Leases were not always one-to-one contracts. In Co. Louth Arthur Young noted that ‘Large tracts were rented by villages, the cottars dividing it among themselves, and making the mountains common for their cattle.’ This was a version of the outfield/infield system. The management of the infield might vary, but the outfield was held in common, or in the ‘lump’; here each tenant was entitled to so much grazing, measured as so many ‘collops’: for example, a collop could be 1 horse = 2 cows or 1 cow and 2 yearling calves; another collop was 10 goats/sheep or 20 geese. After the harvest the livestock was returned to the infields to manure them for the next season’s crops.

Agreement had to be reached about the date of the harvest and the return of the cattle. This was not always easy: ‘fights, trespasses, confusion and assaults’ were common and progress tended to reflect the pace of the slower members of the society rather than its more entre­preneurial citizens. Variations of this system were prevalent throughout pre-industrial Europe. In some areas young cattle were bought by hill farmers and then sold back to the lowland farmers at the big midland cattle fairs to be finally fattened for market on the richer pastures.

The enclosure movement gradually gathered momentum through the century, but was not complete by its close. Usually consolidation could only be done in stages. For instance, in 1754 Nathaniel Nisbitt reported to Lord Abercorn that ‘there are several farms divided [enclosed] tho’ but one lease; I advised more indeed to divide, but the tenants cou’d not or wou’d not agree among themselves.’ Where enclosures were agreed the lands were professionally surveyed. On the Abercorn estate the surveyor told Nisbitt that he got a shilling an acre. Nisbitt replied that he ‘believed he might for a small job but a penny was enough for a large one’.

Where a number of estates marched disagreements could occur, and successful enclosure needed a resident and knowledge­able landlord or good, reliable agents; for example, Robert Molesworth (1419) remarked that:

There is nothing which requires more careful inspection than these scattered estates of ours about Swords, of all our estate it is the place where we have been most wronged … there is such stealing, chopping and changing that every one of us have lost something at last to my cousin Taylor who, by residing in the town, and knowing nicely all the parcels and secrets of these lands, finds a way to make all these stolen and concealed parcels to centre on him.

Normally the Sheriff was required to be present when the writ of enclosure was exercised, or, if that was impossible, the Under-Sheriff and two Justices of the Peace. By statute enclosures were to be made with good ditches planted with one or two rows of quicksets or thorns or else stone walls as the land allowed; Wakefield noticed that in Galway, Roscommon, Mayo and Clare enclosure was with dry stone walls and this was also quite common in parts of Ulster. Tenants were to hold their land ‘under the same conditions and covenants’ as before the enclosure.

Those with leases renewable for ever or 60-year leases were to bear the total expense of the enclosure. Where leases were for three lives or 21 years the landlord and tenant shared the ex­penses equally, but in the case of shorter leases the landlord was solely responsible for any expense involved in the enclosure. Penalties were legislated for not enclosing within six months of the partition, and ‘all mearing [boundary] fences, ditches and drains made … be … kept open, scoured and cleansed, that the water may not stand but pass away’.

It is difficult to quantify those holding farms without leases at various times during the century, and equally difficult to designate their economic status. Undoubtedly the overwhelming majority of such tenants were very poor, but this was not always the case. At the close of the seventeenth century the disturbed state of the country had been reflected in a larger number of tenants without leases.

For instance, William Molyneux (1425) of Castle Dillon, Co. Armagh wrote that when he took over the management of his paternal estate in 1690 his ‘tenants at will’ included John Hutchinson (Hutcheson), the dissenting minister and the father of the philosopher Francis Hutcheson, who held 100 or so acres and two acres of bog for a rent of £18; he had ‘a good strong house of stone and lime with a good cow house and stable and barne but all ruinous by reason the present tenant has not encouragement being only tenant at will; there is likewise a pretty garden and orchard’. Other ‘tenants at will’ included Thomas Stoops, who held 23 acres at a rent of £4 6d and lived in ‘an ordinary mud and sod wall house’; while Denis Kennedy, a Catholic, held eight acres and lived in ‘a good mud wall house’.

Although the increasing political fervour of the late eighteenth century had encouraged the creation of ‘freeholds’ to enfranchise tenants, towards the close of the century and in the early nineteenth century there was a reversion to holding ‘at will’ or without formal leases, which allowed the landlord greater control over his estate, while tenants who paid their rent regularly usually had little reason to fear eviction.

