Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/346

After Limerick Beasts, while those few engross the fat of the Land." Few tenants were needed at the large grazing and dairy farms, and the result of the continual turning of land into pasture was the gradual eviction of numbers of the peasantry from their holdings. The mass of the Irish people became cottiers because they could not gain a livelihood as agricultural labourers, while the industrial restrictions which lay heavy upon the country prevented them gaining a livelihood by trade. Entire villages were sometimes turned adrift, and we are told that in travelling from Dublin to Dundalk through a country esteemed the most fruitful in the kingdom, a man would see no improvements of any kind, no houses fit for gentlemen, no farmers' houses, few fields of corn, nothing but a bare face of nature with a few wretched cottages scattered about, three or four miles apart. The evictions which took place in 1761 were especially numerous and were the direct cause of the rise of the Whiteboy movement, the beginning of Irish agrarian crime. We get vivid descriptions of the condition of the people from the letters and writings of such men as Archbishop King, Primate Boulter, Skelton, Swift, and Berkeley, no less than from various English gentlemen who travelled through Ireland at this time, and were horrified at the condition 334