A renewed concern with mustering and training the ‘risings out’ – the feudal equivalent of a militia – was therefore manifest during these emergency years. Risings out were held in county Antrim and county Down in 1626.13 The calling of half-yearly musters in Ulster was authorised in August 1627, with the undertakers’ commitment reduced to having ‘in every thousand acres … fivepikemen ready, beside arms and fine shot’, although this was later amplified to having five pikes and five calivers or muskets per thousand acres.14 The death of George Alleyne delayed starting the musters, but in September 1628, following on royal instructions of the previous July to the lord deputy,15 Lieutenant William Graham was appointed, for life, muster-master for Ulster and Leinster with the power to demand the same fees as his predecessor, Captain Alleyne, had received previously.16 The muster roll, commonly dated as c. 1630, may then be ascribed to Graham.
The return – a somewhat slipshod undated transcript in a difficult hand apparently transcribed from field papers17 – was compiled from musters carried out between the spring of 1629 and the spring of 1633.18 It was not the first muster to be carried out: the return for county Cavan notes the appearance of defaulters from the previous muster and errors ‘in the other book’.19 While it does not represent a census, the muster roll is the most exhaustive listing of the settler population that is available. Not only is it a means of assessing the planting achievement of the individual grantees, but it is also a firm reference against which other sources providing names may be compared to assess, for example, settler mobility.20 The number of men who mustered was 13,147.21 The quantity of weapons produced – 3,154 pikes and halberds and 1,920 firearms22 – appeared to satisfy the criterion of five pikes and five firearms per thousand acres and the distribution of weapons broadly reflected the distribution of manpower. The figures, however, were less reassuring when examined more closely. Most of the pikes and firearms were to be found on a few estates in each county and only eight of the estates and corporate towns had colours and drummers, the instruments for command and control. Hence, whilst they might be able to defend themselves as individuals, the settlers could not form coherent bodies of armed men that would be capable of defending their communities.
These notes, collated from R.J. Hunter’s working papers, are issues that he had identified for inclusion in the introduction to Men and arms.
The muster roll, although conventionally described as ‘c. 1630’, was produced by William Graham between 1628, when he was appointed muster-master, and 1634, when he presented his findings to Sir Thomas Wentworth, the lord deputy.39 The order in which the counties appear in the muster roll – Cavan, Armagh, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Londonderry, Antrim, Donegal, Down, and Monaghan – is probably the sequence in which the musters were conducted. It would have taken about five minutes to parade each man, to inspect his weapon, and to record his name. Graham would therefore have needed three weeks for each muster in counties Cavan, Armagh, and Fermanagh, four weeks for the musters in counties Tyrone, Londonderry, Antrim, and Donegal, six or eight weeks for the muster in county Down, and less than a week for the muster in county Monaghan.
After his appointment as muster-master in September 1628, Graham wrote to landlords, warning them of the forthcoming muster and telling them where to assemble their tenants.40 Given the farming calendar, the best time for holding the musters would have been in the spring, after the fields had been ploughed and seeds had been sown. The sequence in which estates mustered suggests that Graham worked to a programme he had agreed with each landlord, and the musters seem to have been held at market towns or in estate villages. The time Graham would have spent travelling around the province would have extended the time needed to muster each county by up to a fortnight. The whole process, including the time needed to compile the summary for presentation to the lord deputy, would therefore have taken up to twelve months to complete and appears to have been done in four stages. The Cavan, Armagh, and Fermanagh musters were carried out in the spring of 1629. The Fermanagh muster roll shows ‘Mrs Hamilton, widow to the lord archbishop of Cashel’ as the’undertaker of 1,500 acres’ in the barony of Magheraboy and John Sedborough as the ‘undertaker of 1,000 acres’ in the barony of Clankelly. Malcolm Hamilton, archbishop of Cashel, died on 29 April 1629 and Sedborough, whose demesne was the neighbouring townland to Graham’s property, died before July 1629.41 The Cavan and Armagh muster rolls precede that for Fermanagh and so, assuming that six weeks were needed for mustering each county, the county Cavan musters were probably carried out before Easter (5 April),42 those in county Armagh between Easter and Whitsun (23 May), and those in county Fermanagh by the end of June 1629.
