Life of Sir William Petty 1623 - 1687/Chapter II
CHAPTER II
THE DOWN SURVEY OF IRELAND
1652-1658
The actual fighting in Ireland had terminated with the fall of Limerick and Galway; and when Dr. Petty arrived in 1652, the population which had escaped the sword, or had not fled the country, was anxiously awaiting the decree of the conquerors.
Acting, it has been said, on the suggestions of Harrington, the author of 'Oceana,' and probably influenced by the example of the extirpation of the princes and kings of Canaan by the chosen people of God, and by the success of the plantation of Ulster in the reign of James I., the Government of the Commonwealth had resolved on a vast scheme for colonising the country with new settlers, in order thereby to secure the English connection, as it was thought for ever.
Before the actual commencement of hostilities between the King and the Parliament, 2,500,000 acres of Irish land had been pledged, in 1642, to those who should 'adventure' the money necessary in order to raise an army to put down the rebellion of the native Roman Catholic population. One of the last acts in which Charles concurred with his Parliament was in giving the Royal assent, however unwillingly, to this measure, which in the clauses relating to finance and those limiting the exercise of the royal prerogative of pardon, bore the impress of the suspicions of the Parliamentary leaders, that the sympathies of the King were as much with the Irish rebels, in whom he saw possible allies, as with his own army, in whom he recognised probable foes. The force so raised, however, never crossed St. George's Channel at all, for the funds, having found their way into the Parliamentary treasury, were used for equipping the armies of Essex and Manchester, which fought at Edgehill and Newbury. Subsequently fresh advances were made; and owing to the everincreasing necessities of the Commonwealth, the adventurers, under the 'doubling ordinance,' became entitled to receive double the original allotment for an increase of one-fourth in the amount advanced.[1]
When Ireland was finally conquered, it was by a portion of the New Model Army of Cromwell and Fairfax, aided by some Royalist regiments which, after the second flight of the Marquis of Ormonde, took service with the Commonwealth against the native rebellion. The arrears of pay to all these regiments formed a second category of the obligations of the Government, and it was proposed to satisfy them out of Irish lands at 'adventurers' rates.' The debt due to the latter was 360,000l.; that due to the army was put at 1,550,000l. A third category of creditors consisted of a number of persons who had advanced money on various occasions to help the necessities of the Commonwealth, or to whom money was owing for salaries and otherwise.
The whole matter had been dealt with by an Act passed on August 12, 1652, and by two Orders of Council of June 1 and June 22, and a set of further instructions of July 2, 1653; all ultimately recited and incorporated in an Act of Parliament, passed on September 26, in the so-called 'Little Parliament.'[2] The Church and Crown lands were thereby appropriated to the use of the Commonwealth, and also the estates of all proprietors who, having lived in Ireland during the recent troubles, could not prove that they had shown 'constant good affection.' This meant in practice the confiscation of the estates of all the heads of the ancient Roman Catholic native population, and of most of the old Anglo-Irish nobility, some Roman Catholics, some Anglican Churchmen, but all more or less involved in resistance to the Commonwealth, with but few exceptions. They were bidden to migrate across the Shannon into Connaught, unless they preferred to go abroad, which by a liberal system of subsidies they were encouraged to do. Dr. Petty calculated that 34,000 of the best fighting population—the chiefs and the 'swordsmen'—had accepted the alternative and had fled the country:
'Amazement in the van with flight combined,
And Sorrow's faded form and Solitude behind.'
The Presbyterians in Ulster and the English merchants in the walled towns, who mostly belonged to that religious connection, fared little better than the Roman Catholic landowners. They were indeed the ancient enemies of prelacy, but their sympathies were known to have been with the Scotch army, which the Independents had recently defeated at Dunbar and destroyed at Worcester. They were, therefore, ordered to make way in favour of the victors. Thus the whole of the upper and middle classes of Ireland were crushed in a common ruin. So entirely had the original inhabitants, except the poorest, been driven out of Dublin, that it was next to impossible to find a Roman Catholic physician or even a Roman Catholic midwife, and Dr. Petty with other medical men was ordered 'to consider of the evil and propose a remedy.'[3]
With a view to the distribution of the forfeited lands to the creditors of the State, a survey and measurement was contemplated by the Act. The debt due to the 'adventurers' was primarily charged on the forfeited lands in the moieties of ten counties, which were to be divided equally by them with the soldiers, as it was considered that peaceable possession would be thereby secured to the civilian owners, viz.: Waterford, Limerick, Tipperary, Meath, West Meath, King's County, Queen's County, Antrim, Down, Armagh, and on the whole county of Louth as an additional security. The arrears of the soldiers were charged on the forfeited lands in the remaining halves of the above counties, and in the counties of Deny, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Cavan, Monaghan, Wexford, Kilkenny, and Kerry.
The Government reserved to themselves all the walled towns, all the Crown and Church lands, the tithes, and the forfeited lands in the four counties of Dublin, Kildare, Carlow, and Cork for distribution among distinguished supporters of the Parliamentary cause, and to satisfy public debts. The adventurers were to be satisfied next, and then the army. Of the adventurers' debt, 11,000l. was charged on Munster, 205,000l. on Leinster, and 45,000l. on Ulster; and it was settled that on July 20, 1653, a lottery was to be held in Grocers' Hall, London, the lots to decide first in which province each adventurer was to have his allotment, and then in which of the ten counties it was to fall. The lots were not to exceed, in Westmeath, 70,000l.; in Tipperary, 60,000l.; in Meath, 55,000l.; in King's and Queen's Counties, 40,000l. each; in Limerick, 30,000l.; in Waterford, 20,000l.; in Antrim, Down, and Armagh, 15,000l. each.
Connaught had originally been reserved in its entirety for the Irish owners, but subsequently Sligo and part of Mayo and Leitrim were taken away from the Irish and allotted to a part of the army which had fought in England in the recent campaign, and was still unpaid. When these transactions were concluded, the proportion of land forfeited in Connaught was found to exceed that in the remaining provinces of Ireland.[4] Donegal, Leitrim, Longford, and Wicklow were given to the garrisons of the Munster cities, which, before 1049, had served the King, and, after the defeat and the departure of the Marquis of Ormonde, had passed from the Royal to the Parliamentary cause. Certain special reservations were also made in Dublin and Cork for maimed soldiers and the widows of those who had perished in the war; and well-affected Protestants and English owners, who might wish to leave Connaught in consequence of the Irish transplantation, were offered the opportunity of receiving lands of equal value on the left bank of the Shannon.
Such was the general scheme in outline, but large powers of adjusting details were left to the Irish Council of State, which was entrusted with the execution of the Act. The formation of an Army Commission, to distribute the lands to the soldiers when the survey was finished, was provided for by the Act.
It was one thing, however, to make a general arrangement of this kind, it was another and far more difficult task to carry it out. A survey and map was the first thing needed, but surveying was an infant art, and nothing of the kind existed, except in Tipperary and in some parts of Connaught, where, during the reign of Charles I., Strafford had instituted and partly carried out a survey.
There were said to be 85,000 claimants of land in all, and the Act settled nothing, except that 1,000 Irish acres, equal to 1,600 English measure, in the counties situate in Leinster were to represent 600l., in the counties situate in Munster 450l., and in those situate in Ulster 300l. of debt; the Act rates being 12s. per Irish acre in Leinster, 8s. in Munster, and 4s. in Ulster, the latter being considered the poorest of the three provinces.
In the period between the end of the war and the year 1653, rough lists of the proscribed had been drawn up, and courts had been held to determine who could clear themselves of the charge of conspiracy in the late rebellion, and prove constant good affection. But a large category of 'dubious lands,' as they were called, still remained, which awaited a further and final inquiry, and these both the army and the adventurers were now clamorously demanding should at once be assigned to them. The army also confidently expected that if the adventurers were satisfied first, a large surplus would remain, which they could in that case claim for themselves, and their eyes specially turned to the rich lands of the County Louth, part of which they hoped would ultimately fall to their share. Meanwhile, like the adventurers, the army proceeded to draw a first 'lot,' in order to decide in which province each regiment was to receive their share of the 'satisfaction.'
The amount of army arrears being ascertained and the amount of acres they represented, partial attempts had been made in 1653 to distribute lands amongst some of the regiments,[5] but an accurate method for identifying each lot drawn with any particular parcel of land on the spot was wanting. Quartermaster-General Goulding, for example, might have a debt of 232l. 14s. 9d., which, calculated at the army rates in Connaught, was worth in the County of Sligo 465 a. 1 r. 24 p.; but how was Quartermaster-General Goulding to know where his particular 465 a. 1 r. 24 p. exactly lay, and prove his title against all comers to enter on those lands and no others, and keep them on a secure title; and how was he, on the other hand, to prove that he had not obtained a great deal more than he was entitled to by force and impudence, or by fraudulent or incompetent measurements?
Owing largely to the weakness of Fleetwood, the violence of the officers of the army in Ireland, stimulated by personal greed and cloaked by religious pretensions, had reached such a point by the end of 1653, that the Protector determined on a complete change of administration, and sent over Henry Cromwell on a mission of inquiry, intending that he should ultimately replace Fleetwood, who was under the influence of the military and fanatical party. It was also determined to institute a general scheme of survey and apportionment as the Act directed. The first plan set on foot was to make what was termed a 'Grosse Survey,' or list of forfeited lands in each barony, with brief descriptive notes. Maps were directed to accompany this survey, and some undoubtedly were made.[6] But the work, which was commenced in August 1653, proceeded very slowly, and when the results began to be seen, was at once attacked, by some for want of accuracy, by others for the interminable time which it seemed likely to occupy before completion; and it was also generally criticised for the manner in which it appeared to be carried out for the benefit of powerful individuals.
