The Scotch-Irish in America.

Henry Jones Ford

1915

The Land and the People.

From The Scotch-Irish in America by Henry Jones Ford.

Chapter II.

The feature of the physical geography of Ireland that has influenced its politics is the absence of mountain coverts or physical barriers capable of sheltering a native race after the manner of the Highlands of Scotland. No such demarcation of culture on physical lines as between the Highlands and the Lowlands of Scotland could be established. No such saying as that "the Firth of Forth bridles the wild Hielander" could become current. In Ireland there is no dominating mountain mass. Small clusters of mountains stud the rim of the island, almost encircling a central plain, but there is everywhere easy access from the coast to the interior by valley roads, and at some places the central plain comes clear to the coast. Narrow shallow seas separate Ireland from Great Britain and the strait between Ireland and Scotland at its narrowest point is only thirteen and a half miles wide.

During the period of barbarism in Europe, before races became united to the soil to form nations and while the State was still migratory, Ireland's openness to invasion invited descents upon the land. Extent and variety of invasion form the theme of the legendary history of early Ireland. Tribal successes figure as the founding of groups of kingdoms, the might and renown of which are so embellished by legend that it is well to remember that the island is only 302 miles in its greatest length with an average breadth of about 110 miles. It is a law of history that when cultures meet legends are apt to blend. One of the world's great epics is a monument of this process, Vergil's Æneid, in which the foundation of Rome is connected with the fall of Troy. This mythical relationship was not conceived until the expansion of Roman power had established close contact with the East. As Ireland entered the circle of European culture its own legendary history received strong tinctures from both classical and Biblical sources. According to some of the bards arrivals in Ireland before the deluge were numerous, and among other visitors three daughters of Cain are mentioned. A few weeks before the Flood a niece of Noah, named Cesara, arrived in Ireland with a party of antediluvians. After the Flood settlements were made by colonists from Greece, Scythia, Egypt and Crete. Before leaving the East the colonists intermarried with descendants of most of the heroes of Biblical history, and Judean princesses supplied sacred treasures for transmission to Ireland.

There are old Irish genealogies that extend without a break to Magog, the son of Japhet, the son of Noah. Lists are given of Kings of Ireland that were contemporary with the rulers of the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans. In like manner the legendary history of Poland tells how the ancient rulers of the land subdued Crassus, King of the Parthians, and inflicted severe defeats upon Julius Caesar. The curious mixture of myths in Irish legendary history is well illustrated by those which attach to the Lia Fail, or Stone of Destiny, preserved in the coronation chair of the Kings of England. It was brought into England by Edward I., who captured it in 1296 at Scone, where the Kings of Scotland were crowned. The legend runs that it was the stone on which Jacob pillowed his head at Bethel, and was handed down to his heirs, ultimately coming into the possession of Irish colonists, who carried the stone with them and set it up on the hill of Tara. Thence the stone was carried into Scotland, where its authentic history begins. It is a sacred stone of great antiquity, but geologists find it to be of local material and archaeologists class it among the menhirs, or memorial stones of the period of barbarism, specimens of which are found in many countries.[1]

The barbarian culture that is found in Ireland when authentic history begins is commonly designated Celtic, and upon this classification much historical hypothesis has been set up. Some writers have predicated the existence in prehistoric times of a great Celtic Empire extending across Europe. The material upon which such conjectures are based is chiefly derived from references in Greek and Latin writers to the Keltoi or Celtae in different parts of Europe. But upon examination the terms are not found to possess a specific value, but are rather a general designation like our term "barbarians." The term "Keltoi" was first used to designate the barbarian neighbors of the Greek colony on the site of modern Marseilles in Southern France. According to Herodotus the country from the Danube to the Western Ocean was occupied by the Keltoi. Tribes later classed as German or Teutonic were once classed among the Celtae. Inferences as to the existence of Celtic empire, because ancient writers spoke of Keltoi in the East and in the West, seem to be as little warranted as would be belief in the existence of an extensive empire among the American aborigines because of reports of encounters with Indian tribes in widely separated places.

Although as an ethnic term "Celtic" is a vague appellation, it is quite different as a philological term. It is applied to a well-defined group of the Indo-European family of languages, including Irish, Scottish, Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. The philological evidence is conclusive that these are all varieties of one language. Characteristics of Celtic speech are discerned by some philologists in specimens of the language of the ancient Gauls that have been preserved by classical writers, and indications of Celtic place names have been noted as far east as the Dniester River. But it is observed by the authorities that there is no evidence of any considerable Celtic infusion in either the Teutonic or the Romance languages, such as might be expected if dialect forms found in historic times had arisen on a basis of Celtic culture. Thus it would appear that Celtic names in Europe mark either stages in tribal migration westward or places whose Celtic inhabitants became subject to other peoples thus losing their own language and racial identity.

