enemies of the settlers. Large flocks of wolves roamed about by night, and often made sad havoc among their cattle. The land was unfenced and undrained. Much of it was covered with woods, affording refuge to the outlaws. But on the other hand, rents were low and labor did not cost much. The laws were repealed which made it criminal to have any dealings with the native Irish, who were now employed by the settlers as domestic servants. The wages of a ploughman was six shillings and eightpence a quarter. A servant maid got ten shillings a year. Laborers received twopence, and tradesmen sixpence a day. A cow was worth about a pound, and a horse four pounds. But money was then more available than now, and purchased more of the necessaries of life. In the past, Irishmen had thought labor a disgrace. Old Con O'Neill had cursed those who sowed wheat as well as those who learned English. Their chief sustenance came from cattle, and their food was milk and butter and herbs, such as "scurvy grass." But the colonists drained the swamps, cut down the woods, sowed wheat, and planted the potato-an article of food lately brought from America. Barley was also cultivated extensively, and was prepared for use by pounding in those round stone troughs still to be seen at old farmhouses, and preserved as curiosities.

Even then a trade in linen had taken root in the country. Existing before the foot of a Saxon had been placed on its free soil, it was now carried on with vigor and success. The colonists sowed flax, spun the flax into yarn, and wove the yarn into linen cloth. The cloth when sold produced much of the money they obtained. There was also woollen cloth manufactured. Both commodities were easily conveyed over bad roads to the seaports for exportation; and were highly esteemed abroad.

With their lands at a nominal rent, their clothing and their tools manufactured by themselves, with linen and woollen cloth, cattle and horses, to sell, the colonists soon began to thrive. As the woods were cut and the marshes drained, a larger proportion of the country was cultivated. land, after its long rest, brought forth abundantly. The success of the settlers induced many of their friends from Scotland to follow. The vacant parts of the country were occupied. The woodman's axe rang in the forests, and the husbandman's plough turned up the fruitful soil in the plains. Notwithstanding a difference of race and religion, a common humanity was often sufficient to establish a feeling of friendship between the settlers and the more civilized of the Irish. The woodkernes were subdued or exterminated, and prosperity began to reign in Ulster.

The settlement made by Hugh Montgomery and James Hamilton in 1606 opened up the county of Down to Scottish emigrants. They took possession of the whole of the north of the county, but they were satisfied with the arable lands which they found there, and did not intrude on the hill-country of the southern baronies, which therefore remained Irish and Roman Catholic. To the west of the county the Scots were met by the English colony which

Chichester had founded at Belfast, and which spread up the river Lagan, along both its banks, towards Hillsborough, on the county Down side, and far into county Armagh on the west. Their common Puritanism formed a bond of union between these English and Scottish colonists. It made them unite and form into communities wherever they met, whether on the banks of the Lagan or northward throughout the length and breadth of county Antrim, when it was opened up to settlers by Sir Arthur Chichester along the shores of Belfast Lough, and by Macdonnell northward to the Giant's Causeway. The only district of this county not thoroughly colonized was the highlands along the northeast shore. Then came James's great scheme of colonization in 1610, which threw open the other six counties, for English and Scottish settlers. In some of these counties, and in some parts of them, the settlements were successful; in others they failed to take root. In Armagh, the British colony took firm hold, because, as soon as the county was opened up, settlers flocked into it across the borders from Down, and in even greater numbers from the English colony in Antrim. On the other hand, the " plantation" of Cavan was, comparatively speaking, a failure. In county Tyrone, the British settlers did not invade the mountainous country on the borders of Londonderry county, but contented themselves with the finer lands in the basin of the Mourne, and on the shores of Lough Neagh, and along the streams which flow into it. Londonderry county was during the early years of the settlement left very much to itself by the "Irish Society of London,' which kept its contract largely in the direction of drawing its rents-an operation which is still performed by the London Companies, the valuation of the Londoners' property being stated in the Government return for 1887 at £77,000 per annum. At the mouths of the two rivers which drain the county, however, the London Society founded the towns of Londonderry and Coleraine, and these as time went on became ports by which emigrants entered and spread all over the fertile lands of the county. In Donegal the British only attempted to colonize the eastern portion; while in Fermanagh the Scots seemed to be so little at home that they handed over their lands to the English, who here established a strong colony, from which have sprung some of the best-known names among the English in Ireland. Into these districts of Ulster both English and Scottish emigrants, but especially the latter, continued to stream at intervals during the whole of the seventeenth century.