The Surveyor-General, Benjamin Worsley, had arrived in Ireland at the same time as Dr. Petty. He also was a member of the medical profession, but what were his qualifications as a surveyor does not precisely appear. Dr. Petty described him as one who 'having been frustrated as to his many severall great designs in England hoped to improve and repaire himselfe upon a less knowing and more credulous people. To this purpose he exchanged some dangerous opinions in religion for others more merchantable in Ireland, and carried also some magnifying glasses,' by means of which Dr. Petty, who seems to have underrated his abilities,[7] says he impressed an ignorant public with a vast idea of his scientific attainments. He was a dealer in schemes for a universal medicine, for making gold, sowing saltpetre, establishing a universal trade, taking great farms, and other visionary plans, all of which excited the wrath of the practical and scientific mind of Dr. Petty, who described them as 'mountain-bellied conceptions.'[8]
The scheme of survey attempted by him, so far as it was carried out, was to make a survey of forfeited lands only, without any reference to the civil territorial limits; and barren land was to be excepted from it, unless included by situation within the area of profitable land.
The payment was to be in proportion to the area surveyed, at the rate of 40s. per 1,000 acres of land, whether profitable or unprofitable. Dr. Petty at once perceived the defects which lay on the face of Worsley's plan. The rate of payment, in Dr. Petty's opinion, was excessive. There was also no check on the returns of the surveyors, and it was open to question whether the instructions to them complied in several respects with the Act of Parliament on which they were founded. The men employed, Dr. Petty said, were not 'skilled artists' at all, but mostly, as he thought, 'conceited and sciolous persons' at whose proceedings Worsley, whether from pride or ignorance, or actuated by worse motives, winked, with the approbation, as Dr. Petty believed, of his influential and highly-placed patrons.
Dr. Petty, in fact, suspected the Surveyor General of being as inefficient in his profession as the recently discomfited Apothecary-General had been proved to be in his purchase of drugs, and he expressed his opinion, as to these 'miscarriages,' to Worsley himself, and proceeded to 'admonish him,' recommending him 'skilled artists' for his work. Worsley did not relish his advice, and preferred that of his own nominees—persons whom Dr. Petty termed 'mere bulks and outsides.' The quarrel deepened, and Dr. Petty came to the conclusion that Worsley was dishonest as well as ignorant.
The first great disbandment of the army took place in 1653, and some distributions were actually made in 1654 to those who were most clamorous. These Dr. Petty impugned at once, believing that the public was being robbed; and he proceeded, as he says, to attempt to persuade 'several sober and judicious persons in the businesse, that the way of Survey the State was upon was a mistake.'[9] He found a willing listener in Henry Cromwell, who, from the time of his first arrival in Dublin on his mission of inquiry, had become the object of the attacks and misrepresentations of the powerful Anabaptist faction with which the Protector was at this moment wrestling in England. Henry Cromwell, unable to conceal his disgust at high pretences of religion combined with an almost unlimited rapacity in the affairs of this world, resolved, after trying to stave off a quarrel as long as possible, to risk a formal rupture.[10] 'Men,' he wrote to Secretary Thurloe, 'have taken that from the State for which they paid 20l. p.a. rent, and have immediately let it out again for 150l. per a.; and, Sir, this is to be made good in above 40 particular instances; and 'tis feared that all your lande in Ireland is let at this rate. I know three men that took 18,000 acres of the Commonwealth's land in the County Meath for 600l. p.a., and let it out again for 1,800l. Sir, and these were Commissioners instructed with letting your landes. Another let to himself being a Commissioner, for 400l. p.a., and the State to bear the contribution, that which was at the same time let by the State for 800l., the country being at the same time as well stocked and planted as it is now.'[11]
Other difficulties involving a different set of considerations were also arising. The transplantation of the native Irish into Connaught had not been adopted without considerable doubts in many quarters, both in England and in Ireland, as to the soundness of the policy. Vincent Gookin, member for Kinsale and a Privy Councillor, was the mouthpiece of the opposition. He was the son of Sir Vincent Gookin, in former years a constant opponent and unsparing critic of Strafford in the government; and from his father—reputed in his time the most independent man in the country—he had inherited a bold heart and a ready pen. He was the special adversary of the rule of petty military despots, whether Irish or English. Dr. Petty, himself sprung from the middle rank in life, was willing enough, like Gookin, to see the power of the old military chiefs broken and their strongholds wasted; but to decree the practical ruin of the whole population and to replace them by a body of English officers, was, he agreed with Gookin, a different affair, and they jointly prepared a 'Discourse against the transplanting into Connaught,'[12] declaring it on public grounds a wasteful transaction and contrary to sound policy.
'Mercy and pardon' as to life and estate had indeed been decreed in favour of 'all husbandmen, ploughmen, labourers, and artificers,'[13] and others of the inferior sort; for the chosen people, it was recollected, had found the Gibeonites useful in Palestine as hewers of wood and drawers of water. But all the landowners who had not fled over sea, and their retainers, were to cross the Shannon. Many had already fled the country. The land was already free from the old Irish military party. Nobody at least could deny that. 'The chiefest and eminentest of the nobility, and many of the gentry, have taken conditions from the King of Spain, and have transported 40,000 of the most active spirited men, most acquainted with the dangers and discipline of war.' Such is the grim epitaph of the ancient chiefs and nobles, which the authors of 'The Discourse' recorded in their book. Some went to France and enlisted in the royal armies, others took service with the King of Spain and the King of Poland. Europe was full of Irish Roman Catholic exiles eager for revenge. The widows and orphans, the deserted wives and families of the 'swordsmen,' experienced a worse fate. They were kidnapped and shipped wholesale into the West Indies, the slave-dealing merchants of Bristol achieving a pre-eminence in the nefarious traffic, which their previous experience enabled them to organise with advantage and profit to themselves. Unmerciful passion blinded every religious party, with a few trifling exceptions and with only differences in degree, to the teachings of the gospel of justice and mercy, of which each professed to be on earth the special representative. But even in the seventeenth century, and amid the tumult of conflicting religious animosities, the voice of human nature could occasionally make itself heard; and the views of Gookin and Petty, neither of whose characters were exactly cast in a sentimental mould, found an echo in England.
'The cause of the war,' Petty said, 'was a desire of the Romists to recover the Church revenue, worth about 1,100,000l. per annum, and of the common Irish to get all the Englishmen's estates, and of the ten or twelve grandees of Ireland to get the Empire of the whole.'[14] These grandees had led the Irish people into the troubles out of which they themselves emerged defeated and ruined. But admitting this, and admitting also, as Vincent Gookin and Petty both did, that in consequence 'it was for the security of the English and the English interest to divide the Irish one from the other, especially the commonalty from the chiefs,' they argued that it was not, therefore, necessary to drive out also all the proprietors who could not prove 'constant good affection.' Further, the peculiar constitution of Irish society and of the land system must, they saw, cause an enormous mass of their dependents, their tenants, their retainers and labourers, to be driven out with them, notwithstanding the exemptions of the Act; and it was therefore not true to say that only proprietors and men in arms were being ordered to go.
The authors of the rebellion and massacres, those who had led the people to commit the atrocities which had so deeply stirred the public conscience, 'the bloody persons,' were, Gookin and Petty argued, 'all dead by sword, famine, pestilence, and the hand of civil justice; or remain still liable to it; or are fled beyond sea from it; the priests and soldiers (the kindlers of the war in the beginning and fomenters of it since) are, for the first, universally departed the land, and for the second, to a vast number and the most dangerous; and the remaining are weary of war, having long since submitted; and those that are out sue for nothing but mercy. For the poor commons the sun never shined, or rather not shined upon a nation so completely miserable. There are not 100 of them in 10,000 who are not by the first and fourth articles of the Act of Settlement under the penalty of losing life and estate. The tax sweeps away their whole existence. Necessity makes them turn thieves and Tories, and then they are prosecuted with fire and sword for being so. If they discover not Tories, the English hang them; if they do, the Irish kill them.' It was possible, no doubt, to reply with Colonel Lawrence, who published an answer, that technically no promiscuous transplantation was intended; but a promiscuous transplantation was none the less going on, and that it would not even have the merit of success, was the opinion of the two critics.[15] 'The unsettling of a nation,' they pointed out, 'is an easy work; the settling is not,' and the transplantation could have but one result—the permanent mutual alienation of the English and the Irish, and the division of the latter between a large discontented garrison beyond the Shannon and scattered bands of pillaging Tories on this side of the river. Such bands were already sufficiently numerous, owing to the heavy taxes and to 'the violence and oppression of the soldiery,' which had driven even loyal men into rebellion and despair. A settlement of the country, they fully admitted, was obviously needed; but it should have for object to detach the people of the country from lawless courses, instead of driving them into madness by injustice.
The anomalous result of the rates of distribution under the Act was another matter which had struck Henry Cromwell. At the existing rates he saw that 'one might have a thousand acres worth more than 1,000l., and another in the same barony a thousand acres not worth 200l.' The great desideratum of Ireland, he reported home, was to secure honest commissioners and incorrupt judges; but it was next to impossible to find either. Meanwhile, the Exchequer of the Commonwealth, both in England and Ireland, was empty, and the financial situation critical in the extreme. Some decisive step evidently had to be taken, and on September 6, 1654—while Fleetwood was still at Dublin—an order appeared from the Commissioners of the Commonwealth of England for the affairs of Ireland, stopping the further progress of the Survey, and prohibiting the distribution of lands under it.[16]
A crisis had arrived. A new set of instructions was drawn out for the Lord Deputy and his Council. They were ordered to devote their whole care to improving the interest of the Commonwealth; they were to provide for the advancement of learning, to try to establish the finances of the country on a sound basis, and while maintaining true religion and suppressing idolatry, popery, superstitions, and profaneness, they were given full power to dispense with the orders of the late Parliament and Council of State for transporting the Irish into Connaught, if, on full consideration, it should prove for the public service to do so.
The prospect was fair. But now occurred one of those fatal and unforeseen coincidences which dash the cup from the lips of expectation and destroy the plans of statesmen. In the midst of the events just described, the news arrived, with all the harrowing details, of the enactment in the South of Europe of even worse horrors than those which were being perpetrated in Ireland; with this difference only, that the part of persecutor and persecuted was reversed.
