There is a 17th century text called ‘The Parliament of Clan Thomas’ which is a bitter satire of the rising lower classes, those who were doing well and getting on because of the political upsets of the 16th and 17th centuries. That is to say this takes the aristocratic view of commoners making good in the circumstances of war and social disruption: and a poem is put in the mouth of one of these people in this literary text which says "Treise leat a Chromail" - ‘More power to your elbow, Cromwell’. Get rid of these aristocrats.

Undoubtedly the ordinary people, who had to plough the fields and pay their rent, they’re (apart from the disruption of war which was appalling) it didn’t matter very much to them who was master - the beggars change places but the lash goes on. And so we only get glimpses here and there because Irish literature of the 16th and 17th centuries, the literature of the Early middle ages, is profoundly aristocratic, its instinctively aristocratic in character because, of course, not only were there great lay-nobles but most of those who held office in church were themselves aristocrats and this is true of the whole of Europe as well as just of Ireland - God was not an equal opportunity employer.

And so these texts show us a contempt for the ordinary people: one of the lives of the Irish Saints has the saint, bearing with him to heaven, the soul of a peasant and this is regarded as a magnificent achievement - so it will be very difficult to find what the ordinary people thought of their great Irish lords, but I expect they thought about their lords the same as the rest of the European peasantry thought about their lords - that they were vicious and exploitative and contemptuous of them.