Graham could not have conducted the Antrim and Donegal musters between 1 March and 24 April 1631, and the appearance of Christopher Freeman as lessor of the Fishmongers’ Company means that the muster of that estate took place after January 1631.46 The musters of the city and liberties and of the McClelland and Harrington estates were therefore possibly conducted immediately after the muster of county Tyrone in the spring of 1630, and the musters for the remainder of Londonderry and of county Antrim were held in the spring of 1631. The Donegal muster would then have been carried out after Easter (1 April) 1632, the musters of county Down and county Monaghan would have been held in the spring of 1633, and Graham would have spent the autumn of that year compiling the summary for presentation to the lord deputy.
As ‘the first comprehensive list we possess of the English and Scotch emigrants who became domiciled’ in the province, the muster roll ‘is a document of equal interest to the genealogist and the historian.’47 The information it contains supplements that in the reports of the 1622 commission,48 whilst analyses of surnames reveal the areas in England, Scotland, and Wales from which the settlers originated.49 Such analysis can be taken further: ‘a small minority of the Scottish settlers have epithets and Gaelic forms of first names, whilst the majority of the Scots have English forms [of ] Christian names. It is probably a reasonable assumption that the former group were Irishspeaking and the latter English-speaking.’50 However, a more complete picture of the British community in early seventeenth-century Ulster can be constructed if the muster roll is examined in conjunction with other sources, such as estate papers and probate records.
There are, for instance, twenty-eight surnames among the forty-four men who mustered on Edward Hatton’s estate at Magheraveely in county Fermanagh. Eighteen of the surnames appear once in the muster list, eight of them twice, and two of them (Beatty and Little) five times each.With two families called Beatty and two families called Little, there were in all thirty British families on the estate.52 ‘If, to take account of some few absentees or because some families … might have been represented by only one member, some increase should be made, then fifty to sixty might be the truer figure’ for the number of adult males on the estate.53 There would have been a similar number of females and so, assuming that the numbers of children and adults were the same, there would have been more than two hundred British people living around Magheraveely in 1630.
Finally, the weapons that were produced for the muster are indications of their owners’ wealth and social status. Firearms – in particular, ‘the most advanced weapon, the snaphance’ – were expensive, and so those who held them were probably wealthier than those who had ‘simple weapons such as a sword, pike, [or] halberd.’57 Using possession of firearms as a test, one can distinguish leaseholders from copyholders on the Archdale estate in county Fermanagh and assess Robert Adair’s success in ‘creating quite a sizeable upper stratum of tenants with a much broader base of sub-tenants’ on the estate he had inherited in county Antrim.58 One cannot, however, generalise about social structures and relationships from the weapons that men were carrying or were not carrying: in Londonderry, two of the Companies’ chief tenants – George Canning of the Ironmongers and Peter Barker of the Drapers – mustered without arms and one of the wealthiest men in county Cavan, Richard Castledine, only carried a sword.
Robert was editing the muster roll from published material for counties Armagh, Cavan, and Donegal and from transcripts for the other counties. He had produced full transcripts for counties Antrim, Down, and Monaghan and partial transcripts for counties Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone. I have used published material to supplement the transcripts for Fermanagh and Londonderry and my own transcript to supplement that for Tyrone.
Taken from Hunter, ‘Donegal’, pp 124-7 and supplemented with material from Robert Hunter’s working papers: I am grateful to the Donegal Historical Society for permission to reproduce and adapt the original text.
T.W. Moody (ed.), ‘The revised articles of the Ulster plantation, 1610’ in Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research, 12 (1935), pp 178-83; for a study of the English system, see Lindsay Boynton, The Elizabethan militia, 1558-1633 (London, 1967). ‘A convenient store of arms’ for an undertaker of a ‘great proportion’ of 2,000 acres was ‘twelve muskets and calivers, [and] twelve hand weapons for the arming of twenty-four men’ (Calendar of Carew MSS, 1603-24, p. 269), or enough weapons to arm half of the adult males on the estate [JJ].
T.W. Moody (ed.), ‘Ulster plantation papers, 1608-13’, number 18, in Analecta Hibernica, 8 (1938).
George Hill, An historical account of the plantation in Ulster at the commencement of the seventeenth century, 1608-20 [hereafter, Hill, Plantation], p. 465.
