in recompense of his good service rendered in Ireland, pursuant to her royal letters dated the last of February, 1586 to the Lord Deputy and Lord Chancellor directed, and intending to bestow upon him three seignories and a-half of land, ... ’lying as near to the town of Youghall as they may be conveniently,’ each seignory containing 12,000 acres of tenanted land, not accounting mountains, bogs, or barren heath.”  And again:  “And as Sir Walter made humble suit, to enable him the better to perform the enterprize for the habitation and repeopling of the land, to grant him and his heirs, in fee-farm for ever, the possessions of the late dissolved abbey or monastery called Molanassa, otherwise Molana, and the late dissolved priory of the Observant Friars, or the Black Friars, near Youghall, ... and, as they lie adjoining the lands already granted to him, her Majesty is pleased to comply with his request, and by her letters, dated at Greenwich the 2nd of July, 1587, directed to the Lord Deputy, expressed her intention to that effect.” Patent and Close Rolls, Chancery, Ireland, reg.  Elizabeth, Mem. 5, 41, 1595, p. 323.

As the lands at first granted did not measure the 42,000 acres, the Lord Deputy is instructed to issue a commission to measure off so much of other escheated lands adjoining “as shall be requisite to make up the full number and quantity of three seignories and a-half of tenantable land, without mountains, bogs, or barren heath; To hold for ever in fee-farm, as of the Castle of Carregroghan, in the Co. of Cork, in free soccage and not in capite.”—­Ibid. p. 327.

Alas! how soon he tired of the great and coveted prize.

[6] Hooker, Suppl. to Holinshed’s Chronicle, p. 183.

[7] Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor, addressed to Members of the House of Commons, by R.L.  V.M.  Haliday Collection of pamphlets in the Library of the Royal Irish Academy, Vol. 54.

[8] Page 18.

[9] Page 35.

[10] Short View of the State of Ireland.  Haliday Pamphlets, Vol. 74.

[11] An answer to a paper called “A Memorial of the Poor Inhabitants of the Kingdom of Ireland.” Same Vol.

[12] “Answer to Memorial,” signed A.B., March 25, 1728.

[13] “Letter to the Duke of Newcastle.”

[14] Vol.  I., p. 166.

[15] “The famine of 1741 was not regarded with any active interest in England or in any foreign country, and the subject is scarcely alluded to in the literature of the day.  No measures were adopted, either by the Executive or the Legislature, for the purpose of relieving the distress caused by this famine.”—­Irish Crisis, by Sir C.E.  Trevelyan, Bart., p. 13.

[16] Probably the origin of the potato pit, as we now have it, in Ireland was the following advice given in Pue’s Occurrences of Nov. 29th, 1740:—­

“Method of securing potatoes from the severest frost.