THE ULSTER CONRICT ed to the (Anglican) Church of Ireland; they were banned from running schools or from sending their children abroad to be educated. Some of the laws could not be enforced, but others, notably those affecting property, were stringently applied. The net effect of these provisions was to drive Gaelic Catholic culture underground, to strengthen the political component of Catholicism, and to deepen the divide between Protestants and Catholics. ENGLISH LEGISLATl,ON AND IRISH ECONOMY Outside Ulster the position of the Catholic peasantry dived to a new miserable low. Although nominally «tenants-at-law», they were scarcely more than feudal serfs, completely at the (non-existent) mercy of absentee landlords and their middlemen. The landlords' agents were leased the land at a fixed rent, and they, in turn, sub-let the land, in very small holdings to the peasants, retaining an estate for themselves. The pesants had to work the middlemen's land for them in order to pay the rent and the tithes due to the Anglican Church of Ireland. Virtually all they had in return for this labour was a small patch of land on which to raise sussistence crops (basically potatoes). If they showed any sign of producing a surplus, the middlemen raised the rent so as to expropriate it. The peasants had no security of tenure and evictions were common when more profits were to be made from labour non-intensive cattle-raising or sheep-grazing. The peasants' only resource against rent-raising or eviction was the formation of secret societies which retaliated against rapacious landlords by mutilating their cattle, burning their buildings, or killing them. The parasite class of landlords, agents, Church of Ireland clergy and the corrupt State administration based in the Castle at Dublin, responded with lynchings and transportation of any peasant suspected of membership of a secret society. In Ulster the Presbyterian tenents achieved a more equitable position for themselves. They were much more resistant to landlords than the down-tradden Catholics and they eventually obtained a security of tenure, rents fixed for a reasonable length of time, and the right to sell their tenancies at an improved price. They earned the money to pay the landlord's rent by weaving linen on hand looms in their cottages, not by working the landlord's land. But the Presbyterian tenants also developed secret societies to struggle against tithes and any taxes they considered unfair. These societies had another 61
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