William Petty's 1650s Down Survey remains the era's only systematic contemporary count, and modern historians including Lenihan treat his method, extrapolating from incomplete surveys and combining combat, massacre, famine and plague deaths into one total, as unreliable for a precise war-specific figure without offering a reconciled alternative of their own.
What would resolve this A modern demographic reconstruction applying consistent method to seventeenth century Irish parish, estate and muster records, capable of separating combat and massacre deaths from the era's simultaneous, and largely coincidental, famine and plague mortality.
OpenEarly modern Irish history; historical demographyPadraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, 1641 to 1649