In 1650 the congregation 'de Propagandâ Fide' had established a local council at Turin. Duke Charles Emmanuel II. of Savoy yielded to the Jesuits, and an order was issued that the Protestants, known as Waldenses in the Alpine valleys which converge near Susa, should be exterminated. Measures were concerted with France, and an attack from both sides of the mountains was arranged for 1653; as in a matter of this kind it was desirable, in the opinion of France, to make concessions to the Pope. A large body of the Irish refugees, who had just entered the Spanish service, were at the moment discontented with the terms of their enlistment, and resolved to pass over the Pyrenees. Attracted by the promise of pay and plunder, they made thence for Italy. On their march they were said to have vaunted 'that they had massacred the English Protestants in Ireland,' and that they would 'now tear in pieces and crucify quick any of the religion' they might find elsewhere.[17] Early in January 1654 they were near Nimes, one of the principal Protestant cities of France, and owing to these boasts they were not allowed to come within the walls. Thence they passed on into Piedmont, and took service with the Duke. Soon the barbarities which, with other soldiers of fortune, they exercised against the unoffending inhabitants of the Alpine valleys, were a household word in every Protestant home in Europe. The adversaries of the Irish confiscations were now swept away in a fierce torrent of national indignation, and the nascent feeling of pity, which was beginning to make itself felt in England, was rudely crushed. 'The distressed and afflicted people of God,' the officers in Ireland wrote in a memorial to the Protector, 'have so bitter a portion, even a cup of astonishment, put into their hands to drink by that scarlet strumpet who makes herself drunk with the blood of the saints, because they refuse to drink of the wine of the fornication. What peace can we rejoice in when the whoredoms, murders, and witchcrafts of Jezebel are so mighty?'[18] An Irish plot, fomented by the Jesuits, to murder the Protector was also suspected. Two of the ambassadors of the Commonwealth, Dr. Dorislaus and Antony Ayscam, had actually fallen under the knives of assassins abroad.
The atmosphere was heavy with anxiety. Dr. Petty relates how, at Dublin, in the midst of the controversies about the settlement of the country, 'his Excellency, the Lord Deputy, meeting in the Castle with several officers of the army, they together did resolve freely to contribute and subscribe towards the relief of the distressed Waldenses;'[19] and that the officers voluntarily agreed to give a fortnight's pay and the private soldiers one week's pay, and many still larger sums. The Cavaliers and the Irish were regarded as engaged in one evil business. 'The latter,' said Fleetwood, 'are an abominable, false, cunning, and perfidious people.'[20]... 'As to what you write concerning our transplantation here,' he told Thurloe, 'I am glad to understand you have a good sense of it; though it hath been strangely obstructed and discouraged by the discountenance it hath received from England. There is no doubt as bad, if not a worse, spirit in these people than is in those of Savoy. We are on the gradual transplantation, though the hopes the people have from England of a dispensation makes them keep off, and not transplant so readily as otherwise they would, if their thoughts were free from expectations out of England.'[21]
The transplantation, it was now resolved, was to be proceeded with. In vain did Gookin go over to London and publish his book there. 'A scandalous book,' Fleetwood wrote to Thurloe. In vain did he make a particular protest to the Protector on behalf at least of the 'ancient Protestants' whose case was peculiarly hard, and might have been expected to excite commiseration in the minds of their co-religionists. Exasperation and personal greed were together too strong, and the fatal order was issued.
But it was at least possible, though the policy of transplantation was not to be altered, to prevent a carnival of jobbery and confusion in connection with it. The Council accordingly announced the adoption of a new plan, which was entirely to supersede the former survey. It was decided to make a preliminary inquisition over the whole country and to prepare accurate lists of the forfeited lands; and the work of surveying was to be entirely separated, at least for the time, from that of mapping.
Thus was set on foot the 'Civil Survey,' so called because it was carried out by the civil authorities and not by soldiers. Like its predecessor, it was in substance a gross or estimate survey. Commissions were issued to bodies of commissioners for each county, except where the survey made in Strafford's time already supplied a sufficiently accurate account of the lands in the district, their area, value, and ownership. It was to comprehend not only the forfeited lands, but all other estates and interests belonging to the State as successor to the Crown, and was in fact an attempt to make a land register.[22] 'This improved and most important descriptive survey,' says Mr. Hardinge, 'was not intended for the sole purpose of supplying lists of lands to be measured and mapped and then cast aside as useless, as would be the result had it related to forfeited lands only; but it comprehended all other estates and interests—the Crown's hereditary estates, ecclesiastical and unforfeited, corporate and lay estates and possessions. Many persons are under the impression that the civil survey was designed as the basis of the satisfactions afterwards made to the soldiers for arrears of pay due to them, and that it was rejected by the Government in consequence of the complaints of its inaccuracy. Such an impression is altogether erroneous. This survey was not designed for the purpose assumed. It was a preliminary work, essential to the discovery and description in a legitimate and solemn manner of the forfeited lands, and from which lists, technically called "terriers," were afterwards supplied to the several surveyors, for their admeasurement and mapping.'[23]
While the work of the Commission was proceeding, Dr. Petty was summoned to place before the Council his own plan for the mapping of the lands. The forfeited estates corresponded, as a rule, with former territorial jurisdictions—some very ancient—which had become the basis of the more modern division into baronies, themselves divided into parishes and townlands; just as in the early history of England the boundaries of what were originally the lands of villages became those of manors, and, later in the history of the country, again became those of civil divisions, such as parishes and other units of administration.
Ireland, Dr. Petty pointed out, was divided into 'provinces, countries, baronies, parishes, and farm lands,' but formerly, he said, 'no doubt it was not so, for the country was called after the names of the lords who governed the people; for as a territory bounded by bogs is greater or lesser, as the bog is more dry and passable or otherwise, so the country of a grandee or tierne became greater or lesser as his forces waxed or waned; for where was a large castle and garrison, there the jurisdiction was also large.' As a rule the boundary between the lands of these grandees was the line of the division of the waters 'as the rain fell,' and these divisions were the basis of the larger civil territorial divisions of the country, the provinces, counties, and baronies; while as to the smaller divisions, the 'townlands, ploughlands, colps, gneeres, bullibos, ballibelaghs, two's, horsmen's, beds, &c.,' they corresponded with the lands cultivated by certain societies of men, from an early period, or with the lands of particular men, or with land allotted to a planter, or to a servitor as a reward for service, or as the endowment of a religious cell. The baronies varied in size from 8,000 to 160,000 acres.[24] Starting from the basis of these various civil divisions, Dr. Petty now proposed to survey the country and then map out the whole of the forfeited lands; first surveying all known territorial boundaries and the natural divisions, whether rivers, woods, bogs or other, and then to set out such auxiliary lines and limits in addition to the county, barony, and townland boundaries, as were necessary for constructing a map of the forfeitures, and for the ultimate subdivision amongst the claimants according to the average of their commuted arrears.
The whole task he undertook to perform in thirteen months from an appointed day,[25] 'if,' he said, 'the Lord give seasonable weather and due provision bee made against Tories, and that my instruments be not found to stand still for want of bounders.'[26] He offered to accept payment either at the rate of 6l. per 1,000 acres, or a gross sum of 30,000l., out of which he was to pay expenses. 'Upon the fielde work, it being a matter of great drudgery to wade through bogs and water, climb rocks, fare and lodge hard,' he said he would instruct foot soldiers, to whom such hardships were familiar.[27]
The committee reported that the plan was far superior to Worsley's, who confessed himself 'gravelled' at the Doctor offering to complete a task in thirteen months which he had calculated would last as many years.
Worsley, however, was not easily beaten, and, having influential supporters, obtained a further reference to the Committee of the Council, to which some fresh names were added at his suggestion. But, notwithstanding this attempt to pack the tribunal, the committee decided against him.
Their report was as follows:
'In obedience to your Honour's reference, dated the 10th instant, wee have taken into consideration the businesse concerning the management of the surveys, and after a full debate thereupon, doe humbly offer, upon the reasons mentioned in our first report, that the lands to be sett out for the payment of the army's arrears and other public debts, be surveyed down as is proposed by Dr. Petty.
'Dated the 16th of October, 1654. Signed in the name and by the appointment of the rest of the referees.
The idea of a survey in the present day is indissolubly connected with the notion of a map; so much so that as a rule the name has come to be applied to the map itself which is the result of the survey, as much as to the preceding inquiries on which the map is founded. But the Civil Survey was simply a specification of lands, recorded in lists, with brief descriptive notes as to acreage and value, and partook of the character of what in modern days is called a valuation list or register. There were no maps attached to it, and the scheme of a general map, though present to the minds of the authors of the 'Grosse Survey,' had hitherto never been effectually carried out, though commenced here and there. Dr. Petty now undertook both to survey, to admeasure, and to map; and from the wording of his report just quoted, the work carried out by him came to be known as the Down Survey, because it was to be surveyed down on a map, unlike the Civil Survey, which, as already stated, consisted of lists of lands only with their extent and value.
