Above : One Of Irish Clan Family Logo

The political organisation was based upon groups of various sizes from the family upwards. The family was the group consisting of the living parents and all their descendants. The fine* was a group related by blood within certain recognised degrees. The sept * was a larger group descended from common parents long since dead. All the members of a sept were nearly related, and in later times bore the same surname. The clan * or house was still larger. Clann means children, and the word therefore implied descent from one ancestor. The tribe * was made up of several septs or clans, and usually claimed, like the subordinate groups, to be descended from a common ancestor. The entire basis, therefore, was kinship. But as strangers were often adopted into all the groups, there was much admixture ; and the theory of common descent became in great measure a fiction except in the leading families.

Above: A PICTURE OF THOMAS WENTWORTH The EARL OF STRAFFORD, 1641.

AFTER the fall of Strafford the Irish Government was administered by two Lord Justices, Parsons and Borlase. Both were supposed to be Puritanical in their sympathies, and soon they made themselves most unpopular. Both opposed the concessions to the Catholics, which Charles, anxious for the support of the latter, seemed now willing to grant. The whole country was in a state of dangerous unrest. Numbers of disbanded soldiers wandered about, without employment or means of support. The Connacht landowners knew not when the decrees which the late Viceroy had obtained against them might be put in force. Those of the other provinces felt that, when such remote Crown claims had been admitted, no Irish proprietor anywhere was secure of his estate.The generation which remembered the Ulster plantation was yet by no means extinct; plenty of old men and women remained to tell to their grandchildren the tales of their sufferings in those evil days ; to kindle in their minds the desire of vengeance, and the hope of wresting the fields which their ancestors had tilled from the hands of the stranger. Over in England the anti-Catholie feeling was growing. Seven priests had been executed in London, merely for saying Mass.