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232 Stephen Dunford: The Journey of The IrIsh
Consequently, the confiscated lands were divided among the soldier claiments who were known as Servitors, the Adventurers, those who had “adventured” or invested money for the carrying out of the Irish War and who were now demanding their rewards, and of course the Government also got its share. The Parliaments of Ireland and England were now united, but Ireland was allowed only thirty members, most of whom were army officers.
The transplantation into Connacht was to take place before May 1, 1654. All those Catholics associated with the rebellion, with the exception of ‘such labourers, artisans, and husbandmen, as would be been needed by the new English settlers,’ were ordered, under penalty of death, to be west of the Shannon by the due date. Many refused to go, and in order to wreak vengeance on the settlers, they hung around the lands from which they had been evicted. As in the aftermath of previous conflicts, these landless men were given the epithet ‘Tory’which derives from the Irish word tóraidhe and translates roughly as ‘one who is persecuted or pursued, an outlaw.’
These Tories posed a huge threat and became a source of much concern and alarm to the new settlers and continued to be so for many years. In fact, so much of a deadly nuisance did these landless and lawless men become, that a reward of 40s. was offered by the Gov- ernment to anyone who brought in the head of a “private tory” while as much as £20 was promised for the head of a “public tory.” Incidentally, it was towards the end of the reign of Charles 11 that the term “Tory” was first applied in derision to the English Royalist Party.
Furthermore, at this time, religious persecution was carried on with a zeal heretofore unknown in the country. A price of £10 was given for the head of a priest-this price rose if the clergyman was of a higher rank. Anyone found harbouring Catholic clergy did so at the risk of their lives and property, while anyone discovered, who, knowing where a priest was hidden, and who did not inform the authorities, had his or her ears cut off and were pub- licly flogged. Dr. William Petty, the seventeenth-century polymath and physician-in-chief to Cromwell’s army, who was himself knighted and granted lands in Kerry said: ‘those priests many of whom can even out-talk in Latin those who talk with them were classed by the law with the wolves, to be hunted and killed.’
By the end of 1655, ‘in a scene not witnessed in Europe since the conquest of Spain by the vandals’, as one historian referenced it, the transplanted Irish, some 60,000 in all, had been forced westwards across the Shannon, while almost eleven million acres of land was confiscated.
The object of this elaborate scheme of brutal confiscation was undoubtedly the destruc-
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