the foundation for today’s divide between Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland. Archaeological and documentary evidence complicates this straightforward narrative by demonstrating considerable cultural exchange and the emergence of hybrid practices—suggesting that, during the plantation period itself, religion may have been less influential than economic and political pragmatism. By the end of the 17th century, however, religion took on a more prominent political and cultural role, overtly materialized in objects, settlement patterns, and landscapes. The nature and timing for this transition is examined through archaeological case studies and considered in light of contemporary historical memories regarding the plantation and the origins of sectarianism in Ireland.

Glenconkeyne: How Ireland’s Largest Native Woodland Became the Timber Yard of the Plantation of Ulster

Glenconkeyne: How Ireland’s Largest Native Woodland Became the Timber Yard of the Plantation of Ulster Gordon D’Arcy (bio) this essay explores the circumstances, particularly the ecological and cultural impacts, resulting from the disappearance of the forest of Glenconkeyne (Figure 1) in central Ulster in the early seventeenth century.1 Research has shown that this exploitation, occurring during the turbulent transition from the Gaelic to the colonial regimes and serving to satisfy the demands of the English “undertakers,” completely eradicated the forest by the mid-seventeenth century. The disappearance of a great forest is much more than the loss of a dramatic landscape feature or of the economic value of its constituent trees as a self-sustaining capital resource and the promise of prosperity. Greater than the sum of its parts: evaluation of the forest’s loss must also consider its vital life-supporting capacity and its hidden layers of human history. Ecologically, forests act as protectorates for flora and fauna, many of which are now endangered or relegated to isolated reserves. Forest biodiversity, especially that of the rain forests, is among the richest known, supporting many species that have unbroken links to primordial beginnings. Forests are thus irreplaceable repositories of living things. Their importance as “super lungs” on which all organisms, including humans, depend is common knowledge and one of the primary motivations for contemporary forest conservation. The removal of a forest also represents radical visual transformation: a [End Page 89] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Glenconkeyne Woodland, c. 1600 [End Page 90] landscape replete with natural form and texture replaced usually by unadorned modification; a tract of wilderness tamed. Culturally a forest constitutes a discrete arboreal archive. Human history, benign and nefarious, is frequently linked to the “wildwood”: a place of mystery, a place of retreat, a refuge for seekers of inspiration and outlaws—animal and human. Unchronicled narratives, in story and song, in place-names and folklore may survive in tantalizing snippets. However, since most of this archive disappears with the forest, a combination of myth and mystery is the common legacy. In the case of Glenconkeyne sufficient factual reportage survives, though scattered through medieval and early modern documents, to elucidate its former grandeur—and what became of it.2 Analysis of tree pollen from cores and the science of dendrochronology tell us that early forest history in Ireland is much like elsewhere in temperate regions. The process of landnam—clearing trees by “ring-barking” for agriculture, then moving on when the growing potential of the soil is exhausted—affected the Irish landscape from as early as six thousand years ago. The evidence is vividly exposed at Céide Fields in County Mayo, where a system of small fields, created by the first farmers, lies beneath a blanket of bog containing pine stumps, some cleared by ax and fire.3 Though fragmentary and peripheral, landnam was the beginning of a process that reflects Ireland’s uninterrupted preoccupation with the pastoral way of life. Although prolonged episodes of population collapse and natural climate change allowed the forest to return, the steady growth of an essentially rural population resulted in the “opening up” of the country by the end of the Bronze Age, some 2,500 years ago. Some upland regions, formerly afforested, were by this time rendered exposed and treeless by overgrazing: the Burren in County Clare, for instance.4 A climatic change resulting in cooler, wetter conditions subsequently thwarted farming and resulted in widespread forest reinvasion.5 The capacity to manufacture robust agricultural equipment from iron during the Celtic period and the establishment of thousands of ringfort homesteads pushed back the tree cover once again.6 Nevertheless, by the early medieval [End Page 91] period large tracts of primary and secondary forest remained, surrounding uplands, in river valleys, and in the largely inaccessible bogs.7 Abundant Old and Middle Irish references make clear that Gaelic culture included an arboreal sensitivity.8 The early Ogham alphabet, shown to be connected to tree names, may also have been an educational device. The Gaelic brehon law of neighborhood (Bretha Comaithchesa) ranks society in accordance with the usefulness and other attributes of trees.9 While a...