Thus, whether the matter be viewed in its ethnic or in its linguistic aspects, there appears to be no real support for the romantic conjecture still put forth in the name of history, according to which the Celtic peoples are relics of a once mighty nation spreading over Europe and contesting with Greece and Rome for the empire of the Western World. When the Celtic tribes appear in the full light of history they are all found in the west of Europe. They hold western parts of England and Scotland; they hold Ireland, the most western of the British Islands; and also Brittany, the most western part of France. The hypothesis that best fits the historic facts is that the Celtic tribes were the foremost wave of Indo-European migration westward, pressed to the remotest regions by succeeding waves. This hypothesis agrees with the well authenticated fact that Ireland did experience a series of invasions. The process of migration is historically exhibited in the case of the Celts of Brittany, who migrated thither from the Saxon invasions of England during the fifth and sixth centuries. This hypothesis does not imply that the process would not have widely separated stages, or that it may not have been accompanied by long periods of settlement on the European continent, or that the westward movement was necessarily the result of the onslaught of other Indo-European tribes, although ethnic collisions probably influenced the movement. It should be remembered that early forms of the State are very migratory. The crude technology of barbarians tends to exhaust the natural resources of any locality occupied by them. The natural fertility of Ireland, and particularly the richness and quick growth of its natural pasture, would be very attractive to barbarians. Energetic, roving peoples reaching the northern coasts of the mainland would eventually reach Ireland.

The enthusiastic assiduity of Irish antiquarians has extracted from scanty material proofs that in Ireland Celtic character developed its fairest flower and Celtic culture attained its finest expression. The known facts do not discredit the claim. The name of the country was associated with traditions of racial dignity and culture. The archaeological evidence harmonizes with these traditions. Ancient gold ornaments, bronze weapons and articles of domestic use have been disinterred, giving evidence of native acquaintance with the working of metals and of the existence of artistic crafts. Trade went on between Ireland and the Mediterranean countries from the earliest times. Roman coins both of the republican and of the early imperial period have been found at a number of widely separated points. The fact that Roman geographers regarded Ireland as midway between Spain and Britain points to the existence of direct traffic between Irish and Spanish ports. The escape of St. Patrick, when a youth, from captivity in Ireland was made by the favor of a party of traders who had among the merchandise they shipped from Ireland a pack of Celtic hounds, a breed highly valued in Southern Europe. It has been plausibly conjectured that Patricius owed his escape to the fact that he had learned to tend such hounds while in the service of his master. That the traffic should be going on at such a period shows that it was a thing of long custom, for the times were not such as to encourage new enterprise. The Vandals, Slieves and Alans entered Gaul at the end of A.D. 406, followed in a few years by the Visigoths. Barbarian bands ravaged the country, looting, slaying and burning, until considerable regions became a desolate wilderness. In his account of his journey with the traders through Southern Gaul after making a landing, Patricius says they journeyed as through a desert for eight and twenty days in all, in danger of dying from starvation.

Christianity must have entered Ireland through the intercourse of trade, its case in this respect being like that of Armenia and Abyssinia. The system of reckoning Easter employed by the Celtic church was obsolete in Rome and in the churches of Gaul before St. Patrick began his apostolic labors in Ireland in the fifth century. Professor Bury, who in his Life of St. Patrick has made an exhaustive examination of the evidence, concludes that this and some other typical differences between Ireland and the continent in Christian practice were due to the fact that an early form of Christianity had taken root before the arrival of St. Patrick. When Ireland made its appearance in European history it was as a center from which radiated a Christianity of a distinctly Celtic type. This implies that Christian doctrine found a cultural basis upon which to organize a native church. The specialist who supplied the Encyclopaedia Britanica article on the "Early History of Ireland" remarks: "The exalted position occupied by the learned class in ancient Ireland perhaps affords the key to the wonderful outbursts of scholarly activity in Irish monasteries from the sixth to the ninth centuries." That this scholarly activity was not an importation of classical learning is attested by evidence that prior to the seventh century the literary documents of the Irish church were composed in Irish. Professor Bury has pointed out that it was not until a later period that compositions in Latin began to appear alongside of literary productions in the vernacular.

[1] It appears from the following, in the weekly edition of the London Times, September 22, 1911, that the legendary history of the Coronation Stone still receives credence:

"Archdeacon Wilberforce, preaching at Westminster Abbey on Sunday, said that it fell to his lot during the preparations at the Abbey for the Coronation to guide to the Coronation Stone a well-known antiquary who had made a study of its history.

"The antiquary was convinced that it was the stone on which Jacob rested his head when he had the vision of angels at Bethel, and that from that night it was considered sacred and carried from place to place. He believed it was that stone that Moses struck, and that it was carried by the Israelites during their 40 years of wandering. He pointed to a big cleft in the back from which the water gushed out. He also indicated two rusted iron staples deeply sunk, one at each end, by which it was carried. He traced the stone to Solomon's Temple, and from thence, after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, to Spain, thence to Ireland, thence to Scone, and from Scotland to Westminster Abbey.