The progress of the colonies in the different counties is very accurately described in a series of reports by Government inspectors, and in the letters of Chichester himself. Of the Scottish undertakers, and of the manner in which they were doing their work, there is a special report; and, on the whole, Chichester is favorably impressed with them. "The Scottishmen come with greater port [show], and better accompanied and attended, but, it may be, with less money in their purses."

For two or three years after the "great settlement of 1610, the colony

went on increasing; and then its progress was checked by rumors of a great plot among the natives to sweep away the foreign settlers. Such a conspiracy did actually exist, and was certainly a thing which might be expected; but it was discovered and suppressed in 1615, before it came to a head. In 1618 the Irish Government instructed Captain Nicholas Pynnar to inspect every allotment in the six "escheated" counties, and to report on each one, whether held by "natives" or "foreign planters." The report presents a very exact picture of what had been done by the settlers in the counties inspected -Londonderry, Donegal, Tyrone, Armagh, Cavan, and Fermanagh. Pynnar points out that many of the undertakers had altogether failed to implement the terms of their agreement. On the other hand, he reports the number of castles, "bawns," and "dwelling-houses of stone and timber built after the English fashion," and mentions the number of tenants, and the size and conditions of their holdings. He states that "there are upon occasion 8000 men of British birth and descent for defence, though a fourth part of the lands is not fully inhabited." Of these, more than half must have been Scots; and if there be added the great colonies in Down and Antrim, there must have been an imigration from Scotland of between 30,000 and 40,000 in these ten years.

The only county in which the Scottish settlers failed to take firm root was Fermanagh, for there, by 1618, when Pynnar reported, a large number of the Scottish proportions had been sold, and were held by Englishmen. The result is seen in the small number of Presbyterians in comparison to Episcopalians to be found at the present day in county Fermanagh.

The north of Ireland is now very much what the first half of the seventeenth century made it. North Down and Antrim, with the great town of Belfast, are English and Scottish now as they then became, and desire to remain united with the countries from which their people sprang. South Down, on the other hand, was not "planted," and it is Roman Catholic and Nationalist. Londonderry county too is Loyalist, for emigrants poured into it through Coleraine and Londonderry city. Northern Armagh was peopled with English and Scottish emigrants, who crowded into it from Antrim and Down, and it desires union with the other island. Tyrone county is all strongly Unionist, but it is the country around Strabane, which the Hamiltons of Abercorn and the Stewarts of Garlies so thoroughly colonized, and the eastern portion, on the borders of Lough Neagh, around the colonies founded by Lord Ochiltree, that give to the Unionists a majority; while in - eastern Donegal, which the Cunninghams and the Stewarts "settled" from Ayrshire and Galloway, and in Fermanagh, where dwell the descendants of the Englishmen who fought so nobly in 1689, there is a great minority which struggles against separation from England. Over the rest, even of Ulster, the desire for a separate kingdom of Ireland is the dream of the people still, as it was three centuries ago. In many parts of Ireland which were at one time and another colonized with English, the colonists became absorbed in

the native population; but in Ulster, where the Scottish blood is strong, this union has not taken place, and the result is the race difference which is so apparent in the electoral statistics of the present day. It is perhaps the stern Calvinism of these Scots, which still survives, that has prevented the colony from mixing with the surrounding people, and being absorbed by them, as the Jews of the northern kingdom became merged in the surrounding "heathen." The history of the Presbyterian Church is therefore an important part of the story of the Scot in Ulster; in fact, for many years the history of Ulster, as far as it has a separate history, is chiefly ecclesiastical.' It must be so; for this is a story of Scotsmen and of the first half of the seventeenth century, and at that time the history of Scotland is the history of the Scottish Church. Church polity, Church observance, Church discipline, fill all the chronicles, and must have formed the public life of the people.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XXXIV