The Wirrall Family: Doncaster Merchants, Yorkshire Gentry, and Settlers in Ulster, 1514–1641

The Wirrall family emerged as leading figures in the borough of Doncaster in the early sixteenth century and by mid-century had begun to establish themselves firmly amongst the gentry. From time to time they exhibited abrasive commercial acumen in dealings with the borough corporation as they sought to make the most of the opportunities offered by their newly-acquired manorial rights. These tensions became evident in a series of law suits and in an episode of municipal unrest over a mayoral election. The fifth generation, Hugh Wirrall junior, knighted in 1603, was the last head of the family to be resident in the locality. After apparently calamitous business dealings he made various attempts to retrieve his financial prospects and ultimately became one of the settlers in the Plantation of Ulster.

The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People by Judith Ridner, and: Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765–1776 by Patrick Spero, and: Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania, 1770–1830 by Peter E. Gilmore

Reviewed by: The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People by Judith Ridner, and: Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765–1776 by Patrick Spero, and: Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania, 1770–1830 by Peter E. Gilmore Richard K. MacMaster The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People. By Judith Ridner. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018. 140 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $19.95.) Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765–1776. By Patrick Spero. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2018. 268 pp. Notes, index. $27.95.) Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania, 1770–1830. By Peter E. Gilmore. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 248 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $27.95.) George Chambers, grandson of the founder of Chambersburg, published A Tribute to the Principles, Virtues, Habits and Public Usefulness of the Irish and Scotch Early Settlers of Pennsylvania in 1855 to defend “the Irish and Scotch early settlers of this great State and their descendants against reproach, as well as aspersion, cast upon them in some modern compilations having pretensions to Historical accuracy.” Earlier writers, he said, either dismissed them as “a pertinacious and pugnacious race” who settled on unpurchased land and caused Indian wars, or they ignored them altogether. That is no longer the case. Numerous academic and popular titles interpret their history, but these three new books are a most welcome addition. Immigrants from Ulster, the northern province of Ireland, began coming to North America in significant numbers early in the eighteenth century, where by mid-century they were known as Scotch-Irish.1 Edmund Burke had no doubt about the use of Scotch-Irish. He wrote in 1757 about the population increase in the southern backcountry due to “the migration of the Irish” from Pennsylvania. “These are chiefly Presbyterians from the northern part of Ireland, who in America are generally called Scotch-Irish.” Irish or Scotch-Irish? In the last years of the century, Jedidiah Morse, a New Englander, summed it up succinctly in his treatment of Pennsylvania in The American Geography: “The Irish are mostly Presbyterians. Their ancestors came from the north of Ireland, which was originally settled from Scotland: hence they have sometimes been called Scotch-Irish, to denote their double descent. But they are commonly and more properly called Irish, or the descendants of people from the north of Ireland.”2 Peter Gilmore [End Page 231] prefers to call them simply “Irish Presbyterians,” since “In Ulster ‘Presbyterian’ effectively served as a synonym for ‘Scotch’ ” (4) and “arguably, their most obvious and distinctive ‘Irish’ characteristic may well have been their Presbyterianism” (113). But these “Irish Presbyterians were significantly numerous and cohesive enough to subsume Presbyterians of various ethnicities.” Mainly Presbyterians and mostly of Scottish descent, the Scotch Irish did not always fit ethnic or religious definition; they were a varied people, backcountry settlers and traders, Philadelphia merchants and ship owners, and later mill workers and Pittsburgh industrialists. In The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania, Judith Ridner has told their story from the Plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century through the Philadelphia riots in 1844. The Scottish colonization of Ulster began in 1603 with Sir James Hamilton’s and Sir Hugh Montgomery’s settlers in County Down and the Plantation of Ulster six years later. Migration from southwestern Scotland continued through the century and into the next, with at least one hundred thousand arriving between 1650 and 1700, half of that number in the 1690s. By 1715, on the eve of large-scale immigration to America, Scots and their children were a third of the total population of Ulster (13). As Sir Tom Devine noted, for these emigrants from Ulster, “an integral factor in their distinctive subculture was their Scottish roots.”3 In clear, readable prose, The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania leads the reader through the ebb and flow of immigration. Many arrived in family groups, while others, mainly young men, came as indentured servants, as fluctuations in the linen industry and the flaxseed trade influenced its volume and composition. The author narrates the entry of...