"Mr. E. S. Foot writes from 13, Marlboroughplace, St. John's-wood: 'The late Dean Stanley, in his Memorials of Westminster, pages 594-5-6, sets out the authorities, Professor Ramsay, Director of the Geological Survey of England, and his colleague, Mr. Geikie, who, after minute investigation, were satisfied that the stone is old red sandstone, exactly resembling that which forms the doorway of Dunstaffnage Castle, which exactly agrees with the character of the Coronation Stone itself. "The rocks of Egypt, so far as I know [Mr. Geikie], consist chiefly of mummulitic limestone, of which the Great Pyramid is built. I have never heard of any strata occurring there similar to the red sandstone, of the Coronation Stone." ' "

The case of Ireland, when carefully considered, does not appear to be peculiar as regards ethnic origins. It is not disputed that the Irish are cognates of peoples that have founded highly organized States in England and on the continent. That the Irish did not do so is to be attributed to historical accidents. Of these, the most far-reaching in its effects was the fact that Irish tribal forms of social and political organization were never broken up by passing under the harrow of Roman law. Another important circumstance was that the spread of Christianity in Ireland retained and utilized tribal institutions that on the continent were broken down and discarded. When Charlemagne was hammering Christianity into the heathen Saxons in the eighth century he was smashing their tribal system at the same time. At that period Ireland had been a Christian country for centuries, and was famous as a center of missionary activity and yet it still retained its archaic pattern of social and political organization. The Irish kings, with some vicissitudes, successfully resisted invasions that were triumphant in England. In the first quarter of the eleventh century when the empire of Canute the Dane extended over England, Denmark, Norway, and part of Sweden, Ireland was under native princes whose historiographers could point to a succession of victories over the Northmen, destroying their settlements and uprooting their power.

It was not until the Norman invasion established a State in England with consolidated resources and centralized authority that the military inferiority of Irish institutions was manifested in the relations between the two countries. But while thereafter Ireland remained a prey to English invasion, her tribal polity displayed marked capacity for absorbing the invaders into the mass of native Irish. Irish nationality is a modern concept. Ancient and mediaeval Ireland was a country given over to internecine warfare. Foreign intervention in the aid of some native interest was sought and welcomed. A native chronicler, referring to the Anglo-Norman invasion beginning in 1169, says: "Earl Strongbow came into Erin with Dermod Mac Murrough to avenge his expulsion by Roderick, son of Turlough O'Connor; and Dermod gave him his own daughter and a part of his patrimony, and Saxon foreigners have been in Erin since then."

The Norman adventurers tried to carve the land into feudal fiefs, and the feudal system came into violent conflict with the Irish tribal system, but the latter showed greater endurance. The Anglo-Norman nobles found the vague, customary powers of Irish chiefry more favorable to their authority than the more explicitly defined rights and duties of a feudal lord. When Henry VIII. came to the throne of England in 1509, many old Anglo-Norman families had either disappeared or were merged into the Celtic mass. English polity was restricted to an area extending over a radius of about twenty miles from Dublin, known as the "Pale," and a still smaller area about Kilkenny. Over the greater part of the island Celtic tribal institutions still supplied the legal and political framework of society. It was not until after the accession of James I. that the division of the land into counties was completed, and Ulster the last province to be brought under civil jurisdiction. In Elizabeth's time a scheme of county organization for Ulster was adopted, but there was no machinery of government. Sir John Davies says of the period before Chichester's administration: "The law was never executed in the new counties by any sheriff or justices of assize; but the people were left to be ruled still by their own barbarous lords and laws."

The distinctive characteristics of Irish history may be attributed chiefly to the fact that an archaic type of polity was accidentally preserved to modern times. The struggles and sufferings that ensued from the clash of cultures were such as have always attended such a situation. It was with reference to this that Sir Henry Maine in his Ancient Law remarked: "The history of political ideas begins with the assumption that kinship in blood is the sole possible ground of community in political functions, nor is there any of those subversions of feeling which we emphatically call revolutions so startling and so complete as the change which is established when some other principle, such as that for instance of local contiguity, establishes itself for the first time as the basis of common political action."

When recorded history begins the Greek and the Latin tribes are discovered in the throes of this revolution from which civilization issued.

On the continent of Europe the change took place in the darkness of barbarism and left few records to history. The peculiarity of Ireland's case is that it was, as Lord Bacon observed, the last European country to pass from tribal status to civil polity. But that very circumstance now makes her native institutions specially interesting to scholars. What Bacon deplored as barbarous customs and habits that "enchant them in savage manners" are now the very things in which students are chiefly interested, for detailed knowledge of them would throw light upon the social and political organization of all the Indo-European tribes in the prehistoric period. An elaborate apparatus existed for the perpetuation of the customary laws and historical traditions of the tribe. There were brehons, who were repositories of tribal law; shanahs who were genealogists and incidentally recorders of titles of lands; rhymers who related the deeds of the heroes; and harpers, whose music celebrated the honor of the sept. Biographers of Thomas Moore tell us that his Irish Melodies are based upon Irish folk songs, a fact which must impress one with the variety and refinement of musical rhythms native to Ireland, and also serve to corroborate archaeological evidence to the effect that artistic culture was attained under native institutions.

