Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/361

Notes  i.e., Plain linen cloth. Stamped, striped, checked, and dyed linens were excluded from the British markets.

Che Irish linen industry only met with a partial encouragement. Only coarse white and brown linens could be exported to the Plantations (by 3 and 4 Anne, c. 8 (Engl.)), and the bounties granted in 1743 on the exportation of British and Irish linens from Great Britain were confined in the case of Ireland to coarse plain linens of an inferior quality. Irish linens, when chequered, striped, painted or dyed, had to pay a prohibitive duty when imported into Great Britain (by 10 Anne c. 19 (Brit.), continued by subsequent Acts), and could not be exported at all to the colonies, while the bounty granted by Great Britain on the exportation of all these sorts of linens when of British manufacture, to Africa, America, Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, Minorca, or the East Indies (by 10 Geo. III., c, 38 (Brit.) enabled the British to monopolise the trade in all but plain linen cloth. Ireland was also forbidden to grant bounties on the exportation of her sail cloth (by 23 Geo. II., c. 33 (Brit.)), and as Great Britain at the same time granted bounties on the exportation of her own hempen manufactures to foreign countries, the colonies, and even to Ireland, the Irish sailcloth and canvass manufactures, which had prospered greatly during the first half of the eighteenth century, sank into decay.

In spite of these discouragements, however, the Irish linen manufacture made enormous progress all through the eighteenth century.

$undefined$ King to Mr. 'Addison, July 7th, 1717 (King MSS., Trin. Coll., Dubl.).

$undefined$ They were famous Hampshire deer stealers of the day.

$undefined$ "I told you in my last that since my L L was named to the Government about 18 Thousand pounds annual rent have been given in benefices, employments, and places to strangers, and not 349