Land Agent & Coal Carter Help please

[madfan]

 Hi,

Sorry to be cheeky   but I have 2 occupation questions.

 - What was a land agent (probably in Ireland) around the 1860's?

- Would a coal carter  in the eary 1900's be someone who works at the mine or someone who deliveries coal?

Thank you for help you can give me.

Madfan

[Maggott]

Hi Madfan - Nothing cheeky about asking a question (if you don't ask, you don't learn...)  Land agent was the equivalent of an estate manager.  In 19th cent Ireland not a popular guy because he was often collecting rents.
Coal carter is most likely to have worked in mining, but not necessarily underground. 
If he was a 'coalman' the description would probably have been something like 'coal merchant' or 'coal merchant's man'
Maggott

[madfan]

Hi Maggott,

Thanks for that, my ggg grandfather couldn't have been very popular like you said 

Perhaps thats why they came to England!?

Think I need to do some more research on land agents now. Thanks again

Madfan

[madfan]

Hello again,

Just a thought - If he was collecting taxes could there be surviving records?

Problem is though I'm not sure wherebouts in Ireland he was (although his son was born in Dublin).

Madfan

[stanmapstone]

In mining a Cartman or Coal Cartman drove a horse and cart along underground roads. A Coal Carter could be just a Carter who carried coal for a haulage contractor

Stan

[Christopher]

Hi Madfan - Nothing cheeky about asking a question (if you don't ask, you don't learn...)  Land agent was the equivalent of an estate manager.  In 19th cent Ireland not a popular guy because he was often collecting rents.
Coal carter is most likely to have worked in mining, but not necessarily underground. 
If he was a 'coalman' the description would probably have been something like 'coal merchant' or 'coal merchant's man'
Maggott

The land agent was unpopular because he collected rents is putting the matter extremely mildly Maggot. Many of the Irish estates were owned by absentee landlords who never visited Ireland whilst others lived in grand town houses in Dublin and knew little about what happened on their estates ... such matters like the management of the estate was left in the hands of agents and some of those guys abused their position by being more than somewhat ruthless with the tenants.

An article titled "Irish 'famines': acts of god, colonial mismanagement or genocide?" on the Irish Democrat website makes extremely interesting reading. It mentions the absentee landlords taking vast profits from their estates ... there were 7,500,000 acres of land in the hands of absentee landlords in the 18th century ... and twenty nine famines between 1722 and 1879.

The Moving Here Migration Histories website has an article about the murder of a land agent named Burke and the problems faced by the tenants on Lord Clanricarde's Craughwell estate.

Christopher

[Maggott]

Yup.  My people were on the sharp end of the system.  Always good to break bad news gently
Maggott

[madfan]

Hi Maggott & Christopher,

Maggott - you are right - it is best to break bad news gently  thank you!. But i think 'unpopular' was definately an understatement    as Christopher says.
Maybe just maybe my relative was an exception to the rule of land agents - although thats probably just me wishful thinking. Find it quite hard to take actually that one of my relatives would have been involved in making those terrible desperate times even worse.

Thank you Christopher for those links, as you said - very interesting but very very sad.

Hope you don't mind but I have a couple of other questions -
Would or could the land agent also be a tenant of the landlord? How and why? would a person become a land agent?
Thank you

Zoe

[Christopher]

Hi Zoe,

There's an article writteen by Sharon Adams in the Lisburn Historical Society Journal Volume 2 December 1979 titled "Relations between Landlord, Agent and Tenant
on the Hertford Estate in the nineteenth century."

It mentions the Very Reverend Dean Stannus who was the land agent to the Marquesses of Hertford for more than fifty years as well as being the Rector of the Parish of Blaris, under the patronage of Lord Hertford. The Dean had a slight advantage over many other land agents as being a Rector he could demand and expect certain respect for the dignity of his position. Agents were responsible for the care of the land but unfortunately in Ireland they were more interested in collecting rents and evicting tenants if these were not paid. Many burnt down houses so that the evicted tenants could not return to their properties.

Christopher