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Ulster was always the largest area under Gaelic rule since medieval
times. Expeditions by the English to complete its conquest during the late
16th century and the alarming example of the Plantations already underway
in southern Ireland caused Ulster chiefs to upgrade their military strength.
They did this both by 'arming the peasants' - as was reported of Shane
O'Neill - and by importing regiments of armoured footsoldiers from the
Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland at great expense. At the same time
the constant fighting not only kept armies on the move, but turned villagers
into 'creaghts' - or herds of refugees with their livestock - transferring
out of war-torn areas under the leadership of their local lords.
Up to that time the lack of market towns in the area put a limit to the
amount of rents Gaelic lords could extract from their tenants, because rent
was paid in foodstuffs, which had to be consumed immediately by the lord and
his followers or rot away - as Sir John Davies noted in 1607. In the last
decades before the Plantation, there were signs that Ulster lords were
feeling their way towards a market economy, and the collection of money
rents. This would enable them to accumulate a surplus - to buy fine clothes
and build larger castles at their tenants' expense and in war-time to pay
for troops. O'Neill, O'Donnell and their sub-chiefs obtained royal licences
to hold weekly markets at their chief residences, and both Shane O'Neill and
Hugh O'Neill, the Great Earl of Tyrone, encouraged Anglo-Irish tenants from
the Dundalk area to settle on their underpopulated lands. Hugh O'Neill
replaced a patchwork of varying tributes and taxes from his Irish tenants
with a single charge of one shilling per quarter year for every cow in their
herds, to be collected by the leaders of the creaghts, who kept back a
quarter of the sum as their salary. This yielded Tyrone an income of over
2,539 Euros / £1,631 a year, eight or ten times the revenue of MacCarthy Mór in
south-west Munster.
The Plantation altered this gradual shift from a bartering economy to a
money-based one into an overnight transformation. Now it became profitable
to rack-rent tenants, since the foodstuffs which they still paid as rent
could be sold in the new market towns for export - or traditional tenants
might be displaced to make way for more agriculturally productive outsiders.
Even Gaelic chiefs who retained some lands had to change their ways or go
bankrupt, while some were reduced to leasing summer pastures from the new
planters, to camp there all the year round with their creaghts. The
breakneck speed of this social transformation accounts for the traumatic
grief and shock expressed in Gaelic literature of this period as much as the
actual change in landownership. The mushrooming of towns and fenced-off
lands, the end of assemblies on hills with their sport and music, and the
feasts of the lords, are all mourned.
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