In thus drawing upon native Irish sources Moore enriched the metrical resources of English verse and established his own best claim to fame. It seems to have been no more than a plain statement of the actual facts of the case when the poet wrote:

"Dear Harp of my Country! In darkness I found thee,
The cold chain of silence had hung o'er thee long,
When proudly, my own Island Harp, I unbound thee,
And gave all thy chords to light, freedom and song!"

The point at which the clash of Irish tribal status and English law was most acute was in the matter of land tenure. Although English law admitted various kinds of tenure in land it was exacting and insistent on the point of individual rights. Under the tribal system surviving in Ireland the individual had no rights as such defined by law, but as a tribesman he had certain traditional privileges in the common lands of the tribe conditioned upon customary dues and service to his chief, so vague that they might vary greatly according to the disposition and opportunity of the chief. The sort of tribal communism that existed in Ireland is exemplified in the following petition of one Neale O'Donnell to Chichester, October 9, 1613:

"It is not unknown to your lordship that the Irish gentry did ever make their followers' purses their only exchequer. And I beseech your lordship (now anew) to take notice that mine ancestors left me as great an inheritance (in this kind) as any other man's did unto himself. Of which stock, as I never employed any part (of things given by myself) unanswerably claim as any Ulcestrian whatever. My humble suit, therefore, unto your honorable good lordship is, that as your honor has restored their commins unto all others, so you would.... help me unto my commins also.... I beseech your lordship, in regard to them, to cause my tenants (or if need be, force them) to bring up my children to school till I otherwise dispose of my commins at least."

These "comynes," for so the term usually appears in the State Papers, denotes a custom based upon the relations of the chief of a sept to his people. He claimed all the lands as his in trust for his people. It is a trusteeship that is merely customary and not legally defined, but it intermingles his private estate and the common wealth. His own exertions belong to his functions as ruler, judge and captain of his people. Instead of gathering wealth into his own possession, he distributes cattle or other goods among his people and in return they provide for his wants, rear his children and meet the expenses of their education. These dues are the chief's comynes. In instructions issued August 28, 1610, for settling claims of comynes, Chichester remarks that some of the tenants and followers of the Irish gentry "have by their customs of comynes gotten into their hands the greater part of those goods and chattels; and are, therefore, in far better estate than their landlords, except there be restitution made of some just portion thereof to him or them from whom the same have been received by way of comynes."

Such facts show how closely the interests of the native gentry were bound up with the maintenance of tribal custom in land tenure. The principal chiefs frequently showed themselves not averse to taking title from the English Crown for themselves, but they were bent on keeping their people in the position of tenants-at-will, their holdings subject to the disposition of the chief. It was the policy of the English Government to break up this dependence of the people upon the will of their chiefs. In one of his early letters from Ireland Sir John Davies pointed out that it was just by such control over tenants that the feudal barons of the Middle Ages were able to carry on rebellion:

"Whereas, at this day, if any of the great lords of England should have a mind to stand upon their guard, well may they have some of their household servants and retainers, or some few light-trained fractious gentlemen to follow them; but as for those tenants who have good leases for years.... those fellows will not hazard the losing of their sheep, their oxen and their corn, and the undoing of themselves, their wives and children, for the love of the best landlord in England."

Just such independence on the part of their tenants the Irish chiefs instinctively feared, and their obstinate resistance to surrendering their tribal sovereignty was the root from which rebellion kept growing. The collective right of the people to the soil, characteristic of Irish tribal polity, has received much praise from writers in our own times as an arrangement securing the individual against social degradation and the pressure of want. So judicial a historian as Lecky says of the Irish clansman: "His position was wholly different from and in some respects very superior to that of an English tenant." His superiority consisted in the fact that whereas the English tenant had to pay rent and in case of default might be ejected, "the humblest clansman was a co-proprietor with his chief." But in practice this co-partnership generally meant that the clansman retained only what his chief chose to leave him. The industrious could not possess for themselves the rewards of their industry, and as invariably happens in all such cases industry did not thrive. There was no motive for people to build and improve, when their accumulations might be appropriated by the chiefs and they themselves be shifted to other fields.