Worsley, however, was not yet beaten, and he claimed a detailed examination of the report by the full Council, which in consequence had again to go into the matter. Then arose obstruction upon obstruction. The former surveyors, it was said, had not been properly considered, and it was wrong to employ soldiers. Worsley also, cleverly using the weapon given him by his rival's opposition to the transplantation, intimated that Dr. Petty 'intended to employ Irish Papists,' to which Dr. Petty relates 'that it was answered (1) by denyall, (2) by acquainting the Council that there was noe more danger to have the measurer a Papist than the meresman, which for the most part must be such,'[29] because they were the only persons who knew the boundaries. Eventually these and other difficulties were got over; and on December 11, 1654, 'after a solemn seekinge of God performed by Col. Tomlinson, for a blessing on the conclusion of so great a business,' the preliminary articles of agreement, which had been signed on October 27, were finally adopted in a more detailed shape.[30] Dr. Petty thereupon completed his securities, obtaining valuable assistance from Sir Hardress Waller, one of the Cromwellian officers in high command in Ireland; and he then entered into a contract with the Surveyor-General to perform the work in the specified manner. Orders and warrants were issued by the Council for the necessary supply of meresmen, for the delivery by Worsley within thirty days of the lists of the forfeited lands, and for access to the records of the previous surveys; and a Committee of officers was appointed to meet at Dublin, on February 1, 1655, to consider the best mode of allotting the lands amongst the regiments.[31]
Under his contract, Dr. Petty undertook to survey, admeasure, and map all the forfeited lands, profitable or unprofitable, barony by barony and parish by parish, down to the smallest known civil denominations,[32] together with all Crown and ecclesiastical lands. Where any civil denomination was in excess of the lot or number of acres due to any officer or soldier according to the amount of his commuted arrears, it was to be subdivided and mapped out into smaller parcels by the help of auxiliary limits, but except for this express purpose, no 'surround' smaller than forty acres was to be separately surveyed and admeasured. All the particulars requisite for the proper distribution of the forfeited lands amongst the claimants were to be entered from the records of the Civil Survey upon the face of each map, such as the names of the owners and the area, with the quality and estimated value. Plotts, or maps, were to be laid down on a scale of forty perches to an inch, and, with the corresponding information and references marked out upon them, were to be delivered to the officers and soldiers on demand, provided that no separate map was to be required of any proportions less than 1,000 acres.[33] The work, it was agreed, was to be completed in thirteen months dating from December 11, 1654, allowing one year more for complaints or appeals against it; but in consideration of the unavoidable delays which took place in the early stages of the work, the date was ultimately postponed to thirteenth months, from February 1, 1655. The rate of payment agreed upon was 7l. 3s. 4d. per 1,000 acres of forfeited profitable land, of which one penny per acre was to be paid by the army, and the rest by the State. The Church and Crown lands were to be mapped at the rate of 3l. an acre. Under his agreement Dr. Petty was to deliver maps of the forfeited lands with perfect plots of each townland thereon, with the necessary sub-divisions and books of reference, corresponding to the reports of the Civil Survey, when complete, into the office of the Surveyor-General.[34]
By separate articles he engaged to map and project, in addition to the maps of the forfeited estates, the bounds of all baronies and townlands within the before-mentioned counties, whether forfeited or not, so that in each province perfect and exact maps might be had, for public use, of each province, county, and barony,[35] and for this work he was to receive a payment, the amount of which at the moment does not seem to have been specifically stated.
As to the survey and admeasurement of the adventurers' lands, nothing for the moment was determined.
It will thus be seen that he undertook two things which had no necessary connection with each other, viz. a survey and admeasurement with maps on a large scale of the forfeited lands; and also the preparation of a general county and barony map of the whole of Ireland, for public use and convenience.
The Act expressly provided that no surveyor or other officer employed in the execution of this survey, during the time of his employment, should be allowed to become a purchaser of land, unless with the consent of the Parliamentary Commissioners appointed under the Act. It was further expressly provided that it should be open to Parliament to pay the surveyors with land, if it were found more convenient than to pay in money: a possibility more than likely to be realised in the embarrassed condition of the finances of the Commonwealth.
The war was over. The division of the spoils was about to commence. 'As for the blood shed in those contests,' Dr. Petty afterwards wrote, 'God best knows who did occasion it; but upon the playing of the game or match the English won, and had amongst other pretences a gamester's right at least to their estates.'[36] He had not himself been concerned in the original quarrel, and he now simply regarded himself as a servant of the State called upon to perform a definite duty.
While he disapproved much of what had been done, his work, he thought, would at least prove of permanent advantage to the nation, and the nature of it appealed to his imagination and his scientific tastes. He entered on his gigantic task, thinking that besides his pay 'he should receive monumentall thanks, and not sufficiently considering,' as experience taught him, 'that too great merit is more often paid with envy than with condign reward.' When it had been completed he looked forward to returning to the study of natural philosophy, thinking his present task 'might prove rather an unbending than a breaking of that bow.' 'I also hoped,' he wrote, 'to enlarge my trade of experiments from bodies to minds, from the emotions of the one to the manners of the other; thereby to have understood passions as well as fermentations, and consequently to have been as pleasant a companion to my ingenious friends as if such an intermission from physic had never been.' In this last respect, at least, he was fully gratified, and in after years, still harping on his favourite analogies from the field of medicine, he said he had in this business 'gotten the occasion of practising on his own moralls; that is, to learn how, with smiles and silence, to elude the sharpest provocation, and without troublesome menstruums, to digest the roughest injuries that ever a poor man was crammed with.'[37] A watchful rival was watching his footsteps, to whom perhaps in some respects he had been unfair, and whose powers of mischief, like his abilities, he rated too meanly. This rival had influential friends amongst the extreme religious fanatics of the Anabaptist connection, who hated the Doctor as an unsound theologian, and also among the eager gang of military claimants who were ready to plunder the State which they professed to serve, expecting the officers of the survey to connive at their misdeeds, and ready to be revenged on them if met with resistance. Such was the position. For better or for worse, Dr. Petty was now about to leave the calm life of a scientific student, and the peaceful practice of the art of medicine, for the stormy sea of political strife in a peculiarly troublous time. The following letter to Robert Boyle may, therefore, be deemed no unfitting termination to the narrative of this period of his career:
'A letter from Mr. William Petty to the Honourable Robert Boyle, Esq., dated from Dublin, April 15, 1653.
'Sir,—Being not able to write you any such complements as may delight you, nor to enforme you of any such more real matter as might profit you, I desire that those my deficiencies, together with my usual rudeness, may be taken for the cause of this long silence. Now indeed I am forced to communicate with you, even to keep up the face of the visible church of philosophers; for by Mr. Worsely his going for England and Major Morgan's absence in the North, there is no such thing now left at the headqters. If there be any other reason of these lines besides this, and to beg my continuance in the number of your affectionate servants, it is to dissuade you from some things, which my lord of Corke, my lord of Broghill, and some other of your friends think prejudicial unto you: one whereof is your continual reading. Here, like a Quacksalver, I might tell you how it weakens the brain, how that weakness causeth defluxions and how those defluxions hurt the lungs and the like. But I had rather tell you that although you read 12 hours per diem or more, that you shall really profit by no more of what you read, than by what you remember; nor by what you remember, but by so much as you understand and digest; nor by that, but by so much as is new unto you, and pertinently set down. But in 12 hours how little (according to these rules) can you (who know so much already) advantage yourself by this laborious way? How little of true history doe our books contain? How shy is every man to publish anything either rare or useful? How few opinions doe they deliver rationally deduced but from their own principles? and lastly how few doe begin their tedious systems from principles possible, intelligible and easy to be admitted?
'On the other side, what a stock of experience have you already in most things? What a faculty have you of making every thing you see an argument of some usefull conclusion or other? How much are you practised in the method of cleere and scientifical reasoning? How well doe you understand the true use and signification of words, whereby to register and compute your own conceptions. So well are you accomplisht in all these particulars, that I safely persuade myself, but that your modesty thinks every scribler wiser than yourself, that you can draw more knowledge and satisfaction from two hours of your own meditation, than from 12 hours endurance of other men's loquacity. For when you meditate, it is always upon some thing that you are not yet cleere in (and a little armor will serve, being put upon the right place); but when you reade, you must take your chance and perhaps be corrupted with lies, disgusted with absurdities, and tired with impertinencies; or made ready to vomitt at the bis (imò centies) recocta crambe offered unto you. Besides what a difference is there between walking with our naturall legs, and crutches? or betweene a cloth, whose subtegmen is the same from end to end, and another peeced up out of a 1000 gaudy rags? But the proverb (verbum sapienti) forbids me to be more tedious. The next disease you labour under, is your apprehension of many diseases, and a continual fear that you are always inclining, or falling into one or other. Here I might tell you of the vanity of life; or that to fear any evil long, is more intolerable, than the evil itselfe suffered; &c.
'But I had rather put you in mind that this distemper is incident to all that begin the study of diseases. Now it is possible that it hangs yet upon you, according to the opinion you may have of yourself, rather than according to the knowledge that others have of your greater maturity in the faculty. But ad rem. Few terrible diseases have their pathognomonical signes. Few know those signes without experiences of them, and that in others rather than themselves. Moreover; the same inward causes produce different outward signes; and, vice versa, the same outward signes may proceed from different inward causes, and therefore those little rules of prognostication found in our books, need not always be so religiously believed. Again 1000 accidents may prevent a growing disease itselfe, and as many can blow away any suspicious signe thereof, for the vicissitude whereunto all things are subject suffers nothing to rest long in the same condition; and it being no further from Dublin to Corke, then from Corke to Dublin, why may not a man as easily recover of a disease, without much care, as fall into it? My Cousen Highmore's curious hand hath shewn you so much of the fabrick of man's body, that you cannot thinck, but that so complicate a piece as yourself will be always at some little fault or other. But you ought no more to take every such little struggling of nature for a signe of a formidable disease, then to fear that every little cloud portends a cataract or hurricane. To conclude, this kind of vexation hath been much my own portion, but experience and these considerations have well eased me of it.
'The last enditement that I bring against you, is practising upon yourselfe with medicaments (though specifics) not sufficiently tryed by those that administer or advise them.
'It is true, that there is a conceipt currant in the world, that a medicament may be physick and physician both, and may cure diseases a quâcunque causâ. But for my part I find the best medicament to be but a toole or instrument: now what are Vandijcks Pencills and Pallet in the hands of a bungling painter, to the imitation of his pieces? Recommendations of medicaments doe not make them useful to me, but doe only excite me to make them so, by endeavouring experimentally to find out the vertues and application of them. There be few medicaments that can be more and more really praised than diafalma and Basilian; for they have been carryed up and down in all chirurgeons' salvatoryes for these many hundred years. Yet how few can perform any excellent cures by them or such others? How hard it is to find out the true vertues of medicaments. As I weep to consider, so I dread to use them, without my utmost endeavours first employed to that purpose.
'Though none of these arguments prevaile with you, yet I shall pray that nothing of evil consequent to the things, from which I have dissuaded you, prevail upon you. The desire of your encrease in knowledge, and (in order thereunto) of your health, hath made me thus troublesome; for if what I have said, came from any other principle, I should be ashamed to write myselfe thus confidently
'Dublin, 15 April, 1653.'
