Tenants

The conditions of the plantation laid down a specific landholding structure designed to prevent landlords from managing their estates as they pleased and to provide proper security to their tenants in the form of written leases. It also represented an attempt to fashion a social structure and social relationships in the planted counties. For each thousand acres the undertaker was to reserve for himself a demesne of 300 acres. The remaining 700 acres were to be divided up in the following manner: two fee-farmers or freeholders with 120 acres each; three leaseholders for three lives or twenty-one years with 100 acres each; and at least four families of husbandmen, artificers or cottagers on the final 160 acres.