Sir John Davies’s Agrarian Law for Ireland

The following article examines Sir John Davies’s treatise A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued [and] Brought Under Obedience of the Crown of England Until the Beginning of His Majesty's Happy Reign (Dublin, 1612) with regard to the idea of an Agrarian Law for Ireland. While one prominent scholar has recently suggested a generalized hostility to any redistribution of landed property in early modern political discourse, in the context of the Jacobean colonization of Ireland the idea of an “equal agrarian” in all future plantation efforts received significant support from writers such as Davies.