Landed Estates Court Rentals, 1850-1885
Click to enlarge
What is this record collection and where can you access it?
Since Tudor times at least, Ireland has largely been divvied up amongst a relatively small group of mainly Anglo-Irish Protestant land owners who rented the land back to tenants via leases that generated income. As you can imagine, this process generated a lot of paperwork, some of which survives in estate collections. For example, the University of Galway has compiled a great free database on Landed Estates in the provinces of Connacht and Munster. The information has been indexed by estate or historic house name and by the landowning family name, but if you know your ancestors were tenants on particular estates, then you may find out more about their tenancies.
Although the estates generated significant income from the rents, there were also plenty of outgoings or "encumbrances" e.g. mortgages and/or pensions & annuities payable to a veritable army of relatives, often widows and maiden aunts. During and after the Great Hunger, it soon became apparent that losing your tenants to starvation and emigration meant the rent money soon diminished. With the land now generating so much less income, many landholders were facing bankruptcy and could not sell because of these encumbrances. So, the Irish Government stepped in with legislation in the closing years of the 1840's to create the Landed Estates Court which could take over the title of troubled estates and sell them on. Like any modern property transaction, sale particulars needed to be compiled to appeal to prospective buyers.
It is these original documents that make up this record collection, which are held by the National Archives of Ireland (NAI), indexed by townland only, according to John Grenham. However, if you want to search by name, indexed versions with digital images of the numerous pages are now available on both of the major subscription sites.
I'm not sure exactly how this sales process worked fairly for those who were actually dependent upon an annuity or had provided a mortgage - perhaps they were paid off in full or part from the proceeds, pleased to get something rather than nothing? Reading some of the leading pages in some of my example documents seems to suggest that provision for specific annuities may have been made a condition of sale, so you would really have to read each one carefully to find out what transpired.
Of course, sadly what could have been a real game changer for the Irish tenants to finally own the land they farmed was, I believe, mostly hijacked by property speculators who promptly raised rents and set about consolidating their holdings to the detriment of the incumbents. It wasn't to be until well into the 20th Century that those who farmed the land got a fair chance at buying it.
Since Tudor times at least, Ireland has largely been divvied up amongst a relatively small group of mainly Anglo-Irish Protestant land owners who rented the land back to tenants via leases that generated income. As you can imagine, this process generated a lot of paperwork, some of which survives in estate collections. For example, the University of Galway has compiled a great free database on Landed Estates in the provinces of Connacht and Munster. The information has been indexed by estate or historic house name and by the landowning family name, but if you know your ancestors were tenants on particular estates, then you may find out more about their tenancies.
Although the estates generated significant income from the rents, there were also plenty of outgoings or "encumbrances" e.g. mortgages and/or pensions & annuities payable to a veritable army of relatives, often widows and maiden aunts. During and after the Great Hunger, it soon became apparent that losing your tenants to starvation and emigration meant the rent money soon diminished. With the land now generating so much less income, many landholders were facing bankruptcy and could not sell because of these encumbrances. So, the Irish Government stepped in with legislation in the closing years of the 1840's to create the Landed Estates Court which could take over the title of troubled estates and sell them on. Like any modern property transaction, sale particulars needed to be compiled to appeal to prospective buyers.
It is these original documents that make up this record collection, which are held by the National Archives of Ireland (NAI), indexed by townland only, according to John Grenham. However, if you want to search by name, indexed versions with digital images of the numerous pages are now available on both of the major subscription sites.
- Landed Estates Court Rentals, 1850-1880 (FMP=£)
- Ireland, Encumbered Estates, 1850-1885 (Anc=£) Not sure where they get the extra 5 years from?
I'm not sure exactly how this sales process worked fairly for those who were actually dependent upon an annuity or had provided a mortgage - perhaps they were paid off in full or part from the proceeds, pleased to get something rather than nothing? Reading some of the leading pages in some of my example documents seems to suggest that provision for specific annuities may have been made a condition of sale, so you would really have to read each one carefully to find out what transpired.