Rural Waterscape and Emotional Sectarianism in Accounts of Lough Derg, County Donegal

The story of Lough Derg in Ireland’s County Donegal is arranged around clusters of sectarian narratives in juxtaposition, synthesis and conflict. The Sanctuary of Saint Patrick sits on Station Island, a small rocky islet set within the waters of the lake. The site became well known in the early Middle Ages as the place of Saint Patrick’s delving of a cave that led to purgatory, allowing the sinner to experience a glimpse of the torments of hell while still in this life. The island then attracted pilgrims from all over Europe and became embedded into the Catholic literary and spiritual imagination. After the Protestant Ascendency and the Plantation of Ulster began in the seventeenth century, the place became a site of tension and narrative clashes between differing visions of rural place, each with its own spectrum of affect, emotions and ideals. This essay unpacks the resonances of Lough Derg as a site of sectarian narrative by 1) situating the discussion within a distinctly rural context; 2) adding the unique properties of spiritual waterscape to the discussion; and 3) discussing the Irish sectarian narratives and identities arising from the lake and its purgatorial isle. It focuses on a case study of Protestant and establishment accounts of the lake during the nineteenth century, depicting them as internally diverse as well as part of a larger ecology of sectarian contestations. It explores waterscape and its role in influencing community responses to and shaping of place, the manner in which sectarian responses to space are internally diverse, and the manner in which Catholic and Protestant narratives of place have intertwined to shape the lake in the twenty-first century.

The Maritime Dimension to Plantation in Ulster, ca. 1550–ca. 1600

Plantation by the English in Ireland, and Ulster in particular, has received considerable scholarly attention, and it continues to do so. While plantation as a policy developed out of efforts to secure the coastal region from the continuous arrival of Highland Scots, most studies examine how the English plantations developed. Less attention is paid to the Scottish settlement in Ulster and their efforts to utilize the land for their own purposes. At the same time, few studies examine the wider maritime context. Both the English and the Scots in Ulster had to traverse the North Channel to reach Ulster, and this article seeks to examine the wider maritime context that either facilitated or obstructed the efforts of both the Scots and the English in Ulster.

Éamonn Ó Ciarrdha and Micheál Ó Siochrú (eds), The Plantation of Ulster: Ideology and Practice

Éamonn Ó Ciarrdha and Micheál Ó Siochrú (eds), <i>The Plantation of Ulster: Ideology and Practice</i>

PROTESTANT MILITARY HUMANISM IN EARLY STUART IRELAND

AbstractThis article addresses the role of Protestant military humanism in early Stuart Ireland. The central argument is that Protestant military humanism as embodied in the works of such authors as Geoffrey Gates (fl. 1566–80) and Barnabe Rich (1541–1617) played a vital role in the Jacobean plantation of Ulster. These authors combined a strong commitment to the Protestant religion with the conviction that martial virtue was essential for the preservation of the commonwealth against the threats of domestic rebellion and foreign domination. The example of the soldier-planter Sir Thomas Phillips of Limavady (c. 1560–1636) and his criticisms of the City of London's plantation in Derry during the 1620s demonstrates that military humanist values not only offered a persuasive rationale for colonization, but also significantly shaped the course of plantation on the ground. Phillips's lengthy conflict with the City of London demonstrated a fundamental disjuncture between his own Protestant military humanist outlook, and the City's own understanding of its civilizing mission in Ireland; however, rather than a conflict between aristocratic and civic values, close study reveals instead a struggle grounded in competing hierarchies of civic values.

