As J.G. Simms remarked more than thirty years ago in the introduction to his notable book on the subject, ‘the Williamite confiscation was the last of a series which in the course of a century and a half changed the ownership of the greater part of Ireland’. The Williamite confiscation in Ireland, 1690–1703 was a landmark in the complicated and, till then, much misunderstood history of the subject. In fact, and rather oddly considering the importance of the war of 1689–91 and its consequences, there was no earlier detailed account of the confiscation of Irish land that followed the defeat of the Jacobites at the Boyne, Aughrim, and Limerick; and most references to it were based upon the printed report of the parliamentary commissioners of 1699, in some important respects a highly tendentious and misleading document. Simms based his work upon manuscript sources not previously used: the detailed records of the 1699 commissioners; the records of the forfeiture trustees who succeeded them; and the Books of Survey and Distribution that recorded the ownership of Irish land and its redistribution during the years after 1641. His main general conclusions —
that the treaty of Limerick and the dispute between William and his English commons made the confiscation much less comprehensive than it would otherwise have been; but that many of the catholics who thus succeeded in retaining their estates were induced to change their faith in the course of the eighteenth century by the pressure of the penal laws— have provided all later students of the subject with a firm frame of reference within which to examine the details of the settlement.
An eighteenth-century case history: Carlisle Spedding 1738
