Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland

This is a comprehensive and wide-ranging analysis of relations between landlords and tenants in Ireland in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. W.E. Vaughan explores evictions, rents, tenants' rights, estate management, and tenants' resistance to landlords. In place of the conventional image of predatory and all-powerful landlords, and oppressed, impoverished tenants, the author presents a scholarly and nuanced picture of mutual accommodation, thus revising the traditional view of land relations in nineteenth-century Ireland.

"Drawing on a remarkably wide range of primary sources, most notably collections of estate papers, Vaughan provides a broad and comprehensive description and analysis of the mid-Victorian Irish land system."--Historian

"Vaughan has provided the basis for stimulating debate for years to come. He wanted to be provocative and has succeeded admirably. In addition, he has plugged a large number of holes in our knowledge of the Irish land question. On the whole, as one can expect of an historian of Vaughan's calibre, this is a first-rate piece of scholarship."--Albion

"Vaughn's admirable effort will be part of the new necessary foundation upon which others will build."--Journal of Modern History

"Vaughan's Magnum opus not only integrates a generation of scholarly contributions, including his own, but it extends the terms of the debate in relation to tenant right, crime and law enforcement, the causes and effects of the Land War, and the reasons for the decline of the Anglo-Irish gentry. The style of writing is witty and compelling."--Victorian Studies

"...this is a splendid book that cannot be ignored by anyone who hopes to understand nineteenth-century Ireland."-- ournal of Interdisciplinary History

This is a study of relations between landlords and tenants in Ireland between the great famine and the land war. Based on a remarkably wide range of primary sources, most notably collections of estate papers, it is a comprehensive and wide-ranging analysis, in which W. E. Vaughan explores evictions, rents, tenant right, estate management, agrarian outrages, and tenants' resistance to landlords. Dr Vaughan questions many assumptions about landlord-tenant relations that hitherto have been uncritically accepted. In place of the conventional image of predatory and allpowerful landlords, and oppressed, impoverished tenants, Dr Vaughan presents a scholarly and nuanced picture of complex mutual accommodation, thus revising the traditional view of land relations in nineteenth-century Ireland.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [289]-321) and index.