The system kept the people under primitive conditions of pastoral life. Some of the chiefs dwelt in clay houses; others of them followed "creaghting," a term denoting the practice of moving about the country with their live stock, chief and people living in booths made of boughs coated with long strips of turf. Such habitations could be easily run up and lightly abandoned. "Such are the dwellings of the very lords among them," remarks an English traveler who was in the country in 1600. What tillage there was was carried on in the rudest fashion: several horses were fastened each by the tail to a short plough with a man to every horse to urge and direct the animal. In this way they raised oats for their horses and barley for distilling into whiskey. The principal flesh meat of the people was pork, while oatmeal and herbs furnished vegetable food. There were also supplies of milk and butter, chickens and rabbits. There must have been a rude plenty, for it appears that wandering hawkers were familiar visitors to the creaghts, bargaining for country produce. The chiefs passed their leisure time hunting in the woods and coshering among their tenants. "Coshering," from an Irish word meaning feasting or entertainment, denotes the right of the chief to free quarters and supplies for himself and his retinue. This mode of life had such charms that even Anglo-Irish lords adopted it. At this time equally primitive conditions existed among the Celtic peoples of the Scottish Highlands and indeed continued there beyond the eighteenth century. In Lockhart's Life of Scott it is related that on Scott's first visit to the Highlands he found his host and three sons, with attendant gillies, all stretched half asleep in their tartans on the hearth, with guns and dogs, and a profusion of game around them. In an enclosure far below appeared a company of women actively engaged in loading a cart with manure. Scott was astonished to find that these industrious women were the laird's own lady and her daughters.

Some writers of our own times have idealized the pastoral conditions of Celtic Ireland. A good example of the process is given by a brilliant work on Irish Nationality by Alice Stopford Green. She holds that "in the Irish system we may see the shaping of a true democracy, a society in which ever broadening masses of the people are made intelligent sharers in the national life and conscious guardians of its traditions." This projects into the past the ideas of the present, for democracy by its terms is a late, elaborate, complex form of government. In every form of government power must exist and be vested somewhere. That the rule of the people shall actually exist, it must have appropriate institutions securing and defining the public trusteeship of the actual custodians of authority, and this requires a long course of political evolution. Upon close scrutiny all democratic government is found to rest upon apparatus of sovereignty originally formed on the basis of prerogative. Any inquiry into the origin of legal institutions discloses this fact.

The historical process by which modern society was prepared for democratic government through the growth of monarchical power has been accurately surveyed by Sidgwick in his Development of European Polity. The notion that any early form of the State possessed a democratic character is a belated piece of Rousseauism. All anthropological evidence is in agreement that political power in its earliest manifestations takes arbitrary forms. In the primitive form of the State, specimens of which have been detected among the Australian aborigines, political authority is of a piece with family authority, authenticating itself by its mere presence and power. The community commands and disposes of the lives of its units by transactions as instinctive and impulsive as the habits of bees or ants. The advance from primitive savagery into barbarism is marked by differentiations of tissue in the social organism. The formation of the priest class and the warrior class is an invariable concomitant of political evolution, and the development of class consciousness precedes the diffusion of public consciousness. The notion of individual rights is a late development of political evolution, marking a very advanced stage in the growth of the linguistic apparatus of thought. No such stage had been reached in Celtic Ireland. At the opening of the seventeenth century its institutions retained their barbarian pattern although those institutions were in their dotage.[2]

Authentic traditions indicate that in the pre-Christian period the priest class was a mighty power in the State, but that period had long passed away. The warrior class, however, still remained, its arrogance the greater because all social counterpoise had been removed. Its members are frequently referred to in the State Papers of the period as kerns, galloglasses or swordsmen. They had the typical characteristics of their class wherever found under tribal polity: disdain of labor, jealous guardianship of traditional privilege, fierce tenacity in adhering to their customary rights to public support. Everywhere as advancing civilization eliminates rapine from among the economic resources of the community, the pretensions of the warrior class have raised difficulties in the way of establishing public order. One of the early tasks of European kingship was to put down the robber knights; and the work was not fully performed until the invention and improvement of artillery had transferred the art of war from a hand-made to a machine-made basis. The Irish galloglasses--and their close kin, the moss-troopers of the Scottish Highlands--were survivals of a type that had long since been extirpated in the area of European civilization. Themselves proud of their rank and its adventurous activities, they were detested by the settled agriculturists of the Scottish Lowlands and of the Irish Pale as savage ruffians and cattle thieves. Blackmail was paid to the Rob Roys of Ireland as in Scotland. The Irish State Papers contain accounts of payments of tribute to the "wylde Iryshe" even by the King's officers as a regular charge in public accounts. Returns in the time of Henry VIII. show a yearly tribute amounting to 740 pounds paid as the price of immunity from molestation.

The seventeenth century antiquary William Camden has given us a picture of the Irish fighting-men, a company of whom accompanied Shane O'Neal when he visited the Court of Queen Elizabeth in the fifth year of her reign. Camden says the "axe-bearing galloglasses" were "bareheaded, with curled hair hanging down, yellow surplices dyed with saffron, long sleeves, short coats and hairy mantles." These hairy mantles were the pelts of wild animals, probably wolf skins. The dexterity and skill with which the galloglasses wielded the broad battle-axe are celebrated in English accounts of the Irish wars. A long sword, mailed tunic and iron helmet completed the equipment as formed on the military practice of the times, but the Irish never took well to armor, preferring to fight in their saffron coats. The kerns were light-armed footmen, who fought with a skean, or sharp-edged dagger, and a javelin.

