James Elliott abandoned the family farm at Mullaghdun in Fermanagh, half-way between Enniskillen and Belcoo, about 1860. By then Elliotts had been farming in Fermanagh for two hundred years.[1]
The Ulster Elliotts were Planters, exiled by James VI of Scotland for brigandry after the mayhem of The Busy Week in 1601. Most of these displaced borderers settled and concentrated in the Counties of Fermanagh, Leitrim and Cavan in the North-West of Ireland.
The Elliott story-line ‘originates’ in Liddesdale on the Scottish borders. The name’s origins are probably Anglian, out of Northumberland – from Aelfward – or Breton – amongst the Ellegouet who joined William the Bastard’s[2] expedition in 1066.
Drawn North onto the Scottish Marches as mercenaries, the Elliots were an unruly sept, deeply implicated in the feuding and reiving of the 16th century. When the Debatable Land was ‘pacified’ in 1604, James VI & I’s administration offered the family a simple choice – plantation in Ulster or the gallows. A faction of the Elliots opted for Ulster in 1609, taking their feuding ways with them. As Ulster Protestants, many Elliotts had a reputation for being fierce anti-Catholics but they were Church of Ireland i.e. Episcopalian rather that Presbyterian. The kirk reforms of the 16th Century had had little traction in the anarchy of the Middle March before the Union of Crowns.
Imposed on the indigenous, predominantly Catholic population in an explicitly colonial project, the Elliotts thrived through centuries of distrust, hostility and self-interested brutality. Though tenants, not landowners, Elliotts feature in Ulster Muster rolls of a number of estates owned by Scottish undertakers prior to the Irish Uprising of 1641,
Unlike their catholic neighbours, however, they were enfranchised during the years of the Penal Laws that followed William of Orange’s victories in 1690 – provided they met the property criteria of being, at least until the mid-19th century, forty-shilling tenants[3]. They would also be more likely to hold larger areas or more improved land. And, though Fermanagh was not as prosperous as neighbouring Armagh, by the 19th century they already lived in a more capitalised and ‘modern’ culture than the O’ Boellains of the South West.
[1] Elliotts would continue to farm in Mullaghdun until the second half of the 20th century.
[2] A relation of Kaðlin Hrólfsdóttir Møre de Normandie who was mother of Ciarmac Ó Beólláin.
[3] At which point, to doctor the franchise, the qualifying rental value became £10 per annum.