Agricultural History Review, Volume 63 Part 2 (2015), p. 322

Agriculture and rural settlement has been a particularly active area of research in Ireland in the last decade or so. Before this our interpretation had not advanced far beyond the picture established by Otway-Ruthven in the 1950s and 1960s. The current wave of studies has been driven by four factors. The first has been the archaeological excavations associated with development in Ireland during the years of the ‘Celtic Tiger’. These were not confined to the towns, but covered almost all parts of the island. The second important step was the government-funded Discovery Programme, which included a study of rural settlement in the later Middle Ages. Though not all the results of this are yet available, the work on the Dublin area co-authored by one of the editors of the present volume, Margaret Murphy, has been particularly significant in casting light on that most commercialized region with its strong emphasis on arable cultivation. Third, has been the emergence of a particularly active cohort of postgraduate research students, mostly historians, but also archaeologists. They have undertaken much of the fundamental work which was necessary to clarify the character of the Irish countryside. The final factor has been the re-vitalization of the work of the Group for the Study of Irish Historical Settlement, which has enabled an exchange of ideas through conferences and a series of volumes, of which this is the latest.

The most coherent papers in this volume are those covering the rural economy of the late medieval period. In the first of these Geraldine Stout examines the Cistercian grange in Ireland. The documentary record for grange farms, particularly those outside the area of Anglo-Irish control, is much more limited than that for England, but she is able to draw upon post-Dissolution records, topographical evidence and some archaeological fieldwork to identify the area of lands held by Cistercians and establish the character of grange farmsteads. These seem to have been comparable to those in contemporary England and Wales, though they were often secured by substantial gatehouses or even towerhouses to provide the security necessary in a comparatively lawless country. The theme of demesne farmsteads is developed in the study of manorial centres by Margaret Murphy. In a systematic survey of the late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century evidence, she draws together the evidence from accounts and extents. Inevitably, this study is limited to the area under Anglo-Irish control. Comparison of those areas with other maps in this volume shows that her manors were located in the agriculturally richest and most commercialized parts of Ireland. Building on her earlier work on the Dublin area, Murphy has now provided a comprehensive account of the agriculture in the colony at its peak, yet even in this period there were problems with the burning of granges and theft of grain by ‘Irish felons’. Banks and ditches around the farmsteads and even moats were for rather more than symbolic purposes.

The third of the late medieval studies by Katherine Simms picks up a subject which she first tackled in 1986, the ‘creaght’. In the earlier work she showed that this term referred to a herd of cattle which grazed on others’ lands, either because the herders lacked land themselves or as an aggressive act of depasturing. Creaghts are referred to in the increasingly unsettled period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and Simms links these to the growing demand for meat throughout Europe and to the continuing struggles between Irish lords which could leave a chief and his followers without lands and forced to wander the waste. Yet, in a period of rising livestock prices and shortage of labour, the rental of poor land to creaghts could prove to be an effective means of exploiting otherwise unused lands. A system of payment developed in the sixteenth century under the O’Neills in which pastoral lands in Ulster were rented to herds under a leader of the creaght.

Like many volumes that originate in conferences, this book is something of a mixed bag, both in the quality of contributions and the subject matter. The seven papers are book-ended by an introduction and concluding chapter which seem to have been aimed at readers with a limited understanding of Irish rural history. Other papers, particularly the well-considered and very informative study by Katherine Simms, assume some knowledge of the earlier literature. The scope of the papers range from the very useful summary of Irish agriculture in the seventeenth-century by Raymond Gillespie to a study of the single estate at Collon, County Louth, in the later eighteenth century by Matthew Stout and his six co-authors. It is not clear with this range of contributions whether there was a particular audience for whom this book was intended – the general reader, the committed medievalist or even the local historian. However, many readers will find something of interest and value amongst the papers here.