The domination of these warriors was not compatible with conditions such as can properly be designated as democratic. They helped themselves as of right and the common people submitted with customary deference, but grudgingly. Any growth of individual ownership, privacy of habitation or enclosure of land was in derogation of their class privileges and made the offender a mark of attack. It is not necessary to offer evidence to support so obvious a proposition as that customs permitting an idle soldiery to rove about the lands of the clan quartering themselves on the people could not be favorable to morality. In urging upon Queen Elizabeth his claim to the Earldom of Tyrone, the succession to which was in dispute, Shane O'Neal remarked in his petition: "Being a gentleman, my father never refused no child that any woman namyd to be his." In a letter of May 4, 1606, Sir John Davies remarks that "by reason and impunity of the common use, the bastard is of as good reputation as the legitimate, and doth commonly share the inheritance with him."

The difficulties ensuing from the collision of civilized polity with tribal polity were aggravated by religious differences, and to this cause may be chiefly attributed the marked divergence between Celtic Scotland and Celtic Ireland in their modern history. The Reformation was a unifying influence in Scotland, a divisive influence in Ireland. When Henry VIII. began his war upon papal authority the ancient Celtic Church, which in its day had made Ireland a center of Christian activity, had long since disappeared, and the establishment that had absorbed it had become full of the abuses characteristic of the times. The Irish chiefs were as ready to share in the spoil of Henry's confiscations of church property in Ireland as the English nobles were in England. The English governors of Ireland at the time of the accession of James did not anticipate much trouble in securing conformity in matters of religion.

In a letter to the home Government, December 8, 1605, Sir John Davies remarks that "touching this work of reformation" he was strongly persuaded that "it would have a general good success, for the Irishry, priests, people and all will come to church" under official pressure. He mentions how the mass of the people in England had yielded to their rulers in the matter of religion, and remarks that "the multitude was ever made conformable by edicts and proclamations." This expectation was speedily disappointed. For one thing, the establishment of religion by English law was made odious by the character of bishops and clergy. There were illustrious exceptions, but at the time of the accession of James the general situation was base. In a report written some time in 1604, Chief Justice Saxey describes the bishops as "priests of Jeroboam, taken out of the basest of the people, more fit to sacrifice to a calf than to intermeddle with the religion of God." Writing in 1606, Sir John Davies says that he is informed that:

"The churchmen for the most part throughout the kingdom were mere idols and ciphers, and such as could not read; and yet the most of them, whereof many were serving men and some horseboys, were not without two or three benefices apiece. Nevertheless, for all their pluralities they were most of them beggars; for the patron or ordinary, or some of their friends, took the greater part of their profits by a plain contract before their institution.... And what is the effect of these abuses? The churches are ruined and fallen down to the ground in all parts of the kingdom. There is no divine service, no christening of children, no receiving of the sacrament, no Christian meeting or assembly, no, not once a year; in a word, no more demonstration of religion than among Tartars or cannibals."

This religious desolation afforded a field for missionary labor, cultivated with such zeal and energy by the religious orders of the Roman Catholic Church that the people were gathered into that communion and confirmed in their attachment as never before. Whatever grounds for Sir John Davies' opinion of Irish pliability existed when it was uttered, they were soon conclusively removed. The friars who had been turned out of doors by Henry's suppression of the monasteries had in large numbers continued to work and preach among the people, and under the chastening influence of adversity the immoralities formerly charged against some of them tended to disappear. The restoration of discipline and the purification of morals were really facilitated by the prostrate condition of the church. No legal obstacles would be raised against correctional measures taken by ecclesiastical authority that was itself outlawed. Among the Irish State Papers for 1613 there is a report on the work of a Franciscan friar that doubtless gives a faithful picture of activities characteristic of this period. At a meeting in the county of Londonderry the friar had before him all the priests of those parts to the number of fourteen. "He prayed long, exhorting them to reform their wicked lives, telling them of drunkenness, whoredom, and lack of devotion and zeal." The friar did not depend on exhortation alone but applied sharp discipline. The report goes on to say that he "compels all priests to put away their wives and whores, or else he deprives them of their living and makes them incapable to say mass or exercise their functions."

Such acts imply possession of large ecclesiastical authority. The State Papers afford plenty of evidence that persons described as wandering friars must in fact have been high dignitaries of the Church of Rome. Eventually the Government obtained lists of bishops that had been ordained and commissioned to the work in Ireland. The Jesuits, who flocked into Ireland in large numbers, displayed an energy and an activity that alarmed and incensed the Government officials. In a report sent to the home Government October 27, 1607, the Lord Deputy and Council say that priests and Jesuits land in every part, sometimes a dozen together and then disperse themselves:

".... in such sort that every town and county is full of them, and most men's minds are infected with their doctrines and seditious persuasions. They have so gained the women that they are in a manner all of them absolute recusants. Children and servants are wholly taught and catechised by them.... They withdraw many from the church that formerly had conformed themselves; and others of whom good hope had been conceived, they have made altogether obstinate, disobedient and contemptuous."

