I can?t answer Tom?s query about school. But Peggy's query about Unagh can probably be answered. Unagh was in the parish of Lissan and that general area (near Cookstown) appears to have been church land. Source: Robinson page 163. So no undertaker or servitor there.
If folk want to read up about the Plantation and Tyrone in the 1600s, then Philip Robinson?s book: ?The Plantation of Ulster? or M. Perceval-Maxwell?s ?The Scottish Migration to Ulster in the Reign of James I? are both detailed studies which provide masses of data.
The Undertakers were the major landowners. Robinson?s definition is: ?A class of plantation grantee composed of influential English and Scots who were to ?undertake? the plantation of British settlers on the estates they obtained.?
His definition of Servitor: ?A class of plantation grantee composed of English administrative and military officials who were mostly resident crown servants in Ireland.?
Both categories were appointed by the Crown. They effectively owned the land and could more or less do what they wished, though ultimately all land belonged to the Crown and so periodically got forfeit if you were out of favour, but otherwise you were generally free to do as you pleased with it.
The undertakers undertook to do various things in return for their land grant. Namely to build public buildings and roads, schools, a bawn (a defensive fortress), to establish a militia for local defence, and to bring significant numbers of tenants from their Scottish, English or Welsh estates to establish a significant community in the area. (Previous attempts at Plantation
s in Ireland in the 1500s had failed primarily because insufficient settlers arrived or stayed.). Throughout the 1600s some estimates reckon 200,000 Scots settled in Ulster. That would have been about 20% of the entire Scottish population at the time. They didn?t all come as part of the Planation (1610 ? 1625). They came in batches all through the 1600s and there was a big influx in the 1680s and 1690s due to the Killing Times in Scotland and then a major famine. But the outcome was certainly to dominate or at least heavily change certain counties in Ulster.
In 1784 when the first Catholic church opened in Belfast (St Mary?s) there were something like 357 Catholics in a city of around 13,000 people. The rest were all Protestants, mainly Presbyterian Scots. There was hardly anyone of native I
rish origins in the city at all. That perhaps give the flavour of the impact of the Plantation in some places.
