The Consequences of Land Monopoly
on the Irish People

Cecil Woodham-Smith

[An excerpt from the book, The Reason Why, published in 1953, which discussed the social and political history of Britain's involvement in the Crimean War early in the nineteenth century, and the well-known "charge of the Light Brigade." pp.110-115]

In 1844 Ireland presented the extraordinary spectacle of a country in which wages and employment, practically speaking, did not exist. There were no industries; there were very few towns; there were almost no farms large enough to employ labour. The country was a country of holdings so small as to be mere patches. The people inhabited huts of mud mingled with a few stones, huts four or five feet high, built on the bare earth, roofed with boughs and turf sods, without chimney or window and destitute of furniture, where animals and human beings slept together on the mud floor. In 1843 the German traveller Kohl pronounced the Irish to be the poorest people in Europe. He had pitied, he wrote, the privations endured by the poor among the Letts, Esthonians, and Finns, but compared to the Irish they lived in comfort. "There never was," said the Duke of Wellington, himself an Irishman, "a country in which poverty existed to so great a degree as it exists in Ireland." And yet, in spite of misery, the population swarmed. The population of Ireland," said Disraeli in the Commons on February 15, 1847, "is the densest of any country in the world; the population as regards the arable area is denser even than in China."

Until the last half of the eighteenth century the population of Ireland had been inconsiderable; then abruptly, mysteriously, an extraordinary and fatal phenomenon occurred, and the population began to increase at a rate unknown to history. The accepted increase for the years 1779 to 1841 is 172 per cent, and many authorities put the figure higher. This increase was linked with the adoption of the potato as the staple, indeed the sole, food of Ireland. The people, in their desperate poverty, lacked land, implements, barns. Potatoes require only one-third of the acreage of wheat, flourish anywhere, need the minimum of cultivation, can be stored in the ground and shared with fowls and pigs. As Ireland became a potato country, the shadow of starvation lifted slightly and the character of the people made itself felt. The Irish people were religious, their family affections strong, their women proverbially chaste. Early marriages became invariable: girls were usually married before they were sixteen, but religion and ignorance combined to make birth control unthinkable, and by their early thirties women were grandmothers. Thus the population spread with the rapidity of an epidemic. For these people, swarming in the cabins and the fields, there was no employment, no means of earning wages, no possibility of escaping starvation, except the land -- and land became like gold in Ireland. Farms were divided and subdivided until families depended entirely for existence on a plot the size of a suburban garden. Potatoes vary in quality, and the Irish came to live on the "lumper" or "horse potato," the largest, coarsest, most prolific variety known. They grew the huge, coarse potatoes by strewing them on the top of beds six feet wide and covering them with earth, this method of cultivation, the "lazy bed," requiring only a spade. They ate this potato boiled, and they ate nothing else. Over great tracts of Ireland any form of cooking beyond boiling a potato in a pot became unknown -- greens were unknown, bread was unknown, ovens were unknown. The butcher, the baker, the grocer did not exist; tea, candles, and coals were unheard of. The miserable cultivation of the horse potato occupied only a few weeks, and through the dark, wet winters the people, wrapped in rags and tatters, crouched over the turf fire. "Not a bit of bread," said a tenant of the Marquis of Conyngham in 1845, "have I eaten since I was born; we never taste meat of any kind or bacon … the common drink to our potatoes is pepper and water."

It was human existence on the lowest scale, only to be paralleled in its isolation and privation, said observers, among the aborigines of Australia and South America. As the population increased, the continual subdivision of farms into patches brought the landlord higher and still higher rents, and the potato patches of Ireland first equaled what the rich farmlands of England fetched in rent, and then went higher. Men bid against each other in desperation, and on paper the landlords of Ireland grew rich; but the rents were not paid -- could not be paid. Castlebar was only one of hundreds of estates in Ireland which, prosperous on paper, were sliding into hopeless confusion. "If you ask a man," reported the Devon Commission in 1844, "why he bid so much for his farm, and more than he knew he could pay, his answer is, What could I do? Where could I go? I know I cannot pay the rent; but what could I do? Would you have me go and beg?"

By 1845 the population of Ireland had swollen to eight million, and the enormous majority of these people were living exclusively on the potato, were feeding such animals as they possessed on the potato, were consuming fourteen pounds of potatoes per head per day. The structure of the country, crazily rising higher and higher, was balanced on the potato. And the potato was treacherous: over and over again it had proved itself to be the most uncertain, the most dangerous, the most unpredictable of crops.