Of course, sadly what could have been a real game changer for the Irish tenants to finally own the land they farmed was, I believe, mostly hijacked by property speculators who promptly raised rents and set about consolidating their holdings to the detriment of the incumbents. It wasn't to be until well into the 20th Century that those who farmed the land got a fair chance at buying it.
How should you search the collection wisely?
Whilst I will be quick to point out that I am a huge fan of this collection because it has greatly helped me with my own research, I'm afraid I have some weary words of caution about searching the collection on Find My Past in particular and the shortcomings of their indexing in general. I've yet to exercise the Ancestry version to see if it is any better and will let you know the outcome via these pages, of course. So back to Find My Past for now - get a cup of tea and biscuit and settle down for a good read if you're interested!
You can of course search by name and use the name variants feature too. This will search for your relatives name anywhere in the text, but I would advise extreme caution doing this, given my experiences - you might get so much more than you bargained for that doesn't actually turn out to be entirely relevant! You can also browse by parish and county apparently, but when I tried to use the latter for Kilkenny, for example, I got back over 19,000 name results which seemed to cover a multitude of other counties as well! From this, I tentatively deduced (without exhaustive testing) that the records are not arranged by county but instead the filter just searches for the given county name anywhere in the document, a bit like with newspaper searches - *sigh *.
When you do search by name, you will be returned some tantalising results accompanied by a year and location. When I first started using these records, I thought I had hit pay dirt and was going to be tracing lots of my farming and landlord relatives back into the early 18th century. Nope. For reasons best known to themselves, the FindMyPast indexers appear to have chosen to associate names with random years plucked from within the context of the record but not necessarily actually attached to that name in a meaningful way. Let me illustrate this by example.
My ancestor, Joseph Empson, was a relatively big cheese on the property speculation scene in the mid 19th century City of Kilkenny. Searching for him by name in Kilkenny returns 5 results (including 2 duplicates!), so really there only 3 records ranging from 1769 to 1832 in what turns out to be more than 1 set of sales particulars.
Whilst I will be quick to point out that I am a huge fan of this collection because it has greatly helped me with my own research, I'm afraid I have some weary words of caution about searching the collection on Find My Past in particular and the shortcomings of their indexing in general. I've yet to exercise the Ancestry version to see if it is any better and will let you know the outcome via these pages, of course. So back to Find My Past for now - get a cup of tea and biscuit and settle down for a good read if you're interested!
You can of course search by name and use the name variants feature too. This will search for your relatives name anywhere in the text, but I would advise extreme caution doing this, given my experiences - you might get so much more than you bargained for that doesn't actually turn out to be entirely relevant! You can also browse by parish and county apparently, but when I tried to use the latter for Kilkenny, for example, I got back over 19,000 name results which seemed to cover a multitude of other counties as well! From this, I tentatively deduced (without exhaustive testing) that the records are not arranged by county but instead the filter just searches for the given county name anywhere in the document, a bit like with newspaper searches - *sigh *.
When you do search by name, you will be returned some tantalising results accompanied by a year and location. When I first started using these records, I thought I had hit pay dirt and was going to be tracing lots of my farming and landlord relatives back into the early 18th century. Nope. For reasons best known to themselves, the FindMyPast indexers appear to have chosen to associate names with random years plucked from within the context of the record but not necessarily actually attached to that name in a meaningful way. Let me illustrate this by example.
My ancestor, Joseph Empson, was a relatively big cheese on the property speculation scene in the mid 19th century City of Kilkenny. Searching for him by name in Kilkenny returns 5 results (including 2 duplicates!), so really there only 3 records ranging from 1769 to 1832 in what turns out to be more than 1 set of sales particulars.
The record image associated with what looks like the oldest record tells a different story though. If you study the image below, you can clearly see that Joseph Empson was NOT a party to the original lease dated 1769, but to a later renewal dated 1834. And in fact, strictly speaking if you take the tenant named Joseph Empson, the date associated with him should perhaps be 1865/1866, assuming that the information in the sales particulars was gathered (and verified?) relatively soon before the intended 26 JAN 1866 sale date? - the cover page is at the top of this web page.
