dent gentry were in general very much involved in debt, and could not contrive to get their living; they were pressed themselves, and without making any further apology for them, they certainly used their tenants quite as severely as any one peasant did another. There were of course many exceptions; I do not mean to speak of it as an universal proposition at all. Do you speak of the landlords or the middle men ?—I speak of both; but the landlords however, in general, are persons who have leases of lives, renewable for ever. I do not know that I include in it many, who are actually seized in fee.

Will you be good enough to mention the statutes you refer to as having passed since the peace?—I refer to two or three. I will be prepared on a future day to give the Committee the precise statutes, but I can describe them generally; the statute that gave the power of distraining the growing crops, the acts that enabled the civil bill ejectment to be brought; the one statute enabled the civil bill ejectment to be brought, and another, I believe two others, extended it, and facilitated the means of bringing it. Those are the statutes I allude to; the precise years and chapters I shall furnish the Committee with.

Do the tenants suffer much under the custodiam process ? -There are many instances in which the tenants suffer excessively under the custodiam process.

Will you explain the nature of the custodiam writ?-The custodiam is a grant from the Crown to the creditor of the debtor's land. It commences in the court of Common Pleas, by a civil outlawry; and that outlawry being estreated into the Exchequer, a grant is made in the Exchequer, called a custodiam; the potential effect of which is to entitle the creditor to all the rents of the debtor, and to enable him, by a motion, which is a matter of course, a side bar rule, as it is called, to compel the tenants of the outlaw to pay their rents to the custodie; and also, by another order or motion in court, to demise under the court any lands not in lease. The mode in which rents are levied under it is by personal demand and if there be a refusal, an attachment-liberty is given occasionally to distrain; but the usual course, and that most productive to the attorney, and I may add, therefore, that generally pursued, is by attachment. The outlaw will himself distrain the tenants; he has other creditors, who have mortgages and annuities, and conflicts eternally take place between them, which may be settled, and ought to be settled by the court, upon motion, but which frequently are not; and when they are not, the person who actually suffers is the occupying tenant, for he is compelled, under distress, to pay his rent;

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and after he has paid it to one, he is attached for not paying it to the custodiam creditor. I have known instances, in which the wretched peasants have lain in gaol for years, under that process of attachment; and it is cruel to the debtor, because the legal expenses of it are enormous.

Are the instances numerous that have come under your knowledge?—I have been twenty-seven years at the Irish bar, and the instances are very numerous that have come within my knowledge, where, in really fair cases (tenants will collude, of course, with their landlord, and things of that kind will occur, but I have known an immense number of fair cases), in which the effect of that process has been most grievous, most oppressive; and that without the slightest tinge of blame to those who administered the law in the country.

Is not this form of proceeding by custodiam, a form of proceeding peculiar to Ireland, as distinguished from England? -I take it to be so, though I should speak even of Irish practice with diffidence, but of English still more so; but when we have occasion, in arguing questions, to refer to authorities, we get very little assistance from the English books. That proceeding certainly is not known in England; I say certainly, because if it were, the reports would contain cases upon it.

Is not one effect of the proceeding by custodiam to defeat the claims of prior creditors?-They may be postponed; defeat is, perhaps, too strong a word; they are postponed necessarily, because, in judgment debts, the priority is according to the date of the judgment; the proceedings by what is called an elegit, which is a mode of getting possession of either the rents or the land of the debtor. Those proceedings derive their force according to the priority of the judgment in point of date; but in the custodiam proceedings, it is according to the date of the inquisition.

Does not proceeding by custodiam tend to complicate and defeat the ordinary proceedings by ejectment ?—Yes; innocent landlords are put to great inconvenience by it, because unless the attorney makes search for custodiams, the landlord, to whom rent is fairly due, and due even from a fraudulent tenant, is defeated in that ejectment, merely because he has not gone through the form of obtaining the consent of the attorney-general, and bringing ejectment in the Court of Exchequer; if it be brought in any other court but that, the proceedings are often made void ; and I have known instances in which landlords have lost a year's rent over and over again, and that to a large amount, merely because there were custodiams against their under tenants.

Have you known many instances in which a custodiam has been fraudulently obtained, without the knowledge of the party against whom it was granted?-I have known that Occurrence frequently; I am convinced it exists daily; and I have known instances of custodiams either obtained, or at least continued by the debtor himself.

Have you any doubt that it would be a very considerable improvement in the law of Ireland, as relating to landlord and tenant, if the practice in Ireland, or the law in Ireland, were to be placed upon the same footing, as to custodiams, as it is in England ?—I am quite convinced that the proceeding by custodiam at present in Ireland, is a grievance of an oppressive nature; but I am not prepared to say, except as far as it may be merely abolished, that the merely assimilating it to the English practice would be of great good.

Have many tenants of late been turned off the lands, in the part of Ireland you are acquainted with ?-Within the last eight or ten years, many tenants have been turned off the land.