The movement that the Government officials describe with so much acrimony they found it impossible to arrest. The Reformation cut Scotland and England away from the papal see, but left Ireland more firmly united and more deeply loyal than before, but this religious divergence is to be attributed rather to historical circumstances than to any peculiarities of the Irish character. It is sufficiently accounted for by the Counter-Reformation by which abuses were corrected, morals were purified and faith was revived within the communion of the Church of Rome.

This revival of spiritual energy was in full vigor at the time when the Irish people were practically unchurched. The situation afforded large opportunity to the missionary zeal then abounding and it was utilized with such energy and devotion as to stamp the national character. Within a decade there was a change for the better in the condition of the established church; but it came too late to recover lost ground, and the outlawed Church of Rome remained in secure possession of the loyalty of the Irish masses.

It is clear enough now that in dealing with this situation wise statesmanship would have sought to connect the interests of the masses of the people with the system of law and order which it was proposed to introduce. The conversion of tribal right into legal right should have been accompanied by an equitable distribution of the land among chiefs and people. Virtually this process is going on in our own times under the operation of the land laws, by schemes of purchase and re-allotment sustained by the public credit, and the ultimate effect will undoubtedly be a transformation of Irish social and political conditions. The time is approaching when it will appear that Irish character is no more inadequate to sustain orderly and efficient government than any other European stock. It is a matter of race discipline and race experience rather than of innate disposition. The qualities of shiftlessness and improvidence proverbially attributed to the Irish peasantry used to be imputed to the French peasantry before the changes in land tenure accomplished by the French Revolution. But such penetrating treatment of the situation was beyond the thought and capacity of statesmanship at the time of the Ulster plantation.

Sovereignty was too undeveloped, the State was too lacking in efficient organization to cope with such tasks as the equitable transfer of a people from a tribal to a legal status. Outside of the limited area known as the Pale there were no judges, no juries, no sessions of the courts in Ireland. The clansmen lived under the customary law of the septs, administered by their chiefs. The situation was something like that which confronted the English in India nearly two centuries later, when they acquired administrative authority over peoples among whom English law did not extend, and actuated by considerations of administrative convenience they set up a landlord system that disregarded the customary rights to the soil of the actual cultivators, converting them from co-proprietors into tenants-at-will. It eventually turned out that the arrangement perpetrated injustice, but at the time it presented itself as a public necessity.

It is easy to criticize the administrative shortcomings of one age from the mature knowledge and experience of a later age, but that is not the way to obtain insight. To appreciate the character of any age one must read down to it and not back to it. To understand the nature of events one must view them in genetic order. The English administrators in Ireland, working by the light of their own times, felt no scruples as to the wisdom and justice of their plans for reclaiming Ulster from barbarism. The lands were escheated to the Crown as the result of the treason of the lords. What more proper course to pursue than to do as had often been done in England itself, turn the lands over to the loyal lords, for occupancy by them and their retainers! No scruples as to the propriety of the course actually pursued appear to have been felt by anybody except Chichester, and his were based on practical and personal considerations. He thought it would have been wiser to make a more liberal provision for the native Irish and he feared that his own promise to the Irish had not been sufficiently respected.

Measures by which it was sought to break up Irish tribal institutions had long been pursued. In the time of Elizabeth severe laws were passed against bards and "shanachies," or historians of the clan. Soon after the accession of James the courts declared illegal the native system of inheritance known as tanistry and gavelkind, based upon the principle of collective ownership. This had been frequently recommended by English administrators in Ireland, who regarded it as a necessary reform. A State Paper of 1611 set forth among "Motives of Importance for holding a Parliament in Ireland" that "all the possessions of the Irish shall from henceforth descend and be conveyed according to the course of the common law of England, and not according to the barbarous customs of tanistrie or gavelkinde." Religious conformity was aimed at by a series of laws and proclamations against recusancy, which were futile save as sources of irritation and which Chichester came to regard as so troublesome and impolitic that eventually he resigned rather than administer them.

