DAVE MANSEU were assured by the English government that their property rights would be respected if they kept the peace. This they did and no rising followed the «flight», but the English government almost immediately reneged on its pledges and started the «plantation» of Ulster. Most of the Irish landlords were dispossessed, attempts were made to clear out the native Irish completely from certain areas and to replace them with communities of English and Scottish colonists who were intended to include all classes. This central feature of the English government's intention for the Ulster plantation was never fully realized: the Irish were too hard to displace and they were useful as tenants and servants. Legally the « planters » were not allowed to employ the native Irish as servants in the new towns which they built, but there were simply not enough settlers to achieve comprehensive control, and Irish servants were quietly admitted to the towns. Outside the towns the Irish were banished from the land they had worked and owned and were confined to boggy and mountainous regions. This method of colonization was more typical in Ulster west of the River Bann than in the counties of Antrim, Down to the east of it, and Monaghan. Here the land was handed over to private adventurer called « undertakers » who « undertook» to bring in Protestant English and Scottish settlers; numerically they were more successful than the government was in Londonderry, Armagh, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Donegal and Cavan. The colonization was least successful in the south and west of the province. The most striking feature of the «plantation» was the fact that the colonists were Protestant and represented a culture alien to Ulster, a foreign community which spoke differently, worshipped apart and represented a totally different way of life. The two communities interacted powerfully. Wherever the colonists became entrenched an English deeply influenced by the native tongue superseded the Irish language. The fact that the colonists were real communities and not mere landowners favoured the eventual development of a healthier relationship between landlord and tenant than was to be the case in the rest of Ireland. But the fact remained that the colony had been established by dispossession and repression, and that the Ulster Irish could regard the colonisation as nothing more than a massive act of injustice tarted up with the appearance of legality. The plantation had been a social revolution in a sense, a clean sweep of all the traditional property rights of the occupying Irish (a century later Catholics 56
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