NLI, MS 8014/8; Victor Treadwell (ed.), The Irish commission of 1622: an investigation of the Irish administration, 1615-22 and its consequences, 1623-4 (Irish Manuscripts Commission: Dublin, 2006) [hereafter, Treadwell (ed.), Irish commission], p. 547: the London Companies and some of the leading undertakers imported weapons from England and the Low Countries (see, for example, James Morrin (ed.), A calendar of the patent and close rolls of chancery in Ireland for the reign of Charles I, years 1 to 8 inclusive (Dublin, 1863) [hereafter, Morrin (ed.), Patent rolls, Charles I], pp 200-1). Dillon’s approach, however, was the more typical one. Sir Thomas Ridgeway, for instance, ‘enjoined’ prospective tenants on his estate at Augher in county Tyrone in 1613 ‘to furnish themselves with sufficient arms’ (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Hastings manuscripts, 4 (London, 1947), pp 179-80) and two feefarm grants of land on the Taylor estate in county Cavan in 1613 and 1615 were made in consideration of the ‘bodily service’ of the tenants and their successors ‘to be at all time for ever done at the time of muster being thereunto called’ (NAI, M6956/4, 5) [RJH]. Requiring tenants to provide their own weapons created a problem, as the settlers took their arms with them when they moved to other estates and incoming tenants did not have weapons. Consequently, as happened with Sir Stephen Butler’s property in county Cavan, an estate that had been well armed in 1619 or 1622 became effectively disarmed by 1630 [JJ].
Boynton, Elizabethan militia, p. 237.
Bodleian Library, Oxford, Carte MS 62, f. 481; the patent renewed Pynnar’s appointment as muster-master of Connacht and Munster, a post he had held since 1615 (Calendar of patent rolls, Ireland, James I, p. 338), and replaced Richard Bingley with Alleyne; Bingley had been muster-master of Leinster since 1609 (Calendar of state papers, Ireland, 1608-10, p. 197) and muster-master of Ulster since 1610 (ibid. pp 496-7) [JJ].
His report, with transcripts of related documents, is in BL, Add. MS 18,735 (Calendar of state papers, Ireland, 1615-25, pp 226-30).
Some detected faults of arithmetic in the original manuscript and slight inaccuracies in the calendared version have been corrected [RJH].
Ibid. pp 510-11; Aidan Clarke, ‘The army and politics in Ireland, 1625-30’, in Studia Hibernica, 4 (1964), pp 28-53; see also David W. Miller, ‘Non-professional soldiery, c. 1600-1800’, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds.), A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp 316-17.
Calendar of state papers, Ireland, 1625-32, pp 50-1.
Ibid. pp 173, 207; for an example of a provost marshal being ineffectual, see Hunter, ‘Donegal’, pp 150-3.
Calendar of state papers, Ireland, 1625-32, p. 441.
Instructions to the lord deputy, 16 August 1627 (ibid. pp 263-4); further instructions to the lord deputy, 5 June 1628 (ibid. p. 350).
Ibid. 367; Morrin (ed.), Patent rolls, Charles I, pp 380-1.
Ibid. p. 385; NAI, Lodge MSS, misc. enrolments, p. 41.
BL, Add. MS 4770 (hereafter, Muster Roll): an example of the difficulty of reading the manuscript is Graham’s ‘V and Ws [which] sometimes leave the possibility for ambiguity open: the reader should consider the possibility of substituting one for the other, e.g. Vyne may be Wyne’ (note by RJH, spring 1999 [PRONI, D4446/A/6]).
Muster Roll, fols 9v, 18, and 19; George Alleyne probably compiled ‘the other book’ [JJ].
British settlers in early seventeenth-century Ulster were very mobile: only a third of the men who mustered on Sir Anthony Cope’s estate at Loughgall in county Armagh were from families that had been present in 1622, and barely a quarter of those who mustered on the Balfour estate at Lisnaskea in county Fermanagh appear in the rent roll that was compiled in May 1636 [JJ].
This is a corrected figure taking into account inaccuracies of arithmetic for counties Armagh, Cavan, and Donegal [RJH]: the totals for county Down are also inaccurate [JJ].