In 1739 the potato harvest had failed, and again in 1741, when deaths had been so numerous that the year was named the year of slaughter. In 1806 the crop partially failed, and in the west of Ireland it failed in 1822, 1831, 1835, ^36, and 1837. In 1839 failure was general throughout Ireland. In 1838 the Duke of Wellington, speaking on the Poor Law in Ireland, said in the House of Lords, "I held a high position in that country [Ireland] thirty years ago, and I must say, that from that time to this, there has scarcely elapsed a single year in which the Government has not, at certain times of it, entertained the most serious apprehension of famine. I am firmly convinced that from the year 1806 down to the present time, a year has not passed in which the Government has not been called on to give assistance to relieve the poverty and distress which prevail in Ireland."

The solution, the only possible solution, was to reduce the number of potato patches, to throw the small holdings together into farms, and give the people work for wages. But how was this to be done, where were the people to go, helpless, penniless, and without resources as they were? The Irish peasant dreaded the "consolidating landlord" -- and prominent among consolidating landlords was the third Earl of Lucan.

He was, in fact, far in advance of most of his contemporaries. The Land Commission of 1830 had stated that in their opinion the poverty and distress of Ireland were principally due to the neglect and indiference of landlords. Large tracts were in the possession of individuals whose extensive estates in England made them regardless and neglectful of their properties in Ireland. It was not the practice of Irish landlords to build, repair, or drain; they took no view either of their interest or their duties which caused them to improve the condition of their tenants or their land. "All the landlord looks to is the improvement of his income and the quantity of rent he can abstract." "Regard for present gain, without the least thought for the future seems to be the principal object which the Irish landlord has in view," wrote an English observer.

Lord Lucan was exceptional in being prepared to invest in the land, to forgo and reduce his income, to tie up capital in barns, houses, drainage schemes, and machinery, in order to establish prosperity in the future. But it was impossible for him to succeed. Between the Irish tenant and the Irish landlord not only was there no hereditary attachment, there was hereditary hatred.

Ireland was a country the English had subdued by force, and Irish estates were lands seized from a conquered people by force or confiscation. But Ireland had refused to acknowledge herself conquered, religion had prevented assimilation, and down the centuries rebellion succeeded rebellion, while underground resistance, assassinations, secret societies, anonymous outrages had never ceased. Moreover, the English, normally kind, behaved in Ireland as they behaved nowhere else; the Irish had earned their undying resentment by persistently taking sides with the enemies of England.

The laws of Ireland were laws imposed by a conqueror on the conquered, and the conditions under which an Irish peasant leased his land were intolerably harsh.

In Ireland alone [wrote John Stuart Mill] the whole agricultural population can be evicted by the mere will of the landlord, either at the expiration of a lease, or, in the far more common case of their having no lease, at six months' notice. In Ireland alone, the bulk of a population wholly dependent on the land cannot look forward to a single year's occupation of it.

The power of the landlord was absolute. Lord Leitrim, for instance, passing by a tenant's holding, noticed a good new cabin had been built, and at once ordered his bailiff to pull it down and partially unroof it.

James Tuke was told in 1847 that his Lordship used to evict his tenants "as the fit took him." Only in Ulster had a tenant any rights. In Ulster a tenant could not be evicted if he had paid his rent, and when he left his farm he had a right to compensation for any improvements. Elsewhere in Ireland the tenant had no rights. All improvements became the property of the landlord without compensation. Should a tenant erect buildings, should he improve the fertility of his land by drainage, his only reward was eviction or an immediately increased rent, on account of the improvements he himself had laboured to produce.

Sir Charles Trevelyan, a far from sympathetic observer, wrote of Ireland in 1845 ". . . what was the condition of the peasant? Work as he would, till and rear what he might, he could never hope to benefit. His portion was the potato only, shared, it may be said, with his pig." No ordinary amount of hard work, no thrift or selfdenial could bring a better life to the Irish peasant.

And, in all Ireland, the county which, said the Poor Law commissioners, stood pre-eminent for wretchedness was Mayo, where Lord Lucan held his estates. Mayo, with Sligo, Roscommon, and Leitrim, made up the province of Connaught, and Connaught had a history which made prosperity and good relations between landlord and tenant impossible.

Connaught had been the scene of great severities under Elizabeth, when the Binghams acquired their estates, and of greater severities under Cromwell. After the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford, Cromwell, in the words of Lord Clare,

collected together all the native Irish who survived die devastation and transported them into the province of Connaught which had been completely depopulated and laid waste. They were ordered to retire there by a certain day, and forbidden to repass the Shannon on pain of death … their ancient possessions were seized and given up to the conquerors.

