Tenant Right & Agrarian Society in Ulster, 1600-1870 (review)

Tenant right, or “the Ulster custom,” was the nineteenth century practice by which the new tenant of a landholding in the north of Ireland was expected to make a substantial payment to the outgoing tenant. As the Irish “land question” emerged out of grievances resulting from more active estate management combined with demographic pressure and catastrophe, “tenant right” entered the lexicon of all parties to the controversy. To lawyers, anxious to define the custom as a justiciable transaction, it became “compensation for improvements.” To English liberals the fact that in England tenants did enjoy compensation for improvements, together with Ulster’s relative prosperity within Ireland, made tenant right the elixer which would cure Irish agrarian ills. To spokemen for the Protestant tenants of Ulster, tenant right represented a grand bargain made by the crown with their ancestors in the seventeenth century to induce them to settle in the King’s most dangerous dominion and subdue it. To landlords disturbed by any suggestion that tenants enjoyed proprietary rights in the land, tenant right was simply, in Palmerston’s words, “landlord wrong.”

Given the centrality of tenant right in Victorian discussions of the land question, it is remarkable that until now no serious history of the custom has appeared. Perhaps the omission is due to the fact that the closest disciplinary ties of the most historians who have studied the Irish land question have been to economics and sociology. Tenant right was a social construction which cried out for cultural analysis, and in Martin Dowling it has found its historian at last.

For Dowling tenant right is a liminal phenomenon situated between the customary tenures of feudalism and the market-driven relationships of capitalism. It is to be understood through the narratives which its beneficiaries constructed to justify their continued tenure of a holding in defiance of market forces. Such a narrative would seek to establish a special, extra-economic relationship between the tenant’s own family and that of the landlord. If possible, the tenant would associate the two families in the foundational events of the seventeenth-century plantation or with continuous “peaceable possession” over a long period. Failing that, the narrative might refer to solidarity with the landlord’s family in more recent crises such as the 1798 rebellion or local disturbances.

Of course, the existence of such narratives—typically in appeals for renewal of leases—does not tell us why they were persuasive to their addressees. Part of the answer, of course, is the landlord’s perceived need for a dependable, i.e. Protestant, tenantry in the colonial situation. However, Dowling also explicates the connections between tenant right claims and the principal economic changes over the course of his account. The dysfunctional character of the middleman system (from the landlord’s standpoint) emerges in Dowling’s narrative as an opportunity for smallholders to advance such claims. Proto-industrialization and the fragmentation of holdings which it promoted presented new occasions for personalistic ties between landlord and tenant. Ironically, the persistence of the archaic rundale system of joint tenure and communal decision-making in many Catholic areas might also contribute to the extension of tenant right. Dowling suggests that the landlords understood that ethnic segregation between individual Protestant lowland farms and mountainy Catholic rundale communities was advantageous and could be promoted by respecting tenant right claims even in rundale areas.

Following Bartlett, Dowling maintains that the Irish moral economy ended in the 1790s. The Ulster system of customary tenure, however, persisted, albeit as one of many aspects of their estates which improving landlords sought to manage more effectively. The impact of post-Napoleonic deflation on small to middling farmers, and that of technological change upon rural manufacturing, propelled tenant right from the private nexus of individual landlord-tenant negotiation into the public sphere. Building upon his micro-analysis of the workings of tenant right on particular estates, Dowling offers a brilliantly reconceptualized sketch of the Irish land question in a final chapter entitled...