BROWNLOW’S TOWN (1610–30) Lurgan’s success was, in large measure, the result of the initiatives of the family who were granted its site in the early seventeenth century, and remained its landlords into the eighteenth century, the Brownlows. It is among the papers of that family that many of the sources for the early history of the town can be found, in particular the leasebook made by Arthur Brownlow (1645–1711) which records much of the seventeenthcentury development of the town.2 Supplemented by the records of the Plantation, we have in Lurgan one of the best documented towns of seventeenth-century Ulster.
1 2
12
R. P. Mahaffy (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic: Anne, 1703–4, London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1924, pp. 232–3. See R.G. Gillespie (ed.), Settlement and Survival on an Ulster Estate: The Brownlow Leasebook 1667–1711, Belfast: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 1988.
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PL
Towards the end of 1703, Arthur Brownlow, the landlord of Lurgan, wrote to Queen Anne about his town. It was, he claimed, a large village with a great many houses, well shingled and abounding in settlers. These were ‘industrious and trading people’ who had advanced linen manufacture so that it was ‘one of the most thriving, flourishing villages and most considerable market towns of … Ulster’.1 Brownlow’s claim was supported by a number of testimonials from local landlords. Nearly a century earlier when the map-maker Josias Bodley mapped the barony in which Lurgan lay, he recorded no trace of a settlement on the site (see figure 6). The emergence of Lurgan was the result of the influx of new settlers that accompanied the Plantation of Ulster in the first half of the seventeenth century and an even larger influx after 1660. This growth was not inevitable. Other nearby places, such as Portadown, had a similar inflow of settlers but they failed to produce settlements of the size of Lurgan. Why Lurgan’s first century was so productive is the subject of this essay.
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Raymond Gillespie, Professor of History, Maynooth University
Lurgan was different from other successful Ulster Plantation towns such as Armagh or Dungannon. Apart from the fact that these were well-established settlements before the Plantation, they also in the seventeenth century acquired charters which confirmed their status as centres of civil administration. Hence they had the support of the Dublin administration behind them. Lurgan was not an administrative centre. It was simply a market town with no support but that of the local landlord, who needed a market that would allow his tenants to buy and sell their goods and make enough profit to pay him rent. The first grantee of the site, William Brownlow, moved quickly. By 1611 he was busy constructing a house for himself, presumably on the site of the present Brownlow House. He was already planning a town with two houses recorded as finished and ‘other frames set up, where his town shall be’.3 By 1619 things had advanced with a survey commenting that Brownlow ‘hath made a very fair Town, consisting of 42 Houses, all which are inhabited with English Families, and the streets all paved clean through’.4 Three years later, the final survey of the progress of the Plantation modified this slightly by reducing the number of houses to forty and noting that the houses were built ‘on both sides [of] the street’. We can have some confidence in this description as the surveyors in 1622 also collected a list of names of forty-seven inhabitants, presumably representing the families in the forty houses (see appendix 1).5 Most occupants of the town were English but two tenants were described as Irish. Almost half were described as either ‘yeoman’ or ‘husbandman’, farmers living in the town while cultivating their assigned lands outside of it, which varied between one acre and forty acres in size. The range of specialist occupations in the town was limited with ten occupations being listed. These included four joiners, three turners, three coopers, two shoemakers, a mason, a weaver, a smith, a tanner, a carpenter and a butcher, all tasks that one might find in a settlement dominated by farmers and their families. While three gentlemen were mentioned, there is little indication of any high-value craft occupations or trading. The position of the town as a small marketing centre was
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LURGAN’S FIRST CENTURY (1610-1710)
3
Printed in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the late Reginald Rawdon Hastings, Vol. IV, London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1947, p. 174.
4
Printed in George Hill, An Historical Account of the Plantation in Ulster at the Commencement of the Seventeenth Century, 1608–1620, Belfast: McCaw, Stevenson and Orr,
5
1877, p. 557.
Printed in Victor Treadwell (ed.), The Irish Commission of 1622: An Investigation of the Irish Administration, 1615–22, and Its Consequences, Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2006, pp. 540, 552–5.
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