Dispossessed families were forced to leave their homes and native areas during the plantation period. They had to consider the options open to them.
| Women from gentry families could be responsible for quite a large entourage. Dame Katherine Morris of Latheragh, Co. Tipperary, had a proposed household group of 35 followers as well as stock which included 10 cows, 16 garrans [horses], 19 goats and 2 swine. Mary O'Dowd, 'Women and war in Ireland' in Margaret MacCurtain & Mary O'Dowd (eds.), Women in early modern Ireland, Dublin, 1991, p.106. |
In order to speed up the land settlement, the legal status of women in Ireland was changed when widows of Catholic landholders and wives of men who had gone abroad to enlist for Spain were treated as proprietors in their own right contrary to common law. These women, together with single women who held land in their own right were also transplanted and they joined men at the queues in Athlone and Loughrea to find out where they were being sent in Connacht. There were unavoidable delays and many were threatened with eviction by those who had been granted their lands back home and were in a hurry to take possession.