The Limerick Estate of Sergeant Warren during the Great Irish Famine

As has been indicated in an earlier article1 in this Journal (or in the article which immediately proceeds the present piece?), some years ago 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. During the 1840s, their firm was the most important land agency in Ireland. Most of the letters were addressed to the SK office in Dublin. This hitherto unrecorded accumulation, called the SK correspondence in what follows, probably constitutes the largest single archive of its kind on the decade of the great Irish famine. The archive, which is in the author’s possession, is the principal primary source for what follows. The earlier article to which reference has been made considered developments on Gertrude Fitzgerald’s Mount Blakeney estate between Charleville and Kilmallock. As earlier indicated, during the 1840s SK in fact managed properties in west and southwest Limerick on behalf of three proprietors. Apart from the Mount Blakeney estate, these were the lands of John Stratford in the Robertstown district on the Shannon estuary (the “Robertstown estate”) and those of a person known as Sergeant Warren, near Ballingarry (to which the SK correspondence refers as the “Ballingarry estate” or alternatively the “Ballinruane estate”). Within the SK correspondence, surviving material on the Warren estate, investigated below, is less extensive than that on either the Fitzgerald or the Stratford properties. However, each of the three subsets of correspondence is broadly similar in content: they each reveal that although there was extreme distress in the respective districts during the 1840s, SK’s treatment of the tenantry, on behalf of the proprietors who the firm represented, must be considered generally humane.