Despite their poverty, tenants ‘at will’ were not at the bottom of the social pyramid, for there were the landless spalpeens, who, looking for temporary work, lived a semi-nomadic existence in ‘cabins by the roadside that have no land’. Also, allowance must be made for landlord-tenant relations as where these were good the tenant could feel secure without a lease.

Again there is a tendency to assume that Ireland had a uniform covering of cottiers. This was not the case. The presence or absence of cottiers was linked to the produce of the region; for instance, in a pastoral area, particularly one favouring sheep or dry cattle, less labour was required and consequently there were few cottiers. Arable or dairy farming absorbed more labour. When patterns of agriculture changed – for example in the mid-century swing towards pastoral farming - there was social dislo­cation and consequent distress.

By the end of the eighteenth century, in many areas, leases were replaced by tied labour. Under this system a cash wage was verbally agreed at the beginning of the year and was paid off in rent for a cabin, a potato plot or garden and a few collops on the landlord’s grazing. Usually about 200 days of labour, at 5–6d a day, were required. This was often demanded, sometimes with the inducement of a higher payment, at times when the labourer was occupied with his own harvest. Any surplus was usually cancelled out by the supply of implements, seed or fodder. Wakefield has given the traditional description:

The cottar tenant hires a cabin, the worst in the country, with a small patch of potato land, at a rent of thirty shillings per annum. He also argues for the keep of a collop or half a collop … At the same time he works for his landlord at the small wage of 5d per day; but when he comes to settle he receives nothing, as the food of his few sheep is set off against what he charges for labour. In this manner the poor cottar must toil without end; while his family eats up the produce of the small spot of land he has hired. This is called by the lower classes of Irish ‘working for a dead horse’, that is to say, getting into debt.

In dairying areas in the hinterland of Cork there was a system of leasing land to cow keepers or dairymen. Here the rent was an agreed quantity of butter for each milking cow along with some limited labour services. The calf could belong to either the landlord or the tenant, depending on the agreement. Originally the contract was annual, from 25 March each year, but longer contracts could be granted; for instance, one lease in 1742 contracted for 21 cwt butter for 21 years (1 cwt = 51 kg). Young found leases that stipulated 1 cwt of butter per cow delivered at Cork and a guinea in money. He added that:

The produce is not much more than this cwt of butter; for the dairyman’s profit lies principally in having the grass of a cow, an acre of ground and a cabin and garden, and they are generally very poor. They rear many pigs on account of the dairies, about a pig to every cow, and a calf to every two cows, which they feed on sour milk giving them no new milk. They are attentive to have their cows calve in May.

The advantages of having the cows calve in May were that the grass would be at its best and there would be food to supplement the traditionally hungry months between the end of one harvest and the gathering of the next. An entrepreneurial landlord or middleman could set up a subsidiary industry by letting land to fishermen, weavers or dairymen and sometimes providing them with capital goods such as boats, yarn or cows in return for exclusively marketing their produce.

In addition to payment in labour, rents could be paid in money or in a mixture of goods and money. In remote or backward regions there were market advantages in making payments in kind. Young found in the mountainous area on the border of Counties Fermanagh, Donegal and Leitrim that the ‘rents were paid by yarn, young cattle and a little butter’. One Kerry landlord’s rent book for the years 1755–64 stipulated butter, herring, brandy, linen cloth and cattle in his agreements – thereby indicating the illegal as well as the legal activities of his tenants.

In the middle of the century a traveller reported that in the Rosses, Co. Donegal, the kelp harvest paid the rents. A general lack of labour specialisation was a feature of European pre-industrial societies, and its continuance in Ireland was an indication of the growing rift between British and Irish societies caused by the industrial revolution. Both Young and Wakefield considered that this lack of speciali­sation was detrimental to the Irish economy, as ‘the same person cannot expect to be proficient in both.’

Another aspect of Irish landholding that has acquired a bad reputation was the presence of the middleman. De Latocnaye gave a graphic description of the consequences of this at the end of the century:

The misery of the people is generally attributed to the manner in which estates are let. A rich man who does not wish to trouble himself with details will let a large extent of ground to a single man, whose intention is not to work, but to underlet perhaps to 20 persons; they again will let to perhaps 100 peasants moderately well off; and these once again will let at an exorbitant rent to perhaps 1,000 poor labourers … they cultivate the greater part of it in potatoes which serve to nourish a family, and to fatten a great pig and a few fowls, by the sale of which they commonly find the money to pay their rents. It can be easily understood that with all these ‘cascades’ it is possible that the proprietor receives not more than a third of the money which the lowest tenants are obliged to pay, and the remainder goes to the profit of the rent farmers.

