The plantation of Ulster : British settlement in an Irish landscape, 1600-1670

Abstract

Where does Ireland fit into the story of English expansion? a contributor asked in the I978 festschrift for David Beers Quinn (The Westward Enterprise [Liverpool], 45). It is an old question that keeps being asked because it has yet to be satisfactorily answered. In addition to the two excellent books under review, a forthcoming monograph on the Munster plantation by Michael McCarthy Morrogh (Oxford University Press) will add grist for the mill, as will other research in progress. Was Ireland merely an extension of Britain as far as migratory patterns are concerned, or was it part of a distinctive overseas colonizing process? If the latter, what was the functional relationship between the nearer and farther colonies? Part of the difficulty of answering these questions is that each region of Ireland is a story unto itself, none more so than Ulster. The eastern coastal sections were settled by Norman adventurers in the late twelfth century, but this medieval colony soon atrophied. By the late sixteenth century the central core of what had become a nine-county province was, in effect, a Gaelic heartland. The military power of its aristocracy was broken by English forces in an expensive and difficult campaign during the opening years of the seventeenth century, and in i6io a formal plantation of six escheated (that is, forfeited) counties was begun. A seventh Ulster county, Monaghan, had been planted with native Irish in the I 590s, while the eighth and ninth, Antrim and Down-which radiate north and south from Belfast Lough and the modern city of Belfast-more or less planted themselves by attracting large numbers of English and Scottish settlers. Philip Robinson, a historical geographer, treats the province of Ulster as a whole and carries portions of the story beyond the usual cut-off point of i64I. Raymond Gillespie, a historian, deals exclusively with Antrim and Down in the forty-one-year period during which their populations underwent dramatic transformation. The combined effect of these two monographs is to provide both incentive to reconsider what happened in Ulster and new insights to pursue. Oddly, perhaps, it is Gillespie, working from the narrower base, who addresses more directly the question of where Ireland fits in. His concluding chapter entitled Antrim, Down, and the Wider World supports a functional relationship of complementarity by emphasizing Ulster's dissimilarity from Virginia and its ill-suitedness to compete for North American settlers and capital. Antrim and Down were Britain's nearest overseas colonies. They were visible from southwestern Scotland and readily accessible in favorable weather. Settlers there, Gillespie argues, merely stretched the crucial bonds with their homeland

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