Mr. Obens had 2,000 acres obtained from William Powell, the first patentee.  He had built a bawne of sods with a pallizado of boards ditched about.  Within this there was a ’good fair house of brick and lyme,’ and near it he had built four houses, inhabited by English families.  There were twenty settlers, who with their under-tenants were able to furnish forty-six armed men.  This was the beginning of Portadown.

The fourth lot was obtained from the first patentee by Mr. Cope, who had 3,000 acres.  ’He built a bawne of lyme and stone 180 feet square, 14 feet high, with four flankers; and in three of them he had built very good lodgings, which were three stories high.’  He erected two water-mills and one wind-mill, and near the bawne he had built fourteen houses of timber, which were inhabited by English families.  This is now the rich district of Lough Gall.

It should be observed here that, in all these crown grants, the patentees were charged crown rents only for the arable lands conveyed by their title-deeds, bogs, wastes, mountain, and unreclaimed lands of every description being thrown in gratuitously; amounting probably to ten or fifteen times the quantity of demised ground set down in acres.  Lord Lurgan’s agent, Mr. Hancock, at the commencement of his evidence before the Devon Commission, stated that ’Lord Lurgan is owner of about 24,600 acres, with a population of 23,800, under the census of 1841’—­that is, by means of original reclamation, drainage, and other works of agricultural improvement, Mr. Brownlow’s 2,500 acres of the year 1619, had silently grown up to 24,600 acres, and his hundred swordsmen, or pikemen, the representatives of 57 families, with a few subordinates, had multiplied to 23,800 souls.  Now Mr. Hancock founds the tenant-right custom upon the fact that few, if any, of the ‘patentees were wealthy;’ we may therefore fairly presume that the settlers built their own houses, and made their own improvements at their own expense, contrary to the English practice.’  As the population increased, and ‘arable’ land became valuable, bogs, wastes, and barren land were gradually reclaimed and cultivated, through the hard labour and at the cost of the occupying tenantry, until the possessions of his descendants have spread over ten times the area nominally demised by the crown to their progenitor.  This process went on all over the province.

Sixteen years passed away, and in the opinion of the Government the London companies and the Irish Society, instead of reforming as Irish planters, went on from bad to worse.  Accordingly, in 1631, Charles I. found it necessary to bring them into the Star Chamber.  In a letter to the lords justices he said:—­