Description
The livery companies of London were some of the great record keepers of early modern Europe. This record keeping extended to Ireland where the companies were drawn into playing a significant role in the Ulster Plantation in 1610. Yet, despite the richness of the material in the archives of the individual livery companies in the Guildhall Library pertaining to the Londonderry Plantation (court minutes, correspondence, surveys, financial accounts,), very few of these records have ever been edited and published.
This volume presents one of these sources, a large collection of the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers’ court minutes pertaining to their estate in Ulster, from the first stirrings of the scheme for the Londonderry Plantation in 1609 to the mid-1670s. The minutes reveal much about how the individual livery companies in London experienced the process of being largely coerced into undertaking the plantation by the government of James I and how they then managed their lands from afar over a period of decades, often whilst dealing with delinquent chief tenants. In between, much light is shed on the history of the time, from the way the Ulster Plantation was undertaken in the 1610s to the wars of the 1640s throughout Britain and Ireland.
