Class divisions and the ‘mere Irish’ of colonial Ulster

Abstract

This article seeks to delineate the class structure of indigenous society in Ulster in the period between the beginning of large-scale colonisation at the start of the 17th century, and the 1641 rising. This has been attempted in order to see what insights can be gained from an analysis, in terms of class-struggle, of a society that has often been viewed solely in terms of ethnic or confessional conflict. Use has been made of primarily English sources, bearing in mind the requisite caution that needs to be employed when using sources that were often hostile and disparaging of Gaelic society. The 1641 depositions, for example, were taken with the expressed intention of recording Irish crimes and the sufferings of colonists; while in this sense biased in intention, they have nonetheless proved of particular value in the evidence they supply of social relations and contemporary perceptions of those relations, at the endpoint of the period under discussion. The evidence thus gleaned about class divisions among the Irish, and the way in which the plantation transformed this class structure, are used to examine several key questions about early colonial Ulster, such as to what extent the plantation represented a transformation of the economy of the province, and offered greater economic opportunities to the landless class; also examined is the hotly-disputed question of whether or not the plantation was a primary cause of the 1641 rising which, it is here argued, can be resolved by a consideration of divergent class interests among the native population.