The Middleman System

During the 16 hundreds, there's this process of the celtic feudal system being dismantled piece by piece. Ownership of the land is transferred to english landlords who don't live in ireland. The middleman system allows landlords to profit handily off of irish land and labor without actually seeing the people they're exploiting. And over the course of 200 years or so, most irish peasants wind up living on these ver very small plots of land. We'll talk about this more later but the they keep getting divided up more and more.