So, like I say, be extremely vigilant as to the combinations of names and dates returned by the FindMyPast search interface - you are going to have to plough through every single one. Equally, I wouldn't even bother with putting a year into the search box unless you know your man was associated with a particular lease in a particular year. Let me know if I've got this wrong or if you have some other successful strategies for accessing this valuable data.
What can you expect to find in these records and how should you interpret what you find?
There can be quite a lot of useful information buried in these documents but you will need to take care reading it all and piecing together the story or what you think the story might be. Resist the temptation to just harvest names and zoom on to the next occurrence as at best, you will miss a lot, and at worst, you will get hopelessly confused when there are many mentions of similarly named people.
So, again with reference to the example above, what can you expect to find?
There can be quite a lot of useful information buried in these documents but you will need to take care reading it all and piecing together the story or what you think the story might be. Resist the temptation to just harvest names and zoom on to the next occurrence as at best, you will miss a lot, and at worst, you will get hopelessly confused when there are many mentions of similarly named people.
So, again with reference to the example above, what can you expect to find?
- Sales usually consisted of a number of lots - the number should be stated on the cover page. There are 2 lots in this particular sale.
- Within each lot there could be 1 or more denominations i.e. separately identifiable properties or lands. These would be numbered sequentially in the far left hand column - Joseph Empson's public house is No. 11 in Lot 2. If there is a map with the sales particulars, the property should appear as numbered on the map.
- The current tenant was named or, as in this case, someone who was acting as the Representative of the tenant. This was often in the capacity of an executor meaning that the actual tenant had (recently?) died or perhaps the Chapman family were the publicans who held the original lease from the land owner but in the intervening years the Empsons have taken over as intermediate lessors?
- The yearly rents and size (Irish acres, roods & perches) of the denomination were listed. In this case, as it appears to be a public house only, no acreage was recorded.
- Gale Days were those days in the year when the rents were payable, usually linked to the liturgical calendar - in this case in 2 instalments, the first due on the 25th March (or Lady Day) and the second on the 29th September (Michaelmas.)
- The last column is the interesting one genealogically as it usually spells out the nature of the tenure in terms of the leases that have existed and currently exist. In this case, the earliest lease was contracted in 1769 between the 2 parties named for the common term of 3 lives. It was last renewed in 1834 between the parties named. If you are unfamiliar with leases then this is my interpretation of what I think this all means;
- "Abraham Colles and others" - this man was most likely to have been a descendant of William Colles, the original owner, and he owned the land in conjunction with other parties - possibly siblings who all inherited via a will (confirmed by reading the descriptive pages that precede Lot 2 in the document.) Abraham Colles' name also appeared on the cover page.
- Joseph Empson contracted the lease 22 years prior to this sale date and made it for the lives of 3 men in his family - Richard, Joseph and Richard junior. But there were no relationships named - what might you surmise? Richard junior was the son of Richard? Joseph was the named tenant or could he have been a son or nephew or a grandson? Remember, named lives were generally parties with a vested interest in the tenancy and to avoid paying fees at frequent renewals, the contracted lives often included young children. You will need to corroborate the generations with other evidence to work out who is who in this case, but sometimes you may get relationships named and even more helpfully the ages of the named lives at the time of the contract. The sales particulars made a point of stating which of the named lives were still extant or in this case that this information was not known, so maybe the named life of Joseph Empson was not the same man as the current tenant? I believe that the lease only had to be formally renewed once all 3 lives were no longer extant so who knows in this case?
Map page from sales particulars
What else to look out for and how to organise the images
Yes, more work and extra documentation to save but worth it to preserve the correct context for these records in your research. Trust me - if you don't do this, you will return to your family tree repository in later years and look at some snippet of an image or printed document and have no idea how it fits in with the grand scheme of things!
