The Chichester surname is English in origin, derived from the city of Chichester in West Sussex — a place-name combining the Roman settlement name Cissan with the Old English ceaster, designating a fortified town of Roman origin. The family came to Ireland at the outset of the seventeenth century in the person of Sir Arthur Chichester, who held the most powerful administrative office in the country at the most consequential moment in Ulster's post-medieval history. The spelling Chichester has been stable since the family's arrival in Ireland, and the name is found in historical records of Ulster and Dublin from the early seventeenth century onward.
No English settler family left a more durable mark on the landscape and history of Ireland than the Chichesters — their grant of Belfast and their design of the Ulster Plantation shaped the province whose political character continues to generate debate, conflict, and negotiation four centuries later.
Where Did the Chichester Family Come From?
Sir Arthur Chichester arrived in Ireland in the 1590s as a soldier in the Elizabethan campaigns in Ulster, and his military service — combined with his administrative ability — brought him to the position of Lord Deputy in 1605. His principal seat in Ireland was Belfast Castle, which he received as part of the grant of the Belfast territory, and he administered his Irish lands and his governmental responsibilities from that base for the decade of his deputyship. The Chichester family subsequently held the Belfast estate across the generations, becoming Earls of Donegall in 1647 and eventually Marquesses of Donegall in 1791.
Who Was Sir Arthur Chichester and Why Does He Matter?
Sir Arthur Chichester served as Lord Deputy of Ireland from 1605 to 1616, a decade during which he oversaw the most consequential transformation of Ulster since the Norman period. The Flight of the Earls in September 1607 — when Hugh O'Neill, Rory O'Donnell, and the principal Gaelic lords of Ulster sailed from Rathmullan in Donegal, never to return — left six Ulster counties legally escheated to the crown as the property of attainted traitors. Chichester was the official charged with designing and implementing the scheme for the redistribution of those lands to Protestant settlers from Britain.
The Ulster Plantation scheme that he developed and oversaw from 1610 onward allocated the escheated lands to three categories of grantees: undertakers from Britain who agreed to plant their portions with Protestant settlers, servitors who had served the crown in Ireland, and native Irish who were allocated smaller portions. The scheme was implemented with varying degrees of thoroughness across the six counties, but its overall effect was to transform Ulster from a province where Gaelic Catholics formed the landowning class to one where British Protestant settlers held the land and the political power. Chichester simultaneously received his own grant of the Belfast territory, and the settlement that grew there under his ownership became the nucleus of the city that would eventually become the largest on the island of Ireland. The marquessate of Donegall — the title the Chichester family eventually held — gave its name to Donegall Place, Donegall Square, and the other central streets of Belfast that bear the family's territorial designation to this day.
Where Are Chichester Families Found Today?
In Ireland, the Chichester name is found primarily in Ulster and the historical records of Dublin administration. The family itself, as the Marquesses of Donegall, maintained a presence in Belfast through the nineteenth century before the estate passed from direct family control. The diaspora is found in Britain and North America. The name carries an immense historical weight in the context of Irish history — as the name of the man who designed the Ulster Plantation, it is one of the most consequential in the story of the island's modern formation.
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