What two centuries of deeds, mortgages and one very useful marriage actually say about one Offaly farm.
This post is the deed chain underneath a companion piece, “The Farm at Clonfinlough” (Griffith’s Valuation, plot 5)
The land the Coughlans owned, before they didn’t
On the eve of the 1641 rebellion, the Down Survey and the Civil Survey both record Clonfinlough — written as Clonefillogh — in the hands of Donogh McPhelim Coghlan, a Catholic proprietor of the MacCoghlan sept. Pender’s Census of 1659 lists a widow, “More Coghlane,” at the same townland. By 1670, under the Restoration land settlement, Francis Coghlan — also Catholic — is confirmed as owner of Clonfinlough, fifty-two acres two roods sixteen perches, and of Clonascra the townland next door.
So this was, for a while, Coughlan land in the plainest possible sense: they owned it — and that much isn’t in doubt, it’s right there on the Books of Survey and Distribution and the Down Survey itself.
Then, for a century, the record goes quiet. The next thing to happen to Clonfinlough happens off the page, in a marriage.
The marriage between the Coughlans and Armstrongs
Why did the landlord family — the Armstrongs of Gallen — keep handing this particular Coughlan family the nearest thing to a freehold a Catholic tenant could hold, generation after generation, through the worst of the Penal era and straight through a debt default? Landlords don’t usually do favours. There had to be a reason.
There is one. I think it rests on a single well-informed secondary source. A history of the Armstrong family records that William Armstrong (c.1638–1717/18) “married into the ancient Irish family of Coghlan,” and that “it would appear that through his marriage he acquired the Gallen estate in Offaly, which had been vested in the Coghlans since the dissolution of the monasteries.” His pedigree names the bride: Alice, daughter of Francis Coghlan of Kilcolgan Castle. The same source has the Armstrongs buying Ballycumber “from the Coghlans” around 1700 and rebuilding “the old Coghlan castle” there — the house still carries a datestone reading “IHS Dermot Coghlan Made This Castell In Anno Dni 1627.” They also took Garry Castle, “a medieval castle of the Coghlan family.”
If that’s right, the Armstrongs of Gallen were not some unconnected landlord who happened to hold Clonfinlough. They were sitting on a Coghlan estate that had come to them through a Coghlan daughter, and the Coughlans who went on farming it afterwards were, in effect, tenants of their own in-laws’ descendants. That would explain a pattern that otherwise looks strange: this landlord kept re-granting perpetual, renewable leases — the closest thing to ownership a Catholic tenant could hold under the Penal Laws — to the same family, in 1728, again in 1777, and again in 1803, the last time only four years after that family had defaulted on the rent. You don’t usually do that for a stranger.
None of this proves any line of descent from Francis Coghlan of Kilcolgan down to the Charles Coghlan this post is mostly about — nothing states that connection. The document that would actually prove it — the Armstrong-Coghlan marriage settlement — predates 1708, which means it cannot be in the Registry of Deeds at all. It’s somewhere else, if it survives.
Two men, one debt device, fifty-five years apart
What the Registry of Deeds does hold is two moments where a Coughlan of Clonfinlough got into debt and used exactly the same escape route to deal with it.
In January 1784, Christopher Coghlan of Clonfinlough, Gent, owing Andrew Armstrong £338 17s 4d on five bonds and five judgments, assigned his lease back to Armstrong as security — a redeemable mortgage, not a sale, with a covenant letting Christopher clear the debt at £55 a year and take the land back. The memorial recites that this same lease had originally been granted in 1728, for six hundred acres, which pushes the documented Coghlan tenure at Clonfinlough back fifty years earlier than anything I’d found before. It also names a witnes : Reverend John Bayly of Carrowkeel, very probably holding the glebe that later deeds describe as Clonfinlough’s eastern boundary, and the first named link between the two townlands.