The firearms were calivers, muskets, and snaphances; the caliver and musket were developments of the arquebus and had matchlock actions: the snaphance was an early form of the flintlock action (V.B. Norman and Don Pottinger, English weapons and warfare, 449-1660 (London, 1979), p. 190).
Moody, Londonderry, pp 278-9, 319-22.
Boynton, Elizabethan militia, pp 269-87; recalcitrance is a reflection of the demilitarisation of early seventeenth-century British society (John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘The background to the civil wars in the Stuart kingdoms’, in John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The civil wars: a military history of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1638-60 (Oxford, 1998), pp 4-6).
There is no evidence, for example, that Graham accepted Alleyne’s convention that only twenty-four males were musterable per thousand acres. Leases of this period contained relevant stipulations. Thus a fee-farm grant of land in Cavan in November 1636 required the tenants to be ‘always furnished to their power and ability with good sufficient arms and weapons both for the defence of themselves and the country of the said plantation against the rebels and other [of ] his majesty’s enemies’ (NAI, M6956/8). Another Cavan lease of c. 1635 required the tenant to appear at all musters and outrisings and contribute with the rest of the tenants to a group of ‘ten able men, well armed with pike and musket for the king’s service’ and the defence of the landlord when required (NAI, Deeds, wills, and instruments … post mortem, 25, pp 254-65).
E. Berwick (ed.), The Rawdon papers (London, 1819), p. 63.
RJH, Notes on William Graham (PRONI, D4446/A/7/2); Bernard Burke, Vicissitudes of families, third series (London, 1863), pp 143-7; Hill, Plantation, p. 337; the description of William Graham in 1624 as being ‘of The Mote in county Cumberland’ (Calendar of patent rolls, Ireland, James I, p. 582), the clan’s principal seat near Longtown on the Anglo-Scottish border, suggests that Sir Richard and Sir George Graham were members of the leading family within the clan.
As part of the pacification programme that followed the union of the crowns, fifty families were deported from Eskdale to Roscommon in 1606. Sir Richard and Sir George Graham are the ‘two gentlemen of their own name’ who met the families at Dublin. Most of the families moved onto Sir Richard and Sir George’s estates when the Roscommon plantation collapsed (George Macdonald Fraser, The steel bonnets: the story of the Anglo-Scottish border reivers (London, 1971), pp 323-4). Graham is still a common surname in Kildare, Laois, and Wicklow [JJ].
Ibid. p. 474; this was the origin of Bawnboy. In 1622 the bawn, house, and ‘200 acres of land’ were let ‘for twenty-one years’ to ‘Lieutenant William Rutledge [who] dwelleth’ in the house: the remainder of the land was ‘set to the Irish from year to year’ (Treadwell (ed.), Irish commission, p. 523).
Calendar of patent rolls, Ireland, James I, p. 582; Burke, Vicissitudes of families, p. 152; Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580-1650 (Oxford, 2001), pp 264-5; for William Graham’s lands in Queen’s County and county Wicklow, see NAI, Lodge MS, 5, 90 and 357.
Burke, Vicissitudes of families, p. 151; Sir John Graham was Buckingham’s master of horse.
Graham was probably a tenant of ‘Mr William Stammers [who] holdeth these two tates [Lisnamallard and Lurganboy] of freehold land, 1 May 1637’ (NAI, RC5/28).
Grievances against Lieutenant William Graham, in Journal of the house of commons, Ireland (1641), p. 334 [RJH].
Depositions mentioning Graham’s participation in the uprising: TCD, MS 831, fols 023r-024v; MS 833, fols 260r-260v; MS 835, fols 073r-073v, 091r-092v, 115r-115v, 135r-135v, 147r-147v, 155r-155v, and 182r-182v; MS 838, fols 62-67v.
Inquisition on the death of Roger Boyle, bishop of Clogher, 19 April, 4 James II (NAI, RC 9/1, p. 294).
Burke, Vicissitudes of families, pp 159-60.
Parts of this and the following paragraphs have appeared in John Johnston, ‘An Irish county in 1630: the muster roll of county Monaghan’, in Clogher Record, 20 (2010), pp 233-42. I am grateful to the Clogher Historical Society for permission to reproduce extracts from that article. Data from Robert Hunter’s working papers have led me to revise the dating that was suggested in the article [JJ].