A mid-eighteenth-century example of such a cascade shows a middleman in the parish of Carnmoney, Co. Antrim, paying a rent of £131 for 7½ townlands and subletting them for £732 p.a. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Wakefield remarked that in Co. Kerry Lord Kenmare ‘owns above 35,000 acres which bring him in £8,000 p.a. but his subtenants receive £40,000’.

The Devon Commissioners, inevitably comparing Ireland with England, saw another evil from this phenomenon: ‘the want of that personal attention to the condition of the tenantry, which is at once the duty and interest of landlords … Many of the evils incident to the occupation of land in Ireland may be attributable to this cause.’ Yet this is certainly not entirely true as many landlords and middlemen, both resident and absentee, were compassionate and concerned for their tenants, especially in times of scarcity.

By the end of the eighteenth century the poverty of the occupying tenants and the desire of the landlords for a more realistic return for their land combined to squeeze the middlemen slowly out of the system. Shorter leases and the insolvency of the tenants, along with their growing reluctance to hold their lands through a middleman, made the position of a rentier such as Robert Jones Lloyd of Co. Leitrim untenable.

In 1822 he wrote: ‘that the tenants not only in Leitrim but in Roscommon except one in ten have neither money nor cattle is certain … to expect rent from them is hopeless. They cannot pay it, and the middleman, when he cannot get it cannot pay it.’ When Lloyd became the middleman for this estate in 1810 some of the tenants had resented holding under a middleman, and had been hostile to him from the time of his arrival. In a letter of 1815 he admits that:

There is an apology which can be made for them … I set their lands too high … [and] the suppressing [of] private distillation took from them the only means they ever made use of to make rents … the depression on every commodity which had taken place these two years past puts it out of their power even by selling all they have to pay half a year’s rent.

The Revenue Board tried very hard through numerous statutes, for example 1 Geo. III, c. 7, to control ‘private distillation’, but their success was limited.

Another problem was that some agents and middlemen ran an estate shop, and parliament consistently legislated against labourers being paid in alcohol (e.g. 9 Geo. II, c. 8), or allowed to run up debts through immoderate use of it. Wakefield expostulated against this iniquity:

Many agents have sons or other relations, settled as shopkeepers on some parts of the estate to which they belong, and a tenant, unless he chooses to run the risk of incurring the displeasure of these harpies, cannot purchase a yard of tape or a pound of cheese in any other place. Nay I have known agents, when they had no relation to provide for in this manner, dispose of a shop to a stranger, and exact from him a percentage of all his profits.

As the post-1815 agricultural depression deepened and the potatoes became subject to recurrent blights, Lloyd’s situation became hopeless; in 1826 he finally relinquished his leases. Lloyd was a compassionate middleman, and his letters reflect concern both for his tenants and for his failure to fulfil his obligations to his landlord. By the early nineteenth century middle­men were becoming an anachronism and a luxury that the land could no longer support. The potential for supporting improvement, which they had served in a less developed economy, no longer existed in a depressed and overcrowded agrarian community.

Another unpopular figure was the landlord’s agent, and here again the picture is mixed. One agent described his duty as that of a hen gathering her chickens. In 1763 one of Lord Dacre’s correspondents emphasised that an agent was not merely a rent collector:

That I think is the least business of an agent. The chief matter is to know the tenants, the bounds of each denomination and to prevent disputes. Your present agent I have known many years … He is a calm, sensible man, a useful man in his country in preventing [law] suits.

The need for this intimate knowledge lay behind the custom of employing multiple agents on a great estate, with or without the overall supervision of a chief agent. Multiple agents also acted as a check on each other. Intense local clannishness could, and frequently did, effectively restrict a landlord’s choice of agent to either a local figure or a member of his own family, and these local appointments did not always work to the benefit of either the tenants or the landlord.

Another major abuse was the exaction of lease money. Wakefield recorded an extreme example of this form of maladministration: ‘the leases of an estate of £10,000 per annum being expired,’ he declared, ‘the agent on the renewal exacted a year’s rent from each tenant, by way of lease money, and thus put at once into his pocket £10,000.’