These measures belong to Irish history in general, and in view of the colonization which took place they were of less immediate importance in Ulster than elsewhere. The great administrative task in Ulster was to dispose of the warrior class. It was thought that since their trade was fighting the best thing to do was to send them into foreign service. Sweden then ranked as a powerful State aiming at empire, and her wars with Russia, Poland and Denmark attracted military adventurers, including many from Scotland. In 1609 it was arranged that 1,000 Irish fighting-men should be sent to Sweden. Writing from Fermanagh, September 18, 1609, Chichester says that he had accepted the submission of two chieftans in that county with their followers, "who so freely proffered themselves to this service for avoiding further danger by the prosecutions he made upon them." When ships arrived to transport them to Sweden Chichester had a different tale to tell. In a letter, October 8, 1609, he says that "idlers and swordmen everywhere (especially in the province of Ulster) now withdrew themselves into the woods." Before the end of that month, however, three ships sailed from Derry with 800 men. Another ship was about departing from Carlingford when the swordmen seized the ship and tried to run her ashore so that they might escape. Chichester acted with characteristic energy, mustering a force that attacked the ship with boats and put down the mutiny. Some of the ringleaders were hanged. This ship seems to have been doomed to disaster, for it was soon wrecked on the Isle of Man and had to put into a port of Scotland for relief. There another ship was hired, but this was driven into Newcastle where a body of the Irish escaped.

Chichester had a low opinion of swordmen. To speak generally," he said in one of his reports, "they were all but an unprofitable burden of the earth, cruel, wild, malefactors, thieves." But he had the discernment to observe that it would be good policy to utilize their own native customs and habits of allegiance to their chiefs. Writing to the English Privy Council, October 31, 1609, he recommends that in making levies for foreign service he be allowed "to appoint the commanders, such as he in his knowledge and experience of them shall think most popular with the nation; for they will distaste and avoid all strange commanders." This anticipates the policy pursued by the elder Pitt a century and a half later when he extracted the spirit of turbulence from the Highland glens by forming the clansmen into regiments officered by their chiefs. In Chichester's day the regimental system did not exist, and armies were composed of casual levies. Chichester found that the swordmen did not like to enter the Swedish service, an antipathy readily accounted for when it is remembered that the King of Sweden was a Protestant champion and that the influence of the Roman Catholic missionaries was now active among the people. Chichester twice urged the Privy Council that the swordmen be employed in the service of Russia rather than of Sweden, but nothing appears to have come of the suggestion. Nevertheless, it appears from Chichester's own statement that he sent away 6,000 men for service in the Swedish wars.

The removal of so large a number of the warrior class seems to have aided in the pacification of the country. It appears that the common people were patient and submissive as the Undertakers and their followers made their entry upon the land. On September 24, 1610, Sir John Davies wrote to the home Government in a characteristic strain of cheerful optimism. He remarks that the natives were choosing to be tenants-at-will rather than receive land as freeholders "for which they would be compelled to serve in juries." Davies proceeds: "All the Irish (the chief lords excepted) desire naturally to be followers, and cannot live without a master, and for the most part they love every master alike, so he be present to protect and defend them." And therefore he is of opinion that, "if they were once settled under the servitors, the bishops, or others who may receive Irish tenants, they would follow them as willingly, and rest as well contented under their wings, as young pheasants do under the wings of a home-hen, though she be not their natural mother."

Chichester, the soldier, showed a more penetrating judgment of the situation than Davies, the jurist. Writing about the same time that expressed his confidence in the tranquility of Ulster, Chichester expressed doubts as to the prospects of the plantation:

"But to hinder the same the natives of those countries will do what in them shall lie, for they are generally discontented, and repine greatly at their fortunes and the small quantity of land left them upon the division; especially those of the counties of Tyrone, Ardmagh and Colerayne, who having reformed themselves in their habit and course of life beyond others and the common expectation held of them (for all that were able had put on English apparel, and promised to live in townredes, and to leave their creaghting) had assured themselves of better conditions from the King than those they lived in under their former landlords: but now they say they have not land given to them, nor can they be admitted tenants, which is very grievous unto them."

Chichester complains that he himself has been discredited by the proceedings of the land commissioners, and "he prays that he may not be guided by any directions of theirs, for they know not Ireland so well as he does, especially Ulster." He points out that the grievances of the common people afford grounds upon which the priests can stir up disaffection. He remarks:

"The priests now preach little other doctrine to them, but they are a despised people, and worse dealt with than any nation hath ever been heard or read of; for being received to mercy upon their humble submissions, their bodies, goods, and lands were taken into the King's protection, but now they are injuriously thrust out of their houses, and places of habitation, and be compelled, like vagabonds, to go they know not whither."

Chichester concludes that "how ill soever they be disposed, he sees not how they can rebel in any great numbers unless they have assistance of arms and munition from foreign parts." Nevertheless he suggests that it would be wise to treat them with more consideration. Chichester has been represented as a hard, ruthless soldier, whose policy in Ulster is marked by covetousness, but his own pen has unconsciously drawn for us his true portrait as a man who excelled his contemporaries in justice and discernment.

Before the Ulster plantation began there was already a considerable Scottish occupation of the region nearest to Scotland. These Scotch settlements were confined to Counties Down and Antrim, which were not included in the scheme of the plantation. Their existence facilitated Scottish emigration to the plantation, and they were influential in giving the plantation the Scottish character which it promptly acquired. Although planned to be in the main an English settlement, with one whole county turned over to the City of London alone, it soon became in the main a Scottish settlement.

END OF CHAPTER II.