Violence, Rent, Improvement and Distress on the Frankfort Estates in Kilkenny during the Eighteen Forties

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the author acquired about 30,000 letters written mainly in the 1840s. These pertained to estates throughout Ireland managed by James Robert Stewart and Joseph Kincaid, hereafter denoted SK. Until the letters - called the SK correspondence in what follows - became the author’s property, they had not seen light of day since the 1840s. Addressed mainly to the SK office in Dublin, they were written mainly by landlords, tenants, the partners in SK, local agents, etc. After about 200 years in operation as a land agency, the firm in which members of the Stewart family were the principal partners – Messrs J.R. Stewart & Son(s) from the mid-1880s onwards - ceased business in the mid-1980s. Since 1994 the author has been researching the SK correspondence of the 1840s. It gives many new insights into economic and social conditions in Ireland during the decade of the great Irish famine, and into the operation of Ireland’s most important land agency during those years. It is intended ultimately to publish material on several of the estates managed by SK in book form. The proposed title is Landlords, Tenants, Famine: Business of an Irish Land Agency in the 1840s, a draft of which has been completed. A majority of the letters in the larger study from which the present article is drawn are on themes some of which one might expect - rents, distraint (seizure of assets in lieu of rent), “voluntary” surrender of land in return for “compensation” upon peacefully quitting; formal ejectment (a matter of last resort on estates managed by SK); landlord-assisted emigration (on a scale more extensive than most historians of Ireland in the 1840s appear to believe); petitions from tenants; complaints by tenants, about both other tenants and local agents; major works of improvement (on almost all of the estates managed by SK); applications by SK, on behalf of proprietors, for government loans to finance improvements; recommendations of agricultural advisers hired by SK, etc. Thus, most of the SK correspondence is about aspects of estate management. Apart from a small tract of land near Graiguenamanagh owned by Sir Charles Burton (most of whose lands were in Co Carlow), it seems that the only estates in Kilkenny managed by SK in the 1840s were those of Viscount Frankfort. Although the files on his estates are much less extensive than some of those investigated in the draft of Landlords, Tenants, Famine, they do refer to most of the core aspects of estate management mentioned above. But in the case of the Frankfort properties, the material on some of those themes is very thin.