Fifteen years later, in 1799, Charles Coghlan — I take him to be Christopher’s son, on the strength of Charles later naming his own son Christopher, which is what a grandfather’s name looks like coming back down a generation — did the same thing his father had done. Deep in arrears at £1,000 owed to Armstrong, he assigned his entire Clonfinlough leasehold to a trustee, Thomas Mulock, in trust for Andrew Armstrong. Twice, a Coughlan of Clonfinlough pledged the same Armstrong lease back to an Armstrong for debt, and both times the land stayed in the family rather than being sold outright. That’s a pattern, not a coincidence, and it’s exactly the kind of near-freehold security a life-lease gives you that an ordinary yearly tenancy doesn’t.
What each memorial itself says isn’t in question. That Christopher and Charles were father and son is more of an educated guess — there won’t be a baptismal to show it.
Filling in the gap: 1799 to 1826
The file had always had the two ends of this story — the 1777 perpetual lease and, much later, the 1836 sale of the fee to Henry Spunner — and nothing much connecting them. Filling that gap meant working FamilySearch’s full-text deed transcripts session by session.
What came out of persisting was worth it. Four years after Charles assigned away his lease, a memorial of 1814 shows him still on the ground — not as a former middleman being talked about, but attorning in person, as the rent-paying tenant of Clonfinlough, acknowledging a new landlord’s right to his rent. An attornment is the tenant’s own formal act; only the tenant can make one. Losing the head-lease and leaving the land turned out not to be the same thing at all. And a fresh recital, found later, shows why: in July 1803, four years after the 1799 assignment, Armstrong granted Charles a new lease for lives, not of the whole townland this time but of the part he actually lived on — a named house called Lakefield, its boundaries given in the deed as the Old Road to the north, the Glebe Lands of Carrackeel to the east, the Great Bog to the south, and the Lake to the west. Charles hadn’t failed and vanished. He’d traded down from middleman of a whole townland to near-freeholder of the piece he lived on, and stayed there for the rest of his life.
The estate around him, meanwhile, was in trouble. An 1822 mortgage shows Armstrong pledging Clonfinlough and several other denominations to two men, Thomas Bernard and Simpson Hackett, for £1,290. Two deeds of November 1826 — found only because a Registry of Deeds Lands Index for 1811–1828 turned out to be digitised and searchable, which the file hadn’t known — show Robert Lawder entering the picture, owed £2,500 by Armstrong and taking Clonfinlough as security, with Thomas Mulock — Charles’s trustee of 1799, still holding that interest twenty-seven years on — having to join the deed because Armstrong alone couldn’t convey it. That’s the actual mechanism by which the Coughlan leasehold became the Lawder landlordship that shows up in Griffith’s Valuation in 1854. It happened in 1826, not at the more visible 1836 sale of the fee to Henry Spunner.
This one is interactive. Click the timeline to open it full-size, then scroll or pinch to zoom into any span of years, and click a marker for the full transcript and citation.
Clonfinlough — a Coughlan land history, 1641–1912
One townland (Clonmacnoise parish, barony of Garrycastle, King's County) across three centuries. Owners in 1641 and 1670; perpetual leaseholders from 1777; owners again in fee after 1906.
Coghlan land, held by Coghlans — 1641 Donogh · 1670 Francis · c.1690 the ARMSTRONGS MARRY IN · 1728 Christopher · 1777 Charles · d. 17 Mar 1817 · 1906 in fee
Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, click an event for the detail and the citation. A marker with no label means the labels around it have run out of room — zoom in.
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The middle period, between the 1799 assignment and the 1835 renewal, is carried by the 1814, 1822 and 1826 memorials.
The best document in the file, and what it costs to admit about it
The single most informative record in this whole chain turned up almost by accident, chased down from a one-line index entry that gave no hint of what it actually contained: memorial 827.94.556229, a deed of assignment dated 17 August 1827.
It names five parties. Mary Ann Coghlan of Lakefield, widow of Charles Coghlan, “late of Lakefield aforesaid, Esq., deceased.” Catherine Sophia, married to William Johnstone of Liverpool. Mary Ann, married to David Malone of Ballinahow, Co. Westmeath. Christopher Coghlan of Lakefield, Gent, married to Catherine Sheridan. And Robert Lauder, buying the lot.