The assumption that Graham wrote to the undertakers before holding the muster is based on his statement that ‘the servitors in the county of Donegal who inhabit the barony of Kilmacrenan and the barony of Tyrhugh caused not their British to appear at the general muster at the time and places appointed according to the warning given them’ (Muster Roll, f. 280) [JJ].
Henry Cotton, Fasti ecclesiae Hiberniae, 1 (2nd edition, Dublin, 1851), p. 13; Inquisitions of Ulster, Fermanagh, (33) and (55) Charles I.
www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gentleman0113/easter/easter_text2b.htm, accessed 17 February 2012.
T.W. Moody, The Londonderry plantation: the City of London and the plantation in Ulster, 1607-41 (Belfast, 1939), p. 278, footnote 3.
Sir Moses Hill died on 10 February and Sir Hugh Clotworthy on 28 February 1631 (NAI, BET1/9, p. 58) [RJH].
RJH, Note on NAI, Ferguson MSS, 12, 183, 207-8 (PRONI, D4446/A/7/4).
R.J. Hunter, ‘The Fishmongers’ Company of London and the Londonderry plantation, 1609-41′, in Gerard O’Brien (ed.), Derry and Londonderry: history and society (Dublin, 1999) [hereafter, Hunter, ‘Fishmongers’ Company’], p. 240.
Canny, Making Ireland British, pp 208-11.
Michael Perceval-Maxwell, The Scottish migration to Ulster in the reign of James I (London, 1973), chapters 8 and 9; Philip Robinson, The plantation of Ulster: British settlement in an Irish landscape, 1600-70 (Dublin, 1984) [hereafter, Robinson, Plantation of Ulster], chapters 4 and 5; settlers in county Fermanagh who originated in Norfolk, for example, can be identified through their surnames [RJH]. Graham’s spellings of Welsh names (Evance for Evans and Joanes for Jones, for example) suggest that these settlers may still have been Welsh-speaking [JJ].
Note by RJH (PRONI, D4446/A/8).
Extrapolation from the muster roll data for the province as a whole gives a total population of at least 30,000, but ‘it is fairly clear that under-recording [in this and other musters] is a serious problem’ and so ‘an estimate nearer to 40,000 might be more appropriate [for the total British population of the province]’ (W.A. Macafee, ‘The movement of British settlers into Ulster during the seventeenth century’, in Familia: Ulster Genealogical Review, 2 (1992), pp 94-5).
R.J. Hunter, ‘The Bible and the bawn: an Ulster planter inventorised’, in Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), British interventions in early modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), p. 125.
RJH, Note based on NAI, BET 1/58 (PRONI, D4446/A/8); Inquisitions of Ulster, Armagh, (3) Charles I: Edward Whitehead was probably Giles’s father and the husband of Henry Smith’s second daughter, Dorothy; the elder daughter is probably the Mary Smith who was killed at Shewis, 1641 (Deposition of Ann Smith and Margret Clark, 16 March 1643 [TCD MS 836, fols 073r-074v]) and the youngest daughter, Elizabeth, may have been married to Robert Whitehead of Iniskeen, county Monaghan (Deposition of Elizabeth Whithead, 18 June 1642 [ibid. fols 178r-178v]) [JJ].
Treadwell (ed.), Irish commission, p. 545.
Raymond Gillespie, ‘The origins and development of an Ulster urban network, 1600-41′, in Irish Historical Studies, 24 (1984), pp 18-19; John Johnston,’Settlement on an Ulster estate: the Balfour rentals of 1632 and 1636’, in Clogher Record, 12 (1985), pp 92-102.
Raymond Gillespie, Colonial Ulster: the settlement of east Ulster, 1600-41 (Cork, 1986) [hereafter, Gillespie, Colonial Ulster], p. 117.
John Johnston, ‘The plantation of county Fermanagh, 1610-41: an archaeological and historical survey’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, 1976), pp 193-6; Gillespie, Colonial Ulster, p. 118.
Deposition of Anne Cooke, 19 January 1642 (TCD, MS 832, fols 211r-211v).
Muster Roll, fols 3-6; Deposition of William Cooke, 19 May 1642 (TCD, MS 833, fols 120r-120v).