While the preliminaries of the survey were being arranged, the struggle between the supporters of Henry Cromwell and of Fleetwood had continued. Although the latter treated Dr. Petty with great confidence, he was personally too much under the influence of the Anabaptist officers to throw over Worsley. The fortunes of Dr. Petty and his rival accordingly varied in regard to the survey, according to the advantage gained by one side or the other in the general political contest. The final result depended to a great extent on events in England; and when, after the dissolution of Cromwell's First Parliament in January 1655, the breach between the Protector and the fanatical party had greatly widened, the issue in Ireland was no longer doubtful. It was known to be a mere question of time how soon Fleetwood would leave. After several journeys to and fro, Henry Cromwell finally took up his official residence at Dublin in July 1655, and, owing to the emptiness of the Exchequer, it was decided to proceed with the second great disbandment of the army at once. Fleetwood retired to England in the September following, still retaining, however, the title and precedence of Lord Deputy. Dr. Petty could now feel secure, and he entered on his task with confidence.[39]
He found his ablest assistants in his cousin John, who shared his own talents in mapping and surveying, and in Mr. Thomas Taylor. No less valuable were the services of Mr. James Shaen, who had already been employed as one of the Commissioners for the Civil Survey: a man of great parts and energy, but prone to believe, in whatever was being done, that his own and none other could be the organising head and hand. He was inclined to become the enemy and rival of whoever was placed above him, and was probably equally hostile both to Worsley and Dr. Petty.
On April 12, Dr. Petty received from Worsley the instructions to be observed in making up the books of reference, which, when completed, were, with the maps, to be returned into the office at Dublin. He then proceeded to organise a staff of one thousand persons, consisting of forty clerks at head-quarters, and a little army of surveyors and under-measurers, who worked on the spot in each district.
'In all these arrangements,' says a contemporary account, 'he had vast opposition, while he in a manner stood alone. But he was wont to meditate and fill a quire with all that could in nature be objected, and to write down his answers to each. So that when any new thing started he was prepared, and as it were extempore, to shoot them dead. And as the distribution required exactness in accounts and method, and was a dangerous work, for that the great officers expected to get the parts they had coveted, which going by rate would disappoint, he was forced to show wonders of his own sufficiency by being ready at all points. This in like moment he composed by early meditation of all that could happen, so that he retailed everything to their disadvantage. When, upon some loud representations, the rest of the Commission would refer to him, stating all that had passed (which seemed to require a week's work), he would bring all clearly stated the next morning to their admiration. His way was to retire early to his lodgings, where his supper was only a handful of raisins and a piece of bread. He would bid one of his clerks who wrote a fair hand go to sleep, and while he ate his raisins and walked about, he would dictate to the other clerk, who was a ready man at shorthand. When this was fitted to his mind the other was roused and set to work, and he went to bed so that all was ready.'[40]
He applied the principle of division of labour to the making of his instruments, 'considering the vastness of his work.' 'One man made measuring chains—a wire-maker; another magnetical needles with their pins, viz. a watch-maker; another turned the boxes out of wood and the heads of the stand on which the instrument plays, viz. a turner; another the stands or legs—a pipe-maker; another all the brass-work, viz. a founder; another workman, of more sensitive head and hand, touched the needles, adjusted the sights and cards, and adapted every piece to each other.' Time-scales, protractors, and compasse-cards were obtained from London, 'whither also was sent for "a magazine of royale paper, mouth glue, colours, pencilles, &c."' A uniform size of field book was determined upon, and, where necessary, the surveyors were furnished with small French tents and portable furniture, as it was to be expected that in the wasted counties they would often find neither house nor harbour. Great trouble was taken to secure the most trustworthy meresmen in each barony, and to organise the department of accounts as perfectly as possible. 'But the principal division of the whole work,' Dr. Petty relates, was 'to make certayne persons such as were able to endure travail, ill lodging and dyett, as alsoe heatts and colds, being men of activity that could leap hedge and ditch, and could alsoe ruffle with the several rude persons in the country; from whom they might so often expect to be crossed and opposed. The which qualifications happened to be found among several of the ordinary soldiers, many of whom having been bred to trade, could read and write sufficiently for the purposes intended. Such therefore, if they were but heedful and steady minded, though not of the nimblest witts, were taught.'[41] The same principle of dividing the labour as much as possible was carried out in the actual work of the survey, one set of men being employed to value the land and to fix what was profitable and what was unprofitable; another to do the actual measurement; another to make up the books of reference; and another to draw and paint the maps; and a few of the 'most nasute and sagacious persons were employed to supervise, and prevent scamping and frauds.' Finally, and in order, as he says, 'to take away all byass from the under measurers to returne unprofitable for profitable, or vice versâ, he himself having engaged in an ensnaring contract begettinge suspicioun of those evils against him, in as much he was paid more for profitable than unprofitable,' the supervisors were directed 'to cast up all and every measurer's work into linary contents, according to which they were paid.... The quantity of line which was measured by the chain and needle being reduced into English miles, was enough to have encompassed the worlde ne'ere five times about.'[42] He also drew up a set of instructions for the office work, to prevent fraud and dishonesty. These the highest authorities have pronounced clever and judicious, and have themselves incorporated into modern practice.[43]
The amount of lands forfeited in each province was in Leinster about one-half; in Ulster about one-fifth; in Munster about two-thirds; in Connaught about three-quarters; in the whole kingdom about eleven-twentieths of the total amount forfeited.[44] The head rental of the lands of Ireland was reserved as a source of revenue by the new Government as the legitimate successor of the Crown, but it was remitted for five years. Subject to the head rental it was now determined to proceed to redistribute the whole of the confiscated estates among the adventurers, the army, and the creditors of the Commonwealth.
The Civil Survey of most of the baronies had been completed before the end of March 1655. On February 1 of that year the measurement and mapping of the army lands by Dr. Petty actually commenced, and proceeded as the lists and information came in from the Civil Survey Commissioners.
Dr. Petty's staff had to contend not only with the natural difficulties of the country, but also with the opposition of the native Irish, who identified the progress of the work with the loss of their own possessions. Notwithstanding the protection afforded by the garrisons, several of the soldiers and surveyors were captured and killed by the 'Tories.' Eight, for example, were taken by Donagh O'Derrick, commonly called 'Blind Donagh,' near Timolin, in Kildare, carried off into the mountains, and, after a mock trial, executed.[45] But these difficulties were not sufficient even to retard the work in any material degree. The places of the missing soldiers were rapidly filled, and owing to the skilful division of the labour employed, the survey advanced continuously.
The original plan had been to carry out the survey of the lands and the distribution to the allottees together, the latter being intended to commence immediately on Dr. Petty reporting the completion of his survey over any district sufficiently large to be distributed regimentally. Owing, however, to various delays occasioned by the disputes amongst the committee of officers, to differences of opinion on several points of detail which arose at the commencement of the work near Dublin, to the constant appearance of fresh grantees from England, and the complications caused by the partial distributions which had taken place in some districts under the Grosse Survey to favoured individuals before Dr. Petty's appointment, the original intention had to be abandoned, and the distribution definitely severed from the survey.[46] The partial distributions referred to had been mainly for the benefit of some of the higher officers, who had not only managed to get a start in point of time, but also to get 'the trust of the distribution mainly committed to the persons concerned themselves.' It was very difficult to ascertain what had been done, and a general suspicion of unfairness and corruption hung over the whole of these transactions. When he began his work Dr. Petty says, 'No amount of what was then done ever did appear as a light unto what was further to be done,' and 'the affair was in an altogether ragged condition by reason of the precedent irregular and somewhat obscure actings, anno 1553 and 1555, and other uncertainties of debt and credit, as also of clashing interests.'[47]
Nor did the confusion grow less as the inquiries of the Civil Survey Commissioners proceeded. When their estimates first began to come in, it had been believed that the moiety of the ten counties allotted to the army would only satisfy the debt up to a maximum of 12s. 6d. in the pound. As, however, the work of Dr. Petty advanced, his accurate methods began to reveal the fact that in all probability the extent of the forfeited lands had been underestimated. The committee of officers thereupon demanded that they should be at once paid two-thirds of the claim and receive the remaining third afterwards. Owing, however, to the crippled condition of the finances of the Commonwealth, the Council declined the proposal in regard to the remaining third, and the committee reluctantly agreed to accept in lieu a promise that if, at some future time, it were found possible, they would be paid the balance in lands contiguous to the original allotment; a promise which the officers felt it would in all probability be impossible to carry out in practice, and was therefore regarded as little better than a mockery. This decision laid the seeds of future bitterness which rapidly grew; for soon it was more loudly declared than ever that a sufficiency of land evidently existed for the satisfaction of the whole army debt in full. The army committee accordingly petitioned that the regiments now about to be disbanded might be put into speedy possession of their full and entire satisfaction, according to the Act of Parliament, offering, if it was found on a final account being taken of the whole business, that any parties entitled had been shut out, to compensate the losers in money.[48] They also pointed to the four counties reserved by the Government as in their opinion equitably within their own claims should any lands in them remain ungranted, especially if the adventurers, who technically ranked first, had previously been satisfied in full, and anything still remained unallotted.
