The final Henrician policy towards Ireland, involving ‘surrender and regrant’ and overtones of conciliation and redress is a familiar part of Irish history. What actually happened to that policy in its early phase is not so familiar. In a paper setting forth the importance of Henry’s Irish policy Robert Dunlop felt obliged to say something concerning its fate and the reasons for its failure. Having rejected a religious explanation, or any ‘conflict between tribal and feudal ideas’, he placed the blame on the Irish chiefs themselves. While admitting that a weak central government was ‘unable to enforce its decrees without constantly appealing to the sword’, he stressed most that ‘the easy indifference with which the Irish accepted Henry’s plan was fatal to its success’. Had their chiefs been more willing to surrender some of their authority the policy, so well devised, would have succeeded. ‘Their inability or unwillingness to do so compelled the use of more drastic measures, and was the cause of all their subsequent misfortunes.’ Dunlop’s conclusions have an air of vagueness, and there were actually very concrete reasons, besides the general character of the Irish, why the policy did not achieve more immediate success. Those reasons are to be sought in Edward VI’s reign as it manifested itself in Ireland.

A critical year for Dublin was 1685. It was the year that Charles II died and James II came to the throne. The twenty-five years of Charles II’s reign had brought stability, prosperity and expansion within a predominantly protestant framework. The death of Charles, the accession of his catholic brother James, and the recall of the great duke of Ormond appeared to mark the end of an era. It was a year of anxiety for protestants and of fluctuating hopes for catholics. It was a time of transition that was to be followed by the uninhibitedly partisan policy of Tyrconnell, by the Jacobite war, and by the protestant liberation after william’s victory at the Boyne.

The first reliable statutory census of the population of Ireland was taken in 1821 and started the decennial series. An earlier census authorised by statute had been taken between 1813 and 1815. The results, however, were defective and neither printed nor presented to parliament. The causes or this failure air discussed below.

The first decennial census of Great Britain (taken in 1801) was a success, and a bill to take a single census of Ireland was introduced on 31 January 1806 ‘to assimilate the laws and regulations of Ireland to those of this country as far as it is just and expedient’. It was thrown out at the first readiilg. During the commons’ debate on the second census of Great Britain (taken in 1811), several members deprecated that Ireland had again been excluded and attributed this to ‘a species of timidity on the part of certain persons who were afraid even of letting themselves know the real amount of the inhabitants of the sister kingdom’. More probably, however, Ireland was omitted because of the formidable practical difficulties her inclusion would have presented. A second bill for a census of Ireland, which became law on 18 July 1812, made light of these difficulties or suggested how they might be overcome.

By no means the least of the obstacles which hinder a quantitative analysis of Irish agriculture prior to 1847 is the chaotic state of weights and measures. Successive statutes had been introduced in an effort to secure uniformity, but had little effect even in official quarters. Thus, although 5 Geo. IV c. 74 set up, as from 5 January 1826, the ‘imperial standard’ as the only standard measure of distance, area, volume and capacity, the Irish Post Office continued to use the Irish mile in its cancellations at least up to 1856, and used the same unit in its published list of distances. Variations in the stone, hundredweight and ton, together with non-standard grain measures, were declared illegal in Ireland as from I July 1835, but practice again lagged far behind the law.

In the absence of any comprehensive survey of the actual state of weights and measures in Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century, historians dealing with the period have tended to bypass the problem at the expense of ambiguity and inaccuracy.