Ireland History

At the time of James I’s accession, the state of the Irish Reformed Church, never since Henry VIII’s day satisfactory, was, owing to the wars and unrest of the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, more unsatisfactory than ever. The King was most anxious to establish order and uniformity, and to correct abuses. Several times he appointed Royal Commissions, to investigate and suggest remedies for the neglect and corruption which nearly everywhere prevailed, but the Commissions could do little beyond making known the extent of the evil. The alienation of the Church lands by the bishops, which had been complained of in the previous reign, continued, and often a prelate, on taking possession of a See, discovered that so much of the land had been disposed of by his predecessors, that little or nothing remained for him to live on.

The inferior clergy were in still worse case. The incomes of many of the so-called ” livings ” were so minute that not even the most frugal housekeeping could make them suffice for the furnishing of the barest necessities ; thus it became necessary for the clergyman to hold several of these offices, and to officiate, or undertake to officiate, in several parishes, in order to be able at all to support himself. The best paid livings, as also the best of the episcopal and archiepiscopal Sees, very frequently went to Englishmen or Scotchmen. In the bestowal of ecclesiastical patronage there was much nepotism.

The Commission of 1607 reports that the family of Meiler McGrath, the Archbishop of Cashel, hold amongst them over 70 livings. The Bishop of Down and Connor has made his brother, who was a tailor, an archdeacon. Protestant livings were, it would seem, sometimes held by Catholic priests, or at least by those who still clung to the old forms and celebrated jvlass ; sometimes too by Catholic laymen.

We have seen {Book I) that, according to the old Irish system the land of a clan was considered as fundamentally belonging, in its several portions, to the family groups, which, taken together, constituted the State. The chief’s mensal land was ultimately the property of the State as a whole. It was an appanage of the chieftaincy, and, on the death of an occupant, passed to the elected successor. However much the custom of limiting the succession in practice to the members of one family had obscured this notion, it was still present to the minds of the people, and a verbal or practical denial of it would be resented.

In the agreements made between the chiefs and Henry VIII the communal ownership of the lands was not indeed denied, nothing was said regarding it. All that was specifically done, with regard to possessions other than the mensal lands, was to give the chief a right under English law to the powers over them which previously he had exercised without it. Of his mensal lands he was now constituted absolute owner, and they were to be transmitted by primogeniture to his heirs. A few clans had been in the habit of practising primogeniture, but the great majority had not, preferring usually a brother or a nephew, the son of an elder brother, to the son of a deceased chief. In these clans the introduction of the new succession law became a fertile source of dispute. Again, from regarding himself as absolute owner of the mensal land to regarding himself as absolute owner of the rest of the clan territory, and the clansmen as merely his tenants, was, for an ambitious chief, an easy step, and one which English officials often, when it suited them, encouraged him to take. The chiefs who had bound themselves by these agreements would now, if they failed to carry out the conditions contained in them, and especially if they rebelled against the English Crown, be liable certainly to forfeit their mensal lands ; it might be convenient to pretend to consider that the whole of the clan land was also theirs, and so forfeit also.