The restoration land settlement in Ireland: a structural view

In the history of Europe political revolutions are commonplace; cultural and social revolutions are somewhat less abundant; but revolutions in the ownership of property are exceedingly rare. Even the French revolution, the prototype of profound social upheaval, is today regarded by many—particularly the followers of the late Professor Cobban—as a revolution which failed to transform the proprietary class. And in England, the believers in a great seventeenth-century social revolution have either evaded or artfully rationalised the considerable evidence that the land-owning families of 1660 were essentially the land-owning families of 1640. Despite enormous fiscal pressures, the Long Parliament and its successors never embarked upon a serious effort to expropriate or extirpate those it defeated. ‘It is their reformation, not their ruin, is desired’, wrote the author of Burton’s Diary, and the recent work of Mrs Joan Thirsk, the most exactingstudent of the royalist land sales during the interregnum, tends to confirm the verdict.