17세기 초 얼스터 플랜테이션의 배경 - 런던데리(Londonderry)를 중심으로 -

17세기 초 얼스터 플랜테이션의 배경 - 런던데리(Londonderry)를 중심으로 -

얼스터(Ulster) 식민과 스코틀랜드인의 이주

얼스터(Ulster) 식민과 스코틀랜드인의 이주

Bitter Memories: Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland

Bitter Memories:Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland Christopher Ivic (bio) Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort. ernest renan, "what is a nation?" (1882) Eavan Boland's poem "Becoming the Hand of John Speed" opens with the question "How do you make a nation?" to which the speaker responds, "I have no answer. I was born in a nation/I had no part in making" (48). John Speed was an English historian and mapmaker whose cartographic images and chorographical descriptions of Ireland graced his 1611–12 atlas The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine. Speed "made" Ireland by representing it in the form of a map (figure 1) rendering that island visible to seventeenth-century English men and women in a way that it had never been before. Published in the wake of the Flight of the Earls, Speed's Irish maps can be read as celebratory of Stuart Britain's incorporation of Ireland and, in particular, the plantation of Ulster. Edmund Spenser, too, played a part in "making" Ireland. He worked in and wrote of Ireland during a time of intense violence; his Irish experience was bracketed by the Desmond rebellion (1579–83) and the Nine Years' War (1594–1603). Just as Spenser's Irish work gives voice to fears that Elizabethan England's grip on its neighboring kingdom/colony was loosening, it revisits and uses the past to instill a sense of English belonging and to incite reclamation in the face of Irish resistance. If Spenser "bequeathed a complex, diverse, and, above all, dominant legacy of subsequent notions of literature and national/ethnic identity in the British Isles for the whole of the seventeenth century and beyond" (Hadfield 12), then he did so in part by drawing upon the constitutive power of memory, especially collective memories etched as grievances. Spenser arrived in Ireland in 1580 as a secretary to Arthur Grey, [End Page 9] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. John Speed, "The Kingdome of Irland," from The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London, 1611–12). The Bodleian Library Map Res 74, between 137–38. Black and white image reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. [End Page 11] Baron Grey of Wilton, who, as lord deputy, was sent over to confront Old English lords, such as Gerald fitz James Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond, and James Eustace, third Viscount Baltinglass. As early as 1582 Dublin-based Spenser secured a lease on one of the former estates of Viscount Baltinglass; a few years later, he took possession of the 3,028 acres of Kilcolman Castle in the north of County Cork, a castle formerly held by Desmond. This settlement placed him within the project known as the Munster plantation, to which Spenser as a colonial administrator contributed significantly.1 His eighteen-year residence in Ireland enabled his social and economic advancement, and by no means did it disable his authorial self-fashioning. Within this volatile and often violent context Spenser wrote, among other texts, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), and Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595). Another product of Spenser's lengthy residence in Ireland is the document that we now know as A View of the Present State of Ireland, which was completed ca. 1596 at the height of the overthrow of the Munster plantation by Sir Hugh Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh. This lengthy prose tract, almost 70,000 words in dialogue form, is dedicated to redressing what was increasingly seen from both within and without Whitehall, especially by English colonial and military officers in Ireland, as a failing, if not failed, (re)conquest and (re)colonization of Ireland. Its two speakers, Irenius and Eudoxus, are Englishmen: Eudoxus is less familiar with Ireland than Irenius, who shares Spenser's knowledge of Irish history, politics, and society. The View traditionally has been read as a blueprint for the Anglicization of Ireland, and Irenius is often regarded as Spenser's mouthpiece. Recently, literary historians have come to regard the View as a (if not the...

The Irish DNA Atlas: Revealing Fine-Scale Population Structure and History within Ireland

The extent of population structure within Ireland is largely unknown, as is the impact of historical migrations. Here we illustrate fine-scale genetic structure across Ireland that follows geographic boundaries and present evidence of admixture events into Ireland. Utilising the ‘Irish DNA Atlas’, a cohort (n = 194) of Irish individuals with four generations of ancestry linked to specific regions in Ireland, in combination with 2,039 individuals from the Peoples of the British Isles dataset, we show that the Irish population can be divided in 10 distinct geographically stratified genetic clusters; seven of ‘Gaelic’ Irish ancestry, and three of shared Irish-British ancestry. In addition we observe a major genetic barrier to the north of Ireland in Ulster. Using a reference of 6,760 European individuals and two ancient Irish genomes, we demonstrate high levels of North-West French-like and West Norwegian-like ancestry within Ireland. We show that that our ‘Gaelic’ Irish clusters present homogenous levels of ancient Irish ancestries. We additionally detect admixture events that provide evidence of Norse-Viking gene flow into Ireland, and reflect the Ulster Plantations. Our work informs both on Irish history, as well as the study of Mendelian and complex disease genetics involving populations of Irish ancestry.

잉글랜드 제임스 1세의 얼스터 식민정책

잉글랜드 제임스 1세의 얼스터 식민정책

Urbanisation in North-West Ulster, 1609–1670

A central problem confronting most Irish urban historians is the extent to which the evolution of the urban network has been influenced by Tudor and Stuart plantations. The official plantation of Ulster by James I from 1609 to 1625 was not responsible for the first introduction of towns, even to west Ulster, but because of the survival of adequate source data it is not possible to observe some of the most important processes of urbanisation in operation until this period. In north-west Ulster these processes include the emergence of an urban hierarchy where town size was related to function and to the density of the adjacent rural population, and the development of an urban network whose spatial relationships were closely governed by the pattern of dispersed rural settlement. Although these developments were associated with plantation settlement, this does not necessarily imply that they were brought about intentionally by the official plantation scheme.

Border Gothic - history, violence and the border in the writings of Eugene McCabe

As well as producing a rich body of novels, novellas, short-stories and plays spanning throughout seventy years of the century of partition, Eugene McCabe charts the broad trajectory of Irish history and politics from the Elizabethan Conquest and Ulster Plantation of the 16th and 17th centuries to the recent 'Troubles' which spanned the thirty years between the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement (1968) and the signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (1998). They positively seethe with gruesome assassinations, indiscriminate bombings and deliberate shootings, while resonating with a veritable cacophony of deep-seeded ethnic rivalries and genocidal, religious hatreds, which are interlaced with poverty, social deprivation and dis-function, migration and emigration.