Extracted from Lord Kilgobbin by Charles Lever, published by Appletree Press
Lord Kilgobbin
by Charles Lever
Chapter One - part 5
Had the Government Commissioner, sent to report on the state of land tenure in Ireland, confined himself to a visit to the estate of Lord Kilgobbin–for so we like to call him–it is just possible that the Cabinet would have found the task of legislation even more difficult than they have already admitted it to be.
First of all, not a tenant on the estate had any certain knowledge of how much land he held. There had been no survey of the property for years. “It will be made up to you," was Gill's phrase about everything. "What matters if you have an acre more or an acre less?" Neither had anyone a lease, or, indeed, a writing of any kind. Gill settled that on the 25th March and 25th September a certain sum was to be forthcoming, and that was all. When the lord wanted them they were always to give him a hand, which often meant with their carts and horses, especially in harvest time. Not that they were hard-worked or hard-working population: they took life very easy, seeing that by no possible exertion could they materially better themselves; and even when they hunted a neighbour's cow out of their wheat, they would execute the eviction with a lazy indolence and sluggishness that took away from the act all semblance of ungenerousness.
They were very poor, their hovels were wretched, their clothes ragged and their food scanty; but, with all that, they were not discontented, and very far from unhappy. There was no prosperity at hand to contrast with their poverty. The world was, on the whole, pretty much as they always remembered it. They would have liked to be "better off" if they knew how, but they did not know if there was a "better off" –much less how to come at it; and if there were, Peter Gill certainly did not tell them of it.
If a stray visitor to fair or market brought back the news that there was an agitation abroad for a new settlement of the land, that popular orators were proclaiming the poor man's rights, and denouncing the cruelties of the landlord, if they heard that men were talking of repealing the laws which secured property to the owner and only admitted him to a sort of partnership with the tiller of the soil, old Gill speedily assured them that these were changes only to be adopted in Ulster, where the tenants were rack-rented and treated like slaves. "Which of you here," would he say, “can come forward and say he was ever evicted?" Now as the term was one of which none had the very vaguest conception,–it might, for aught they knew, have been an operation in surgery,–the appeal was an overwhelming success. "Sarra doubt of it, but auld Peter's right, and there’s worse places to live in, and worse landlords to live under, than the Lord. Not but it taxed Gill's skill and cleverness to maintain this quarantine against the outer world; and he often felt like Prince Metternich in a like strait–that it would only be a question of time, and, in the long run, the newspaper fellows must win.
Peter Gill's control is not confined to 'Lord Kilgobbin's' tenants: Kate Kearney's position is explained further here
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