The Council, however, which by this time had passed entirely under the influence of Henry Cromwell, finding the financial situation to be even more serious than it had been believed to be, decided against the demand of the officers to be satisfied in full.[49] A furious controversy at once sprang up, and many of the officers threatened to refuse to take up their allotments, irritated, no doubt, by the sight of their more fortunate colleagues who had got satisfied first in the haphazard and questionable manner already described.[50] Meanwhile, the officers who in the early distributions had gained this unfair advantage were representing themselves as aggrieved, and were asking for more; probably hoping that this was the best means of at least retaining possession of what they had got. The Council, however, refused to be intimidated by any of the contending factions. 'Liberty and countenance,' Henry Cromwell said, 'they may expect from me, but to rule me or rule with me I should not approve of.' They were therefore informed that it was intended that the overplus of the lands, if any, which might remain after the satisfaction by the two-thirds payment was, owing to the financial necessities of the situation, 'to lye entirely together for the better convenience of the Commonwealth and remaining part of the army,' and that whether the exact proportion paid would ultimately be two-thirds, or some other proportion, must depend on circumstances. This decision in no way satisfied the claimants; and to Dr. Petty, as he himself points out, it became the cause of 'great and unexpected hardshipps,' as most unjustly, he was made responsible for it by the officers, who quite understood that under the terms, however courteous in appearance, there lay a hardly concealed intention of using whatever surplus lands might ultimately be found to exist, for the payment of expenses of the survey and of the other growing debts of the Commonwealth, civil and military, which the statutory reservations already made were insufficient to cover.[51]
By April 1656 the greater part of the undertaking was finished; in the autumn of that year the work was complete. Dr. Petty then proposed that proper arrangements should be made for the official examination, and it was accordingly referred by the Council to a committee, who reported favourably on the execution of the task. It was next submitted to "Worsley as Surveyor-General, but he alleged various defects and omissions, and urged them with great pertinacity. To these criticisms Dr. Petty replied, pointing out the difficulties, especially the absence of ready money and the confusion of the country, under which the work had had to be performed, and that the omissions in question were all in way of being completed and were to be traced to the above-mentioned circumstances. He therefore formally applied to the Council to give back the contract, and release his securities. This application was referred to the Attorney-General, who recommended that the Doctor's application should be granted. The Council, however, at Worsley's instigation, still for a time delayed giving their assent, but ultimately decided that the work had been properly performed. The bond was then cancelled and the contract given back, to the great vexation of the persons who had constituted themselves the critics of the work, and had prophesied a failure.[52]
'Mr. Worsley,' says Dr. Petty, 'rackt himself and his brains to invent racks for the examination of my work: not unlike the policy of the Church of Rome, as it was deciphered to me by Monsieur Cantarine, that priest whom we were wont to admire for his wit, notwithstanding his feeding and age. This priest and self were eating together at the image of St. Ambrose, our ordinary, and together with us a mad and swearing debauchee. After dinner I asked M. Cantarine what penance they used to impose upon such lewd fellows; he answered me: "Very little, for," said he, "they would do little, if we should, and rather neglect the very Church than put themselves to any pains that way; which when they do, they come no more to us, but become incorrigible hereticks. But," said he, "they be the Bigotts and Devout Persons whom wee load with penance, and on whom wee impose all the scrutinies imaginable in their confession; because such care, and will submit to us therein." In like manner, because I was willing to give content in all things reasonable had I unreasonable things put upon mee, always enduring a more than Inquisition-like severity.'[53]
While these events were taking place, the committee of the adventurers, sitting at Grocers' Hall, London, had become involved in interminable discussions, but at last, in September 1656, they decided to entrust the survey and admeasurement of their lands to Dr. Petty and Worsley jointly. An order and instructions were accordingly issued by the Council, in regard to the forfeited lands in the counties on which the adventurers had a joint claim with the army, to those in Louth and Leitrim, and to those escheated, but as yet not admeasured, in the remaining counties of Ireland. The lands in the liberties of Galway and Athenry were specially excepted from this order, because they were appointed for the satisfaction of the regicide, Colonel Whalley, and they were confided to the superintendence of Dr. Petty by orders of April 3 and December 29, 1657. Thus was begun 'the second great survey,' which was carried out on the same lines and by the same persons as the first, and proceeded with equal regularity and speed.[54]
Owing to the disputes already described between the different categories of officers and soldiers, the provision in the contract by which Dr. Petty had engaged to mark out at once the subdivision by name amongst the allottees on his maps had, as already seen, been unavoidably dispensed with, and the actual allotment for the time adjourned. Meanwhile, the lists of forfeited lands prepared by the Civil Survey Commission and the maps, had been returned into the Court of Chancery. But when, owing to the firmness of Henry Cromwell, the disputes had at last been brought to some kind of at least superficial settlement, the work of distribution had to be entered upon. This was really a far more difficult matter than even the survey which preceded it. In the first, Dr. Petty had had mainly to contend with the natural difficulties of the country; in the second, whoever was entrusted with it would have to wrestle with the fiercest passions of the human heart, excited by greed and ambition.
Henry Cromwell, weary at last of the opposition of a few interested critics, had insisted that there should be no further delay, and on May 20, 1656, the Council decided that the lands allotted to the army should be distributed according to Dr. Petty's maps and admeasurement by a committee of agents or trustees chosen by the army, as contemplated by the Act, and without necessarily waiting for the previous distribution of their lands to the adventurers, who, as already seen, technically ranked first. But a large committee was evidently useless, and after long and acrimonious disputes, the distribution was ultimately delegated, through the determination of Henry Cromwell, on May 20, 1656, to a committee of six, and eventually on July 10 following to an executive of three—Dr. Petty, Vincent Gookin, and Colonel Miles Symner—the last an officer who appears to have been persona grata to the party of the Protector, and is described by Dr. Petty as 'a person of known integrity and judgment.' Subsequently Mr. King was added to their number. The choice was remarkable. It indicated the triumph of the ideas of the civilian party over the rapacity of the officers, and the defeat of the fanatical section amongst the latter.
The larger committee of six would, it was hoped, have composed the differences among the officers before the distribution began, for it had been discovered at an early period that the Act rates produced the gravest injustice, as lands varied as much in value between particular counties as they did between the provinces. To obviate this injustice, a system of equalising the rates as between the different counties in each province had been agreed upon by the Committee of Officers before casting the lot, which decided to which county each regiment was to be assigned. But it soon was noticed that lands varied just as much in value in the baronies and in the smaller denominations as in the counties, and fresh complaints arose. After much discussion the system of equalisation was extended to the baronies, and the plan on which the lands of the army were distributed was ultimately arranged as follows. The regiments in each province having settled in which county and barony each was to be located, the forfeited lands were then arranged on a string or list, barony by barony; and finally, a lot or ticket was made for every troop or company, with the arrears marked on it which were due in each case, and the total number of acres they represented subject to the equalisation, with the names of the several officers and soldiers. A species of ballot, or 'boxing,' as it was called then, determined in what barony the lot fell for each troop or company; and finally, the lot of each officer and soldier in the smaller civil denominations and the order in which they ranked.[55] The equalisations made by the officers, notwithstanding their attempt at redressing the most glaring inequalities, were at best of a very rough and ready description. 'They were made,' Dr. Petty afterwards wrote, 'as parties interested could prevail upon and against one another by their attendance, friends, eloquence, and vehemence: for what other foundation of truth it had in nature I know not.' The army had indeed signed a paper in which they all declared 'that they had rather take a lott upon a barren mountaine as a portion from the Lord, than a portion in the most fruitful valley, upon their own choice;' but when Providence gave 'a lott upon a barren mountaine,' then too often the contrast with the more fortunate possessor who had obtained 'a portion in a most fruitful valley' became more than the minds of even the elect could endure. 'The principal care,' says Dr. Petty, 'was to avoid the County of Kerry because of its reputed poverty;' and resort was had to every kind of device to obstruct the ways of Providence in fixing a portion from the Lord in that particular district.[56] 'This party of men,' says Dr. Petty, 'although they all seemed to be fanatically and democratically disposed, yet in truth were animals of all sorts, as in Noah's Ark.'[57] 'The great officers expected to get the parts they had coveted,' and were ready to make everybody who stood in their way suffer for their opposition. Owing to these furious ambitions and jealousies, the hope that the committee of officers would be able to settle all the differences amongst the allottees before the distribution began, was disappointed, and the commissioners, of whom Dr. Petty by the force of circumstances became the directing hand, owing to his technical knowledge, had now to settle for themselves the burning question of what proportion of each claim was actually to be paid, and also to decide how to deal with the earlier allottees, as well as to settle many minor points.
In order to arrive at a just decision they determined to pass over all previous discussions, declarations and concessions, and reduced the whole army by calculation to the state it was in in 1654, when they had cast the regimental lot so as to allow derivative claims.[58] This was the debtor side of the account. They then ascertained what lands were at their disposal, according to the Act of Parliament and the Orders in Council issued under it. This was the creditor side of the account. 'The whole forfeited land set aside for the army was destined to pay the whole army debt at certain values specified by the Act; and it was necessary that the whole should be cast or recast in one crucible, that all might share alike. Accordingly, setting aside the enhanced rates at which the former settled parties had been redeemed, the prayer for additional compensation, and the remonstrance of the army against it, Dr. Petty appears to have computed the claims of the whole army as if one uniform distribution had been made, and then considered each as having received, or being about to receive, such or such a quota pars, in order to make up the deficient, and pare down the redundant, to the same rate in the pound on their respective claims.'[59]
The amount actually to be received by each claimant appears to have been fixed at five-eighths on the arrears of pay, as commuted into land at the adventurers' rates, subject to the equalisations agreed upon. The odd roods and perches on the regimental allotments, called 'the refuse ends and tayle lots,' were withdrawn with the consent of the army from the distribution. It was hoped that these surplus lands and the advantage to the public gained by equalising the rates, which diminished the total amount allotted, would materially increase the fund remaining over to meet the other unsatisfied liabilities of the Commonwealth.[60] The officers grew very unruly and clamorous while the work went on, so much so that Major Symner lost his head, and for a time had to retire; nevertheless by February 1657 the distribution was complete, so far as the task of the executive committee was concerned.
Dr. Petty and his staff had surveyed for the army 3,521,181 acres, and the sum passed as due to him was 18,532l. 8s. 4½d., including 1,000l. for the county and barony maps. Out of this sum had to be deducted the whole of the expenses of the survey, and a sum of 1,538l. 8s. 6d. for the surveyors under the previous abortive survey whom he had agreed to pay. The money owed him by the army, after considerable delay, was paid, with the exception of a sum of 614l. In order to get in a large portion of the sum due, he says he was forced 'to collect and wrangle out of the soldiers in an ungrateful way and by driblets, what the State was bound to pay him in a lump, and to receive in bad Spanish money what he was to have in good sterling.'[61] Not being able to get the whole amount due to him paid, he was obliged to accept in lieu of it as much of a debt of 3,181l. 14s. 3d. owed to the State by the army as he might be able to collect. Eventually, when the whole of the arrangements for the satisfaction of the army had been completed, he commuted this debt into land debentures representing 1,000l. in surplus undistributed 'refuse ends and tayle lots,' which were assigned to him at Act rates by the Council in exchange for his debt, according to the provisions of the Act, which, as already stated, enabled the Council to pay for the work in land in lieu of money. He was also allowed in connection with this arrangement to invest a portion of the debt in mortgages on lands encumbered to the Commonwealth, which under the Act had been kept out of the general distribution, and to redeem these lands. But he undertook in the event of the 'refuse ends and tayle lots' being found to exceed the amount due to him, or if the soldiers brought in their remaining pennies, to cancel debentures to that amount; and he entered into securities of 3,000l. to guarantee these conditions.
