Melvyn Bragg follows his long historical exploration of the Routes of English with Voices of the Powerless, the BBC Radio 4 series in which he explores the lives of the ordinary working men and women of Britain at critical moments across the last 1,000 years.

Ulster, one of the four ancient provinces of Ireland, remained largely independent of English rule until the end of the 16th century.

The plantation period the programme looks at is the half century between the Tudor conquest of Ulster in the 1590s and the rebellion of the Ulster Irish in 1641.

This episode was first broadcast in 2002.

Guidance: due to the archive nature of the recording the sound quality may vary.