This book is a detailed account of the City of London’s share in the Ulster Plantation, based on exhaustive research among original sources, including the records of the London Livery Companies. Besides giving a picture of the colonization of Ulster in the early seventeenth century, it describes the foundation and early history of the county of Londonderry, the city of Londonderry, the town of Coleraine, and the Irish Society of London. It is also a study in the Irish policy of the early Stuarts, and in their relations with the City of London.
First published in 1939, The Londonderry Plantation has come to be regarded as a pioneering work of historical scholarship. It was the first serious attempt to understand what actually happened in the Londonderry Plantation and was published at a time when Irish historical writing was entering a new and more rigorous phase with Moody and his peers leading the way.
In his Foreword to this reissue, Professor James Stevens Curl praises ‘the integrity of Moody’s scholarship and industry in laying the foundations of proper source-based narrative, free from speculation, hoary mythology, and cant.’
Eighty years after it was first published, Ulster Historical Foundation is pleased to make this important work available to a modern audience in a high quality format with, where possible, the original maps and plates reproduced in colour.