In this manner he received for the army debt, and the sum of 1,000l. owing to him, 9,665 a. 1 r. 6 p. of profitable land, with a proportion of unprofitable; and from mortgages of encumbered land he bought 300 acres in Leinster and Munster, and 1,000 in Ulster. By the adventurers Dr. Petty was promised 600l.[62] For his services as Commissioner of Distribution, Dr. Petty, 'observing the Treasury to be low, applied to be paid in debentures, and received lands under Orders from the Council as follows:
| A. | R. | P. | |
| In the liberties of Limerick . . | 1,653 | 1 | 0 |
| In the county of Kerry, in the parish of Tuosist | 3,559 | 0 | 31 |
| In Meath, near Duleek . . . | 555 | 18 | 0 |
| „ „ „ . . . . | 250 | 0 | 0 |
these lands being the equivalent of a sum of 2,000l. due to him.[63] The result of all these payments was a net sum of 9,000l.[64]
The maps of the forfeited lands comprised in the army allotments had been completed very close upon the period of thirteen months from February 1, 1655, to which, under his agreement, Dr. Petty was limited; but as he had asked time to make the record complete, the official deposit did not take place till June 24, 1657, when 'all the books with the respective mapps, well drawne and adorned, being fairly engrossed, bound up, indexed and distinguished, were placed in a noble repository of carved worke and so delivered into the Exchequer.'[65]
Fresh difficulties, however, now arose. Many of the officers refused to take up their allotments, hoping that if the adventurers' claims were settled first, the army would obtain a better result by claiming the residue in what were known as the 'dubious lands,' than if their own claims were satisfied first, as was now proposed, and the earlier allottees refused to give up anything. Their eyes were also still fixed on the rich lands in County Louth, which many hoped to obtain instead of allotments in the desolate regions of Kerry.
At length it was agreed, on the suggestion of the Lord Deputy, that in order to get the matter forward, Dr. Petty should go to England and meet the committee of the adventurers.[66] He was also entrusted with the care of handing over to Secretary Thurloe the addresses of the Irish army accepting the order of things established by 'The Humble Petition and Advice,' and 'The Instrument of Government'—addresses not obtained without great difficulty from the Independent and Anabaptist officers—and he was also the bearer of letters to General Fleetwood, and to Lord Broghill, then in England and unwell.
'Dr. Petty,' Henry Cromwell wrote to Fleetwood, 'is coming over with the addresses, and to see whether any conclusion can be made with the adventurers, with whom we are daily troubled. I shall only say this for him, that he has in all the late transactions shown himself an honest man.' Dr. Petty, he told Lord Broghill, 'is one to whom your lordship may safely communicate such things as your hearers and indisposition will not permit you to write yourself.'[67]
There is a glimpse of Dr. Petty during his visit to London in a letter from Hartlib to Boyle, from which it appears that his surveying operations had not quenched his interest in scientific subjects. Dr. Petty, Hartlib tells Boyle, 'has been with me two hours. He talked of an educational plan on which he proposed to spend 2,000l., not doubting but that he would be a good gainer in the conclusion of it. The design aims at the founding of a college or colony of twenty able learned men, very good Latinists of several nations, that should teach the Latin tongue (as other vulgar languages are learnt) merely by use and custom. This, with the history of trades, he looks upon as the great pillars of the reformation of the world.'[68]
Most of his time was, however, occupied by his negotiations. He found the committee of adventurers again involved in disputes. It required several months to adjust the points at issue, but so favourable was the impression he created, that notwithstanding anonymous attacks which pursued him from Ireland, instigated by the officers who were dissatisfied at not obtaining full measure, he was made a member of the executive appointed by the adventurers' committee for the distribution of their lands. This executive accomplished its task about the autumn of 1658. The work was far easier than in the case of the army lands, for the claims as a rule were larger in amount and smaller in number. As in the case of the army lands, a ballot or boxing was adopted to settle the order of the claimants, and the lands were distributed by the string thus created. The maps of the counties which were the joint property of the adventurers and the army, and of Louth, had been completed in about thirteen months, but they were not returned into the Surveyor-General's Office till the latter end of 1659, for reasons similar to those which had caused a delay in the final deposit of the maps of the army survey.
The allotment of the adventurers' lands was the last step in the great work Dr. Petty had undertaken, and before it was entirely completed an event had occurred which hastened it on and rendered all the claimants anxious to settle. On September 4, 1658, the Protector died, while Dr. Petty was still in England. By the end of the year, except in the 'dubious lands,' the allottees were everywhere entering into possession. Owing, however, to the determination of the earlier military allottees not to allow their allotments to be pared down to a common level, and the impossibility of giving possession in the case of the 'dubious, encumbered and withdrawn lands,' great inequalities still existed, 'some of the adventurers being left deficient and some of the soldiers being wholly deficient also, and some but in part satisfied; some according to a quota of 4s. 3d. in the pound, and some 2s. 3d. only.' The maximum actually received seems to have varied from 12s. 3d. to 13s. 4d.[69] The allotment was not indeed perfect; the circumstances did not permit of it; but to the rapidity with which the survey and the distribution were carried out, the army and the adventurers owed it that they were in possession of their lands at the Restoration, when a very different distribution would probably have taken place, if the advocates of change had not been met by the logic of accomplished facts, which they were compelled, however unwillingly, to respect.
From first to last the settlement of Ireland by the Commonwealth had occupied a space of four years, of which the actual distribution of the lands had occupied half. All this, 'which is the more wonderful,' says Clarendon, 'was done and settled within little more than two years, to that degree of perfection that there were many buildings raised for beauty as well as for use, orderly plantation of trees, and fences and enclosures raised throughout the kingdom, purchases made by one from the other at very valuable rates, and jointures made upon marriages, and all other conveyances and settlements executed as in a kingdom at peace within itself, and where no doubt would be made of the validity of the titles.'[70] Such is the contemporary testimony of the great historian of the rebellion. Equally decisive is the verdict of one of the most skilled of modern Irish administrators, and one of the highest authorities on the art of surveying—at an interval of nearly two centuries—on the labours of his predecessor. 'It is difficult,' Sir Thomas Larcom wrote in 1851, 'to imagine a work more full of perplexity and uncertainty than to locate 32,000 officers, soldiers, and followers, with adventurers, settlers, and creditors of every kind and class, having different and uncertain claims, on lands of different and uncertain value in detached parcels sprinkled over two-thirds of the surface of Ireland; nor, as Dr. Petty subsequently experienced, a task more thankless in the eyes of the contemporary million. It was for his comfort that he obtained and kept the good opinion of those who were unprejudiced and impartial. The true appeal is to the quiet force of public opinion, as time moves on and anger gradually subsides; and from that tribunal the award has long been favourable to the work of Dr. Petty. It stands to this day, with the accompanying books of distribution, the legal record of the title on which half the land of Ireland is held; and for the purpose to which it was and is applied, it remains sufficient.'[71]
NOTES TO CHAPTER II
I
On the Maps of the Survey
It may be surmised that the chest mentioned in Chapter XIII. of the 'Down Survey' is the same as that described by Mr. Hardinge, which, on being opened by him in a room where it was discovered at Dublin in 1837, was found to contain townlands maps of some of the surveys on two scales: a reduced scale as described in the 'Brief Account,' and a larger scale, from which apparently the official maps had been reduced, thereby affording important evidence for Mr. Hardinge' s contention that there were two sets of townland maps—the first set on a large scale, and the second set or official maps on a reduced scale. The latter were undoubtedly those officially deposited. The maps so deposited were, however, not uniform in scale, but were made on a variety of scales in order to accommodate the baronies and parishes, which naturally varied in size, to a sheet of 'royal' paper of uniform dimensions; the effect of which was to reduce the original barony maps to scales varying from 80 to 640 perches to the square inch, and the original parish maps to scales varying from 60 to 140 perches to the square inch. These official maps were greatly injured in the fire of 1711, which destroyed a large portion of the Government offices in Dublin. What became of the original maps is doubtful.[72] A few of them were found by Mr. Hardinge in 1837 in the old press in the ancient Treasury buildings in Dublin, with a few of the reduced official and parish maps, but the remainder have been lost. Their discovery, as pointed out by Mr. Hardinge, would be of special interest, owing to the partial destruction of the official maps.[73] 'A set of barony maps,' says Mr. Hardinge, 'preserved in La Bibliothèque Impériale at Paris, have by many been supposed to be the originals. The Irish Parliament and the Government were led into this mistake when Colonel Vallancey, R.E., was engaged, at a heavy cost, in 1791, to make copies of them for the office of Surveyor-General of Crown Lands in Ireland. The Irish Record Commissioners fell into the same error, and it has been recently reiterated in the Preface to a "Calendar of the Patent and Close Rolls of Chancery in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth," compiled by Mr. James Morrin, and published under the directions of the Master of the Rolls in Ireland, with the further additional statement, "that the Down Survey records were carried to France by King James II., and that they still remain there." I personally examined the Parisian set of barony maps many years ago, and after a very careful comparison of them with an original volume, belonging to the Surveyor-General's set, brought with me for the purpose, can authoritatively pronounce the Parisian maps to be but copies of the Down Survey barony maps, enlarged in their text by introducing into their parochial subdivisions the outlines and names of the townlands; and this enlargement was made by Petty from the Surveyor-General's set of Down Survey parish maps. The difference between the Down Survey and Parisian set of barony maps is so striking, that I am surprised that any official examiner should have concluded the Parisian set to be originals. The history of the Parisian maps is this. A French privateer, cruising in the Channel in the year 1710, captured a ship having on board these maps in transit from Dublin to the son and heir of Sir William Petty, at Lothbury, London, when they were immediately carried to Paris and deposited in La Bibliothèque du Roi, where they have remained ever since. Were this set of barony maps restored by the French Government, they would be of no more value than the copies made of them by Vallancey. They were compiled, as described, from the Down Survey barony and parish maps, between the years 1660 and 1678, while Vallancey' s copies of these were made in 1790 and 1791, but neither set would be received as evidence, except by consent, in any court of justice in these kingdoms.'[74] The error as to these maps noticed by Mr. Hardinge is repeated in Edward's 'History of Libraries,' ii. 259.
