53 



The court of defective titles may have suggested the notion of the 

 modern Landed Estates Court : the substantial diiference between them 

 consists in this, that whereas the letters patents were obtained on pay- 

 ment of a money consideration to the Crown, and protected the grantee 

 and all deriving under him from Crown claims, the conveyance from 

 the Landed Estates Court is attainable at the mere cost of the law ex- 

 penses attendant upon the proceedings before it; and, the authority being 

 parliamentarjT^, the title conferred is good against the world. 



The preparations preceding, and necessary to carry out Wentworth's 

 design, had the effect of calling into existence commissions of survey, 

 which resulted, agreeably to former precedents, in inquisitions finding 

 the title of the Crown to the counties named. These inquisitions were 

 returned into Chancery some time between 1637 and 1639. And as it 

 was essential for the purposes of the proposed plantation to ascertain 

 accurately the quantities and bounds of the several townlands, the sur- 

 veyor- general was again called into action. 



The books of survey and maps compiled in pursuance of these pro- 

 ceedings were returned into the office of the surveyor-general; and were 

 all consumed, as stated by Stone^ the then surveyor-general, in the cala- 

 mitous fire of 1711. But, antecedently to that event, copies of the sur- 

 vey books, expressing the names of the denominations of lands, their 

 quality, and contents, Irish plantation measure, and situation as to 

 parish, barony, and county, together with the significant number of re- 

 ference by which each might be referred to, and identified on the plot 

 or map, were made out and returned by the surveyor-general to the com- 

 missioners for executing the act of settlement in the year 1661. The com- 

 missioners required such assistance to enable them to charge the King's 

 quit-rents, imposed for a special purpose by the act, and also ultimately 

 to distribute the lands themselves to the adventurers, soldiers, trans- 

 planted persons, and other legitimate claimants. 



These books, after serving the purposes for which they were intended, 

 as well as the decrees, certificates, and other record proceedings of the 

 commissioners, were, by direction of section 1 of the Act of Explana- 

 tion, 17 & 18 Car. II., and of clause 60 of the rules attached to and 

 incorporated in the Act of Settlement, 14 & 15 Car. IL, cap. 2, delivered 

 up to the auditor-general about the year 1678, to remain as of record in 

 his office, for perpetual preservation and public use; and they are now de- 

 posited in the Landed Estates Eecord Office, Dublin; and abundantly cor- 

 roborate the statement I have made of Wentworth's, alias Strafford'' s, 

 mapped townland survey. Eut that no doubt should be allowed to remain 

 upon so important a point, I subjoin a statement in detail of payments 

 made out of the Irish exchequer to an extent exceeding £9,000, which 

 declares the names of the counties subjected to survey, and the nature of 

 the records arising out of it. The inquisitions alone are not named ; 

 but, as they are in existence in Chancery, they tell their own tale. My 

 object is to show that there were also books descriptive of the survey, 

 and maps of the townlands described in the books : — 



