as had obtained possession of them had been first reprised. According to the Irish agents 47,000 acres were still in 1664—5 withheld from innocents for this cause.[1]
The unheard innocents and those who claimed the articles of peace obtained no redress. Some may have repurchased their former lands; others became tenants of what they had formerly owned, thus starting the class of "middlemen"; the bolder spirits took service with foreign states, or as Tories harassed the new settlers. The weaker starved or sank into the condition of peasants. In some cases the former tenants supported, for a time at least, their old landlords, paying a double rent, or giving them free quarters according to the old Irish custom in their houses.
Sir H. Piers in his account of Westmeath says that the ancient and noble family of the Barons of Rathconrath were then represented by a shoemaker, and a couple of poor cottagers. A German traveller of the early days of the nineteenth century tells how he found in the hands of an illiterate peasant on the Lansdowne estate an official copy of the deed of partition made by the Elizabethan Commissioners in 1594 of the lordship of Bere and Bantry between Sir Owen O'Sullivan, his brother Philip the Tanist, and his nephew the celebrated Donnell of Dunboy. Questions elicited the fact that the peasant was the direct descendant of Philip whose share had been the castle of Ardea and 6 ploughlands.[2]