Is that habit increasing amongst landlords of clearing their farms?-I think it is at a stand; the depreciation of prices made the tenants so unpunctual in paying, that many landlords have endeavoured to clear the farms of them altogether, and to hold them in their own hands, sometimes feeding cattle upon them; in general they make cattle dairies, but on the fattening lands there have not been occupying tenants for some years.

What becomes of the families that are turned off, how do they contrive to exist?-They exist among the wretched class of labourers, or they go about begging; the man goes to England or some remote parts of Ireland to get labour, and the wife and children go begging during the autumn of the year; that occurs upon some estates in fee, where there is no middle man at all; I know it in one district very extensively upon an estate in fee.

You alluded to the operation of the Civil Bill Ejectment Act, the Committee wish to know, whether that Act altered any thing but the process by which the ejectment was effected? Yes, it did; it altered a good deal; in the first place, that Act altered and took away the exceptions which formerly existed from the ejectment; there were some excepted cases, in which an ejectment for non-payment of rents did not lie at all, as a case of infancy, coverture, and imprisonment, that Act took away those exceptions totally; it also, according to my recollection, and I believe I am accurate, altered this, that it gave ejectments against absconding

tenants, as they were called, where the premises were left vacant, it gave to two magistrates the power of declaring that vacancy; and any thing that increases the power of the magistracy in Ireland, I take to be a great alteration, not for the better but for the worse; it gave that power to magistrates to declare the tenement vacant, so that it altered, by taking away the excepted cases, and bringing them within the ejectment statute altogether, such as the cases of infancy, coverture, insanity, and any person out of the realm, or in prison; it also increased the class of cases, by cases against absenting tenants' deserted possessions.

You do not mean to apply the observations which you make as to increased hardship upon the tenant, which the Act imposed to the case of absenting tenants, that is not the part of the Act of which you complain ?-No, its general operation; but I have known cases where men were voted to be absenting, that really were not, and therefore cases of hardship in that respect, and I consider the Act as being liable to abuse; the theory of the Acts was, perhaps, good; I speak of their application to the state of society and peasantry in Ireland, as stimulating to insurrectionary movements, and creating an oppression upon the peasantry.

With respect to the Act which has been adverted to, which gave the power of distraining growing crops, was there not a provision in that Act to meet the case of a tenant who had already paid his rent?—As I remember there was, but that was only giving him a legal remedy against another person; it is quite useless to talk of an Irish peasant having a legal remedy; he has not money enough to pay the stamp duty upon what they call a latitat, the first process.

You have stated, that the usage generally in the counties you referred to was, that the tenants held by parole agreement, or by a written agreement, not recorded on stamped paper ?I stated that as one of the ill effects of stamp duties upon tenures.

You are perhaps aware, that that has not operated very extensively to the prevention of the registry freeholders, which can only be made upon stamped instruments?-With respect to the registry of freeholders, there being landlords, having a particular stimulus to register freeholders, they would go to the expense of the stamp duty; and besides that, the tenant there is supposed always to have an interest in the land, so that the case of traffic in freeholders is not applicable to my observation; I have known, however, many freeholders registered upon unstamped paper of late years; if the inferior

officer be in that interest, the thing may take place and easily.

In cases of the creation of freehold interest on stamped paper, have you known any instances, in which the freehold lease, though executed, has not been delivered over to the possession of the tenant, but has been kept in the hands of the landlord ?-Yes, I have known instances of that, and the complaints of it are not at all unfrequent.

Arising out of that, even in those cases where there is a stamped agreement between the parties, and where therefore the tenant has a legal instrument ascertaining and establishing his right, the same species of dependence which you have already alluded to still subsists, if that instrument remains in the hands of the landlord?-It does, and I have known it exercised; certainly to exercise it at all would be improper; but I have known it exercised very improperly.

The Committee understand you to state, that you have known instances of freeholders being registered, where the leases under which they were registered were on unstamped paper?-Yes.

Can you state any instances in which you know it of your own knowledge?—I am not prepared to mention names; it would be impossible for me to state particular instances; I have known the thing occur.

It is illegal, is it not?-It must be illegal, because neither tenure nor contract for land can be made in Ireland without a stamp.

Are you aware, that the certificate runs that it is upon stamped paper?-Yes; but that is recent.

Therefore the clerk of the peace would be the person who would be in fault?-Since the passing of that Act, which is certainly a recent Act.

Are you of opinion that there is any great difficulty in making registries of freeholders without the business being very accurately performed according to law?-The greatest facility; the clerk of the peace can appoint his deputy, any man can be his deputy for the moment, and it is the easiest thing in the world to register freeholds upon the present system, without either freehold or valid tenure to constitute a freeholder; there must be first tenure, that is to say, a grant for a life or lives to constitute a freehold; in order to registry there must be at the utmost such a rent as would leave the freeholder a profit of forty shillings a year: now I have known numerous instances, where, if a peasant was made to swear that he had a freehold of forty shillings, he would have perjured himself in the grossest way; and in those instances a friendly