During the Lord Lieutenancy of the Earl of Essex, who succeeded the Duke of Ormonde, copies of the barony maps were by his direction made by Mr. Thomas Taylor, in sixteen volumes, imperial folio. These found their way into the Ashburnham collection of manuscripts, and without their aid no complete idea can be formed of the distribution of the forfeited lands.[75]
II
Clauses of the Act of 1653 relating to purchase of land by the surveyors and others, and their payment in land debentures:
'Provided always, and be it hereby declared, that no Surveyor-General, Registrar, Under-Surveyor, or any other person employed in the execution of this service, his or their childe, or children, during the time of their employment, or any in trust for him or them, shall be admitted directly or indirectly, to be a purchaser of any part of the lands to be surveyed, upon pain that the purchase be void unless that they do first acquaint the Commissioners of Parliament with their desires and obtain excuse from them for the same.'
'Provided always that if any of the aforesaid persons to be employed by this Act, their child or children, heir or executors, have arreares or publique debts due unto them from the Parliament, which shall be allowed of as aforesaid, that the Commissioners of Parliament be and are hereby authorized to lay out and make over lands for their satisfaction in such manner and at such rates as are appointed by this present Act for other arrears or debts of the same nature.'[76]
- ↑ See Scobell's Ordinances, pp. 21, 26-37. See also Commons' Journals, ii. 420-425; Lords' Journals, iv. 593-607.
- ↑ The Acts of Parliament referred to are to be found in Scobell's Ordinances, 1650-1653, pp. 196, 240.
- ↑ Prendergast, p. 139; Thurloe, v. 508.
- ↑ Hardinge, p. 34.
- ↑ See Prendergast, p. 86.
- ↑ Hardinge, p. 11.
- ↑ See Sir Thomas Larcom's opinion, Down Survey, p. 320, note.
- ↑ Reflections, p. 107. Worsley is mentioned by Boyle in a letter printed in his works, vol. v. p. 232, where the saltpetre experiment is alluded to.
- ↑ 'The first survey or old measurement was performed by measuring whole baronyes in one surround, or perimeter, and paying for the same after the rate of 40 sh. for every thousand acres contained within such surround; whereby it followed that the surveyors were most unequally rewarded for the same work, viz. he that measured the barrony of 160,000 acres did gaine neare five times as much per diem as he that measured the barrony of 8,000 acres. Besides whereas 40 sh. were given for measuring 1,000 acres, in that way, 5 sh. was too much—that is to say, at 5 sh. per 1,000, a surveyor might have earned above 20 sh. per diem cleare, whereas 10 sh. is esteemed, specially in long employments, a competent allowance.'—'Brief Account,' p. xiii. Down Survey, ch. ii. p. 3. Henry Cromwell to Oliver Cromwell, October 9, 1655, Thurloe, vi.74. Ludlow, i. 360.
- ↑ Thurloe, ii. 149; iv. 373.
- ↑ Ibid. iv. 509.
- ↑ Lansdowne MSS., British Museum, 822, 1. 26-27, October 21, 1656; Prendergast, pp. 54-64; also the articles 'Gookin' in Dictionary of National Biography. The pamphlet referred to above is entitled A Discourse against the Transplantation into Connaught. Two editions were published, both anonymously, in London, in January and March 1655. Dr. Petty acknowledges his share in the authorship in a list of his works found amongst his papers (see Appendix), where it is mentioned under the title of A Discourse against the Transplanting into Connaught, 1654. The published book bears the marks of joint authorship, the opening sentences—an elaborate medical comparison between the State and the human body—being altogether in Petty's style, as well as the later portions, where the arguments are of exactly the same general character as those in the Political Anatomy of Ireland, ch. iv.
- ↑ Preamble of the Act of 1650: Scobell, ii. 197; Proclamation of October 11, 1652, Prendergast, pp. 27-28.
- ↑ Political Anatomy, ch. iv. p. 317.
- ↑ The Interest of England in the Irish Transplantation stated by a Faithful Servant of the Commonwealth's, (Col.) Richard Laurence, London, March 9, 1655 (British Museum).
- ↑ Thurloe, ii. 413, 506; vi. 810, 811, 819.
- ↑ Thurloe, i. 587; ii. 27.
- ↑ Ibid. iii. 466.
- ↑ History of the Down Survey, ch. ix. p. 66.
- ↑ Thurloe, ii. 343.
- ↑ Ibid. iii. 468.
- ↑ Hardinge, p. 15.
- ↑ Ibid. pp. 15, 20. The commissions and instructions under the Civil Survey are printed in the Appendix to Sir Thomas Larcom's History of the Down Survey, p. 382.
- ↑ Political Anatomy, ch. xiii.pp. 371, 372; Brief Account, p. xiii.
- ↑ Down Survey, p. 9.
- ↑ Down Survey, p. 18.
- ↑ Ibid. pp. 18-19.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 12.
- ↑ Down Survey, p. 20.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 22.
- ↑ Down Survey, ch. v. pp. 40, 41.
- ↑ Ploughlands, townlands, colps, &c.
- ↑ This means a separate map. One map would often cover the claim of an officer and several soldiers. The distribution, it must be remembered, was to be by regiments, companies, &c.
- ↑ Hardinge, pp. 24, 25, 26.
- ↑ Down Survey, p. 25; Political Anatomy, ch.ix. p. 341.
- ↑ Political Anatomy, ch. iv. p. 317.
- ↑ Reflections, pp. 15, 16.
- ↑ British Museum Add. MSS. 6198, part i. cxvii. B; Boyle's Works, v. 296.
- ↑ Henry Cromwell at first only received the title of Major-General of the Forces. In 1657 he was appointed Lord Deputy.
- ↑ Nelligan MS., British Museum.
- ↑ Brief Account, p. xv.
- ↑ Brief Account, p. xvii.
- ↑ See Sir T. Larcom's note to ch. vii. of the Down Survey, p. 324.
- ↑ Hardinge, p. 34.
- ↑ Webb, Irish Biography, article 'Petty.'
- ↑ Down Survey, ch. ix. pp. 66, 80; Thurloe, vi. 683.
- ↑ Down Survey, pp. 185, 337.
- ↑ Ch. ix. of the Down Survey contains the account of these transactions.
- ↑ See Thurloe, v. 309, 709.
- ↑ Prendergast, p. 86; Down Survey, pp. 63-66, 211, 185, 186, and note to ch. xiv. p. 337; Thurloe, ii. 314; iii. 710, 715, 728, 744; vi. 683; vii. 291; Ludlow's Memoirs, ed. 1771, p. 196.
- ↑ Down Survey, p. 66; Thurloe, ii. 314, iv. 433.
- ↑ Down Survey, ch. xiii.
- ↑ Reflections, pp. 23, 24. Compare D'Alembert, Sur la Destruction des Jésuites en France, ed. 1765, p. 67.
- ↑ Down Survey, p. 53; Hardinge, p. 24.
- ↑ Down Survey, pp. 86, 102, 208, and p. 337 note.
- ↑ Political Anatomy of Ireland, ch. x. p. 342; Down Survey, pp. 91, 210.
- ↑ Nelligan MS., British Museum.
- ↑ Down Survey, ch. xiv. p. 207; Reflections, p. 116.
- ↑ Sir T. Larcom's note, Down Survey, p. 336, and see also Down Survey, ch. xiv. pp. 191, 195. I desire here once more to record the obligation expressed in the Preface, which I owe to the notes by Sir Thomas Larcom in regard to the intricate technical points connected with the survey and distribution.
- ↑ Down Survey, p. 189, and Sir T. Larcom's note to ch. xv. pp. 339, 340.
- ↑ Reflections, p. 47.
- ↑ As to the adventurers' survey, see the references in the History of the Down Survey, pp. 53, 127, 136, 236, 246, 247. The order for the survey is to be found in the appendix to Sir Thomas Larcom's edition, p. 390. The references to the adventurers' survey in the History are few and meagre, as compared with the account of the survey of the army lands; the reason being that the adventurers' survey was not the object of much subsequent attack. The men of business with whom Petty had to deal appear to have behaved far more reasonably than the grasping body of military men whom he had had to meet in the first survey. The sum of 600l. is given as 60l. in the copy of Sir William Petty's will, printed in the Petty Tracts; but the correct figure in the text of the will is that printed above. The survey of the lands allotted to the other creditors are not specially mentioned in any of these accounts.
- ↑ Down Survey, chs. xii., xv. See, too, Sir Thomas Larcom's Notes, pp. 339, 340; and the Reflections, p. 25.
- ↑ Sir William Petty's Will.
- ↑ Down Survey, p. 183, and Brief Account, p. xvii. 'This cabinet of most exquisite joiners' work,' also mentioned as the repository of the maps in the Brief Account, is probably the antique press discovered by Mr. Hardinge in the Treasury Buildings, Lower Castle Yard. See note at the end of the chapter.
- ↑ Thurloe, vi. p. 760; Down Survey, p. 211.
- ↑ H. Cromwell to Fleetwood, May 5, 1658; H. Cromwell to Lord Broghill, May 1658; Thurloe, vii. pp. 144-5.
- ↑ Hartlib to Boyle, August 10, 1658, in Boyle's Works, v. p. 280.
- ↑ 'Another more calm and true narrative of the sale and settlement,' Nelligan MS., Brit. Mus.; see also Down Survey, p. 208.
- ↑ Clarendon's Life, p. 116.
- ↑ Down Survey, notes, pp. 338, 347.
- ↑ Down Survey, p. 323, note to ch. vii.; Hardinge, pp. 26-9.
- ↑ In the estimate of his estate made in his will, Sir W. Petty says: 'I value my three chests of original mapps, Field books, the copy of the Down Survey with barony mapps, and the chests of Distribution books, with two chests of loose papers relating to the Survey, the two great Barony books, and the books of the History of the Survey, altogether, at two thousand pounds.'
- ↑ Hardinge, pp. 32, 33.
- ↑ See Appendix to the Eighth Report of the Historical MSS. Commissioners, Part III. p. 40; and Hardinge, Part III. p. 284, who says two copies were made.
- ↑ Scobell, Acts and Ordinances for 1653, ch. xii.