While the Penal Laws ‘are a standard set piece in text book accounts of the eighteenth century’, it is only relatively recently that Catholics have ‘emerge[d] … not as an amorphous mass of down-trodden victims whose destiny was to endure, but as a group of socially-mobile individuals who struggle[d] … against civil disabilities’ and ‘unmitigated persecution’. With the publication of a number of works with local focus, a picture has begun to emerge of Catholics who not only attempted to, but were successful in employing a number of methods by which they could circumvent a legal code ‘directed so comprehensively at the right of the Catholic to enjoy, inherit and purchase land’, the ‘basis’ of which lay in the 1704 and 1709 Popery Acts. Such tactics included conversions to the established religion and intermarrying with Protestant families, as well as granting annuities, manipulating the use of long leases, entering into private trusts and creating settlements to prevent the land being passed on by gavelkind, the latter three approaches relying on some level of collusion with willing Protestants.
Through a case study of three Catholic brothers-in-law, Patrick Lattin, Richard Leigh and Michael Moore, who, in collusion with their Protestant bother-in-law, William Alcock, purchased various properties in Dublin, Kildare and Meath, this talk will detail the legal strategies used by Catholics to screen their illegal land acquisitions during the Penal Laws. The importance of family connections, as well as the information regarding family ties that can be gleaned from legal papers will also be highlighted.
Emma Lyons holds a PhD from the School of History in University College Dublin, where she has lectured in early modern History. Emma held the Research Studentship in Irish History at the National Library of Ireland, cataloguing the Castle Leslie estate papers, and was researcher for the National Library of Ireland's World War Ireland exhibition.