It recites that Charles Coghlan “departed this life on or about the 17th day of March 1817,” leaving a will dated 1 July 1812 that gave Mary Ann a life interest in the land, with £600 sterling reserved for the two daughters and the remainder to pass to Christopher after her death. On 17 August 1827, all four of them sold their whole interest to Robert Lauder for £553 17s — the exact sum, converted, that the will had set aside for the daughters. The Coghlan interest in Lakefield ends on this date.
It’s a genuinely good document, and it does something else too: it identifies a widow who has sat in this file for a year as an unexplained line in a 1824 landholders list — “Mrs Coughlan, Clonfanlough, 96.75 acres,” no forename given. Four separate sources now converge on her being this same Mary Ann: a description in Shaw Mason’s parish survey of about 1814–16 of one substantial resident Coughlan household in the whole parish, holding about two hundred acres in the only good slated house besides the glebe; this memorial giving that household a name and a house; the death and the life interest, which is precisely the kind of interest a cess landholders list would record, against precisely the person it would record it for; and her disappearance from any such list after the 1827 sale, which gives the argument a bit of firmness. That said, the 1824 entry itself gives no forename, and the acre unit is still unverified against the original which I have requested from the archive in Tullamore.
Here’s the part I don’t get to skip past. Mary Ann Coghlan, William Johnstone of Liverpool, David Malone of Ballinahow, Christopher Coghlan, Gent — these are gentry. Esquire and Gent, daughters marrying into commerce and into the Malones of a named house, six hundred pounds sterling in legacies. My own documented line begins at James Coughlan Sr and Ann Devery, tenant farmers, full stop. Whether the Lakefield Coghlans are that line’s own family or an entirely separate Coughlan family that happened to hold the next farm over in the same townland, we do not know.
Our Coughlans, who never stopped farming
Whatever the Lakefield family’s relationship to my own line, somebody with this surname kept a plot at Clonfinlough continuously from Griffith’s Valuation onward, and the valuation revision books let you watch it change hands, almost tenant by tenant, for the next sixty years.
In 1854, plot 5 — about twenty-five and a half acres — is held jointly by James Coghlan and James Condron, of the landlord Robert Lawder. In 1864, James is struck out and his son Thomas is written in; Thomas was baptised at Clonmacnoise on 1 January 1838, son of James Coughlan and Ann Condron, which means this succession is documented at both ends.
By 1874 the Coughlans and Condrons had effectively swapped halves of the same shared plot without either family actually leaving it. Thomas died in 1900, and his widow Mary is written over him at both his holdings by 1906.
That date matters more than it looks. In 1906, under the Land Purchase Acts, the tenancy converts to outright ownership, and the family that had been paying rent to somebody else’s landlord for well over a century holds Clonfinlough in fee. By the 1912 renumbering, the rented plots are wound up and reassigned, but the roughly sixteen acres held in fee stays in Mary Coughlan’s name. It’s the first time since the seventeenth century that anyone named Coughlan has owned, rather than rented, a piece of this townland.
Two hundred and sixty-five years, near enough, between Francis Coghlan’s ownership in 1670 and Mary Coughlan’s ownership in fee in 1906 — with everything in between spent as a tenant, first of in-laws, then of the in-laws’ creditors. But I know the land came back into Coughlan hands at the end of it and that particular farm is the land of my second great grandfather’s brother James Coughlan.
What’s still open
The 1728, 1777 and 1803 leases have never turned up as registered memorials in their own right — all three survive only as recitals inside later deeds, which means registration for this landlord’s leases to this family was, apparently, never thought necessary. Charles Coghlan’s will, dated 1 July 1812 and stated in 1827 to have been “duly proved,” hasn’t surfaced in any index searched so far, and neither has his burial. And the identity question — Lakefield gentry or tenant-farmer cousins, brothers or a more distant branch — is exactly where the companion post about plot 5 and the naming evidence picks up.
That companion piece — “The Farm at Clonfinlough” — picks up the naming-convention puzzle where this one leaves off, using the same plot 5 succession from Griffith’s Valuation onward. Read alongside each other, they’re the fullest picture I have so far of what actually happened to this one Offaly farm.