Yes, more work and extra documentation to save but worth it to preserve the correct context for these records in your research. Trust me - if you don't do this, you will return to your family tree repository in later years and look at some snippet of an image or printed document and have no idea how it fits in with the grand scheme of things!
- FindMyPast will dump you somewhere in the document that happens to have your man mentioned in it. If the printed page number of the document is visible, note this page - there are no helpful image numbers like you find on FamilySearch I'm afraid. If there is no number then try to note something memorable like the description of the first property or denomination. If there is a lot number visible as a page header, note that too. You will want to at least recognise it again later and if there is a page number, reference this exact page in your source citation.
- The image screen will have 2 little white arrows on either side. Click on the left hand arrow and page back through ALL the preceding images until you reach a cover page - it should look something like the image at the top of this web page. You will have paged through some interesting intervening pages - resist the temptation to pause! Note the number of lots as advertised on the cover page. Now, use the right hand arrow to page ALL the way through to the end of the document, making sure you reach the end of the last lot. Note the total number of pages that are contained in the sales particulars. Now page all the way back to the beginning and READ through the document in sequence and I strongly recommend you save each and every page as you go along, naming your files as per your own convention - here is mine e.g.
- LTV - BARKER Eagle Hill & Croneskeagh (Pg 1 of 5) (LTV = Leases, Tenancies and Valuations)
- By doing this, you will;
- Get all the valuable context of the descriptive passages at the beginning which often describe the original tenancies from the early 18th century plus any terms and conditions of the sale e.g. continuing annuities for named individuals. I even found a marriage date for a named couple listed here.
- Usually find a good large scale map with the properties clearly marked like the example above. You may also find an annotated OSI map showing the townland highlighted in the wider context of the county.
- Learn about the surrounding properties and be able to place your relatives' holdings more precisely in the shared landscape,
- Learn about your relatives' neighbours and in particular the context of the families with whom yours may have intermarried or shared business dealings with. For example, you may also find your relatives being named as lives on leases for these other people.
- Note ALL the occurrences of your relatives in a particular area - be sure to check carefully back to your sometimes confusing search results list, as by saving one version of the entire document you may well have captured most or all of the images relevant to a group of results (the image icon for each record will have a small white on red tick against it if you have already accessed the set of images that each record ticked is displayed in.) If a record's image icon is not ticked, then your relative must appear in another sales document - go find it!
How do you work forwards or backwards from a record in this source?
The most obvious place to check back to is Griffith's Valuation, 1847-1864 for either the named individual or the townland or parish to see if this is a continuation record for the same person or if have they acquired the land in the intervening period (Check the Valuation Revision Books, 1847-1864+ for that information.) Check forward in those same Valuation Revision Books to see what happened as a result of the estate being sold - did your relative have to relinquish their tenancy soon afterwards perhaps?
As ever with leases, the Registry of Deeds Memorial Deeds ought to be a happy hunting ground for the preceding period and you will usually know the date on which the last lease was contracted. Search from and forward from this date to try to find it as it could have been registered much later or perhaps not at all. Where you do find much older original leases mentioned then try using the Townland Indexes to locate this first lease as it may contain very valuable information that takes you further back on your tree, especially if it was part of a marriage settlement.
The most obvious place to check back to is Griffith's Valuation, 1847-1864 for either the named individual or the townland or parish to see if this is a continuation record for the same person or if have they acquired the land in the intervening period (Check the Valuation Revision Books, 1847-1864+ for that information.) Check forward in those same Valuation Revision Books to see what happened as a result of the estate being sold - did your relative have to relinquish their tenancy soon afterwards perhaps?
As ever with leases, the Registry of Deeds Memorial Deeds ought to be a happy hunting ground for the preceding period and you will usually know the date on which the last lease was contracted. Search from and forward from this date to try to find it as it could have been registered much later or perhaps not at all. Where you do find much older original leases mentioned then try using the Townland Indexes to locate this first lease as it may contain very valuable information that takes you further back on your tree, especially if it was part of a marriage settlement.
(c) Irish Geneaography - 12 OCT 2023