Undoubtedly some agents were disreputable characters, but, as Wakefield pointed out: ‘in that country there are many most respectable agents; honourable men who would as little take a bribe from the hand of a tenant as they would pilfer a guinea from a banker’s drawer.’276 Probably the tenants who fared best were those of a resident and paternalistic landlord such as R. L. Edgeworth, or those of a great land­lord such as Lord Abercorn, who, although an absentee, was accus­tomed to running his many estates along business-like but compassionate lines.

Agents were paid either a percentage on the rents they received or an agreed salary. For most of the eighteenth century the percentage system was probably the more usual method. In May 1757 Nisbitt declared to Lord Abercorn that:

The common allowance for agents in this country is 12d in the £; whatever less is given by agreement, according as the circumstances of things may be; I have several times computed what I had for your Lordship’s money, and I never cou’d make it 9d in the £, the fees or nominy penny inclusive, paid by the tenants, for I never trusted them so as to let it swell.

Thus the tenant usually paid the agent 5 per cent of the rent that the latter collected. In addition the agent was entitled to the nominy penny, which was 5 per cent paid on the return of goods distrained for non-payment of rents. He was also entitled to fees related to other estate business, such as the preparation of a lease. The latter type of fee was subject to individual arrangement.

For instance, in 1756 when Lord Abercorn was anxious to get his tenants to sign leases, Nisbitt wrote to him that ‘I wou’d be glad your Lordship wou’d settle what fees I am to get, for though I pretend to be as modest as any man of my profession, yet, your Lordship concludes that there’s something due for my trouble.’ On a previous occasion he had found that ‘they let the leases lie in my hands and would give me nothing for my trouble.’ This may have been partly due to the leases on that occasion being offered for 3, 7 and 21 years instead of the usual 31 years and 3 lives. But it may also have reflected a degree of confi­dence between landlord and tenant.

On the whole, Lord Abercorn appears to have been served by conscientious and reliable men. Perhaps having a group of agents was useful in this respect. Nathaniel Nisbitt pointed out to his master the activities of his fellow agents McClintock and Colhoun, reporting that they:

had little bargains of land which I never had, and other little dealings among the people which I thought below me, chusing always to keep within the law, well knowing that the Lord Chancellor’s allowance to an Agent was 12d in the £ on a sequestered estate; indeed in most estates in this country the 12d in £ is paid by the tenants, by covenant as receiver’s fees if the rent was paid in 21 days after due.

Where the agent was paid by percentage the Lord Chancellor’s allowance on sequestered estates appears to have been the yardstick for his basic salary, but this could be augmented in var­ious ways. Apart from persuading tenants to take leases or obliging them to shop at a store in which he had an interest, the agent could magnify his power by allowing them to become indebted to him. Rents were paid six months in arrears. This was known as the hanging gale, and was intended to allow an incoming tenant a respite to establish himself rather than, as it was afterwards construed, to make him indebted to the landlord.

After that, the tenant’s animals and goods could be sequestered and he would have to pay interest on the outstanding rent and a fee for the return of his goods. Wandering animals were likewise locked up in the manor pound, and a fee was payable on their redemption. Where the agent doubled as a tithe collector, he acquired the odium attached to that unpopular role. This was intensified when he tried to collect more than the legal or traditional dues for the area. On one occasion Nisbitt pointed out his fellow agent Colhoun’s iniquities as proctor for the parish of Ardstraw, where he had ‘made the people pay by the acre for flax and potatoes but at the same time confessed it was more an act of power than any right’.

Some landlords paid their agent an agreed salary, sometimes with additional allowances. For instance, in 1750 Lord Egmont paid his Irish agent £100 p.a. Some years later Lord Charlemont was paying his agent £150 p.a. In 1778 the Shirley family paid their agent 6d for every £1 of rent collected to be made up to £300 p.a., and he also had the use of a house on condition that he kept a room for the landlord.

In the late 1780s Lord Fitzwilliam was paying his agent £300 p.a. plus £50 as a housekeeping allowance. These were large estates, and the salaries offered to the agents placed them on a financial par with junior government officials or army officers. An agent could also manage a number of smaller estates, sometimes including his own, and thereby augment his income.281

Thus, in the eighteenth century, estate management with its perquisites and reflected prestige could, and often did, offer a career suitable for a gentleman. This was no longer the case in the nineteenth century. However, in the eighteenth century, the agent was the bridge between the tenant and the landlord and an estate functioned most efficiently when he was the trusted arbitrator between the two parties.