These unhappy people, turned loose to starve in a ruined country, joined with the few survivors of the depopulation to form a population in Connaught which has never yet been able to forgive or forget.

The people were rebellious, the land poor, the country inaccessible. Roads were few, education non-existent -- in 1845 at Castlebar only seven people out of 1845 could read -- and, in addition to the normal evil of subdivision, two deplorable systems of land tenure flourished: rundale, a primitive survival where the land was rented jointly by a group farmed it in strips; and conacre, where a patch of land was rented only for the growing of a single crop.

To the people of Mayo an Earl of Lucan, a Bingham, was an oppressor, responsible for the cruelties of the past and the misery of the present, automatically to be hated. Between any Earl of Lucan and his tenants history had erected a barrier almost impossible to surmount. The third Earl of Lucan, however, had no smallest inclination to try to surmount it. Though his Irish tenants might cherish an hereditary hatred for him, he cherished an equally powerful contempt for them. From the bottom of his heart he despised them, swarming, half starving, ignorant, shiftless, and Roman Catholics into the bargain. It is doubtful if he considered the Irish as human beings at all.

And yet it was not an ignoble vision which the third Earl of Lucan cherished; and for it he was prepared to forgo his immediate comfort. The Irish countryside was to be remade, sound cottages were to replace mud cabins, machinery succeed the spade, trim furrowed fields were to appear in place of 'lazy beds," herds of dairy cattle and fat pigs supplant the lean and miserable animals who shared their owners' bed and board. But to make that vision real it was necessary to be relentless -- the miserable hordes of the half-starved must disappear. Evictions became numerous, and it began to be said in Mayo that he possessed "all the inherited ferocity of the Binghams."

Fear of the third Earl bit deep into the consciousness of the people, and he still survives as a bogey in Castlebar. Tales are told of the fierce Earl galloping through the town, the hoofs of his great black horse striking sparks from the cobble-stones, bringing terror to his tenants' hearts. When least expected he suddenly appeared, for though he gained the credit of being a resident landlord, he seldom stayed in Castlebar more than a few days -- it was his custom to swoop down a dozen times a year. On one occasion, believing him to be safely in England, the inhabitants of Castlebar were burning him in effigy on the Mall when suddenly the sound of the great black horse was heard and the Earl galloped into the midst of the crowd, shouting as they scattered in terror, "I'll evict the lot of you."

Honours might come to him from England -- he was elected a Representative Peer of Ireland in 1840, in 1843 he had the satisfaction of refusing to be restored to the Bench, in 1845 he was made Lord Lieutenant of Mayo. But on his estates the antagonism between Lord Lucan and his tenants became acute. He brought in Scottish Farmers, particularly detested in Mayo, to manage his farms. Irish bailiffs could pot be trusted, he said: turn your back for a moment, and hovels were allowed to spring up again on the newly cleared land. Asked for mercy, he declared that he "did not intend to breed paupers to pay priests"; for his part he would be only too glad if he did not have a single tenant on his estates in Mayo. On June ai, 1845, a meeting of protest was held at Castlebar and a resolution unanimously passed and forwarded to the Earl of Lucan. It condemned the inhumanity of his declaration, "worthy only of the days of persecution and oppression of which it so forcibly reminds us." During the next few years men were to look back and say with a shudder that the Earl's angry words had drawn down a curse on Mayo.

In 1844 it was reported that the potato crop had failed in North America, but no apprehension was created in Ireland, for the country was occupied with her own concerns. That year was a restless one: rents were at their highest, evictions numerous, secret societies active, and more than one thousand agrarian outrages occurred.

In September, 1845, the early potato crop was dug, and proved to be exceptionally abundant. The main crop, on which the food of the people depended, was not dug until December, and there was every sign that this, too, would be remarkably good. Potatoes lifted at the end of November were matured in good condition and the plants were prolific. A few weeks later the crop was dug, and found to be tainted with disease. The news came like a thunder-clap: failure was totally unexpected throughout the three kingdoms. Once the disease had appeared, it advanced with fatal speed, part of the crop rotting at once, and what was stored swiftly rotting in the pits. Within a month the whole was lost.

Dire distress followed. In January Parliament in London repealed the duties on the importation of foreign corn, the "corn laws," and an attempt was made to replace the potato by supplies of Indian corn, unknown as a food in the United Kingdom. …