Of the grievances from which the Irish Catholic laity suffered, they appear to have felt none more acutely than the difficulty, under the existing laws, of obtaining a liberal education for their sons. During the reign of Elizabeth, this had also been complained of, but now that the English authority had extended itself over the whole island, the state of the case had become worse. Investigations were made, and schoolmasters who had not conformed to the State religion were ordered to close their schools, however efficient these might be. It is certain that, in this as in other matters, evasions were often practised with success.

The great schools which had long existed in many of the principal towns, as Waterford, Limerick, Galway and Kilkenny, continued to flourish. To what extent they were ” reformed ” it is °ften difficult to say ; certainly, amongst the men trained in them during the later sixteenth and the earlier seventeenth centuries, were found ^{many steadfast champions of Catholicity. In these schools the classical languages, and especially Latin, were the chief subjects of instruction but, in several, Irish, the native tongue, was also cultivated.}

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.