Jonathan Bardon
During the French Revolution the 'aristos' were guillotined. It took Stalin's Red Army to achieve a final bloody clearout of landlords in central Europe during 1944-45. Tens of thousands of landlords were executed in China after Mao's triumph in 1949. In Scotland the landlords won and there they cleared their Highland estates of unwanted and unresisting crofters.
In Ireland, following a protracted 'Land War', the British government's solution was land purchase. Tenants were lent millions by the Treasury to buy out their landlords. De Valera's refusal to continue to remit the annuities to London precipitated the Economic War in the 1930s.
In 1973 there were still 22 staff in the Land Purchase Annuities Branch in the Northern Ireland Ministry of Agriculture. Some 36,000 farmers were still paying annuities under a tidying-up Northern Ireland Act of 1925, 1,000 were still paying under the Wyndham Act of 1903 and - remarkably - 1,000 were paying off money advanced to them under the 1885 Ashbourne Act.
This was the quiet concluding phase of a unique bloodless revolution which had transformed the landscape by dissolving the great estates. Descendants of the great proprietors had either been swept away or been confined to modest demesnes at Caledon, Mountstewart, Castlecoole and elsewhere.