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 but on the Statute of Absentees, he directed that the inhabitants were to be treated as intruders, and a plantation was to be made on the lines of that of Wexford.

It is noteworthy that, in this very same year, the King wrote ordering Letters Patent to be made out for their estates for all the landowners in Clare and Connaught, as had been intended by the late Queen at the time of Perrot's Composition of Connaught in 1585. Three years later St. John prepared a scheme for a settlement. He estimated that there were 50,000 acres of arable and good pasture land in the county, besides lands of patentees and unprofitable land. Incidentally we learn that many of the natives had built good stone houses and that they were "reasonably reclaimed by civil education." As a matter of fact in the Carew MSS. Vol. 625 we find an account of Longford which goes far to show that the distribution of land by gavelkind was not the uncertain and scrambling distribution which Davies in some of his pleadings represented it to be: but that what distribution there was was confined within the limits of the inheritance of one family. In Longford, as in Wexford, Fermanagh and Leitrim every acre had its owner, and each individual clansman knew what acreage he was entitled to. It is noteworthy that some of the