1 See Appendix T (Conditions of the Ulster Plantation).

This state of desolation was the result, in a great measure, of Mountjoy's ruthless policy, as carried out against the natives by Chichester and his officers, especially in the county of Down. The following extract from Fynes Moryson's Itinerary is an awful record of the condition to which the hapless natives were reduced: "Now because I have often made mention formerly of our destroying the Rebels Corne, and using all meanes to famish them, let me by two or three examples show the miserable estate to which the Rebels were thereby brought. Sir Arthur Chichester, Sir Richard Moryson, and the other Commanders of the Forces, sent against Bryan Mac Art aforesaid, in their return homeward, saw a most horrible spectacle of three children (whereof the eldest was not above ten yeeres old), all eating and knawing with their teeth the entrals of their dead mother, upon whose flesh they had fed twenty dayes past, and having eaten all from the feete upward to the bare bones, rosting it continually by a slow fire, were now come to the eating of her entralls in like sort roasted, yet not divided from the body, being as yet raw. . . . Capt. Trevor and many honest Gentlemen lying in the Newry can witness, that some old women of those parts used to make a fire in the fields, and divers little children driving out the cattel in the cold mornings, and comming thither to warme them, were by them surprised, killed and eaten, which at last was discovered by a great girle breaking from them by strength of her body, and Captaine Trevor sending out souldiers to know the truth, they found the childrens skulles and bones, and apprehended the old women, who was executed for the fact. The Captains of Carrickfergus, and the adjacent Garrisons of the Northern parts can witnesse that upon the making of peace, and receiving the rebels to mercy, it was a common practise among the common sort of them (I meane such as were not Sword-men), to thrust long needles into the horses of our English troopes, and they dying thereupon to bee readie to teare out one another's throate for a share of them. And no spectacle was more frequent in the Ditches of Townes, and especiallie in wasted Countries, then to see multitudes of these poore people dead with their mouths all coloured greene by eating nettles, docks, and all things they could rend up above ground."-Part ii., book iii., chap., i. p. 271.

'See Appendix V (Early Presbyterian Congregations in Ireland). Also, Reid and Killen's History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.

THE

CHAPTER XXXV

THE ULSTER PLANTATION FROM 1610 TO 1630

HE allotments of lands by King James to the Scottish, English, and 66 native undertakers" in the six escheated counties of Tyrone, Armagh, Cavan, Londonderry, Fermanagh, and Donegal are shown in the tabulations given below. Where transfers or reconveyances of the estates were made prior to 1620, that fact is also noted.

The following were the precincts or baronies set apart for the Scottish undertakers, and the allotments to each individual, for nearly all of which grants were issued in 1610.

I.

2.

3.

4.

5.

I.

2.

COUNTY OF ARMAGH; PRECINCT OF FEWES-6000 ACRES

2000 acres to Sir James Douglasse [or Douglas], Knt., of Spott, Haddingtonshire. Sold in 1611 to Henry Acheson, who afterwards sold it to Sir Archibald Acheson.

1000 acres to Henry Acheson, gent., Edinburgh. Sold to Sir Archibald Acheson in 1628.

1000 acres to Sir James Craig, Knt. Sold to John Hamilton in 1615. 1000 acres to William Lawder, gent., of Belhaven. Sold to John Hamilton in 1614.

1000 acres to Claude Hamilton, gent., of Creichnes.

COUNTY OF TYRONE: PRECINCT OF MOUNT JOY-9500 ACRES

3000 acres to Andrew Stewart, Lord Ochiltree, Galloway.

1000 acres to Robert Stewart, gent., of Hilton, Edinburgh. Transferred to Andrew Stewart, Jr., before 1620.

3. 1500 acres to Sir Robert Hepburne, Knt., of Alderston, Haddingtonshire.

4.

5.

6.

7.

1000 acres to George Crayford [or Crawford], Laird of Lochnories, Ayrshire. Transferred to Alexander Sanderson before 1620.

1000 acres to Bernard Lindsey of Lough-hill, Haddingtonshire. Transferred to Alexander Richardson before 1620.

1000 acres to Robert Lindsey of Leith, Edinburghshire.

1000 acres to Robert Stewart of Robertown, Ayrshire. Transferred to Andrew Stewart, Jr.

COUNTY OF TYRONE: PRECINCT OF STRABANE-13,500 ACRES

I. 3000 acres to James Hamilton, Earl of Abercorn, Renfrewshire.

2.

2000 acres to Sir Claude Hamilton, Knt., of Lerleprevicke (brother of James), Renfrewshire.