Ireland 432-1800 Ireland from St. Patrick to the Norman Conquest, 432-1169

Stock raising remained the essential function of the native Irish production system, cattle were used as a form of currency, they featured in dowries, jointures, mortgages and fines. Cultivated areas were farmed in common and often divided into separate strips. The main crops grown included rye, barley and oats. Land was normally cultivated by a horse-drawn plough, although the spade tended to be preferred in upland, mountainous and marginal areas. Transhumance or ‘booleying’ on summer pasture remained an important feature of Irish agriculture and the herds, commonly know as ‘creaghts’ were regularly accompanied by a large part of the community. In the years after the rebellion of 1641 war brought devastation, famine, plague and depopulaton. Land values and rents slumped, trade virtually collapsed and a severe shortage of coinage exacerbated the problem. Foodstuffs had to be imported from England and Wales in large quantities. However, the 1650s saw a rapid recovery in the Irish economy although its fruits accrued to a relatively small percentage of the population.

The Restoration witnessed a slow but steady recovery and expansion in the Irish economy, a consequence of a long period of relative peace and the emergence of a vibrant merchant class. However, intermittent famines, European wars and successive English legislative assaults on the Irish economy [the Cattle Act of 1667, which banned the export of live cattle to England and the Navigation Acts of 1671 and 1685, which prohibiting direct trade between Ireland and the English colonies] tempered this recovery. The end of the Jacobite wars and bumper harvests in the 1690s facilitated a rapid recovery and expansion, although this in turn was tempered by further English/British parliamentary assaults on Irish trade [The Woollen Act] and the disruption and uncertainly caused by the ongoing European wars of succession.

Although the Woollen trade could still avail of the domestic market and a flourishing smuggling trade with France it had been disastrously weakened by this new legislative imposition. The extent of the resultant smuggling trade tended to be exaggerated by contemporaries, who often associated it with families of dubious political loyalties, Jacobite intrigue and ongoing recruitment for the Irish Brigades in French and Spanish armies on both sides of the Channel. Nevertheless, it became an important and lucrative trade. Having availed of the higher prices offered by the French merchants for this wool smugglers filled their holds for the return journey with contraband clarets, wines and silks. The jagged west and southwest coast of Ireland proved impossible to police and the smugglers enjoyed the active support of the people and the collusion of some local officials.

The promise to compensate for these aformentioned economic restrictions by encouraging the linen industry initially foundered on the interests of Scottish linen weavers who insisted that Irish coloured linen be excluded from the British market. An embargo on hops importation into the country in 1710 effectively strangled the native brewing industry while the glass industry fell victim to similar restrictive legislation. Effectively hamstrung as it was by Poyning’s Law the Irish parliament was unable to take any retaliatory action. However, Patriot opinion, influenced by the irrepressible Dean Swift, retaliated by discouraged the wearing of foreign manufacture. Indeed, the Dublin hangman occasionally used his notoriety to support the campaign by donning the latest imported fashions from London at the scaffold. In spite of these economic restrictions Ireland enjoyed a share in the expanding colonial trade in linen and provisions to the West Indies and North America. Indeed, the volume and value of trade doubled by the first half of the eighteenth century although the profits did little to improve the lives of the greater populace, ending up in the pockets of landlords, middlemen, merchants and tenant farmers.

Population figures, based on analyses of Irish Heart Tax returns, fluctuated from 1.9 million in the early eighteenth century through to 2.4 by the 1720s. Although this would fall sharply back to 2.1 as a result of the famine of 1739-40 it approached 5 million by the turn of the century, thus exceeding mean figures for western Europe. This growth has be associated with the spread of potato cultivation which supplemented the traditional diet of oats and dairy products which sharply reduced the risk of famine. In this utter dependence of the potato lay the seeds of the catastrophe that would befall the country with the total failure of the potato crop in 1845-47. Falling childhood mortality and a steady growth in agricultural and industrial productivity were also key factors in this unprecedented population growth.

The expansion of trade and industry in the eighteenth century manifested iteslf in increasing urbanization, particularly in the coastal towns of Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Galway, Belfast, Newry and Derry. Louis Cullen has computed that in 1600 Dublin had 900 houses, 600 within and 300 without the medieval walls, containing some 500 inhabitants. What transformed the size population and political fortunes of Dublin was the concerted efforts by Tudor monarchs to conquer Ireland which turned the city into a military bridge-head and store-house for the arms and materials of re-colonization. Having reduced the country by 1603 Dublin would become the political, administrative, economic, legislative and cultural focus of the newly conquered kingdom. Its population exploded from 50,000 in 1691 to over 120,000 by the mid-century [dwarfing Edinburgh and Bristol (c. 50,000), Philadelphia, Manchester (c. 25,00) and Liverpool (c.20,000) in comparison]. By 1800 it was the second largest city in Britain and Ireland, the sixth largest in Europe. Its phenomenal growth was aided by its status as the administrative, commercial, legislative and religious centre, as well as being home to Ireland’s only university [Trinity College Dublin]. It also became the focal point for the manufacture and distribution of luxury goods, textile brewing, distilling and sugar refining, while effectively monopolizing foreign trade with some 50% of exports and 75% of linen exports passing through it’s port.

The city began to take on much of its modern appearance in this period. Many of her greatest public buildings including Parliament House, the Customs House, the Four Courts and much of modern Trinity College, as well as the finest of her early modern churches, were constructed in the eighteenth century. Thee great façade of Trinity, constructed in the 1750s and financed by the public purse, fronted the largest single ensemble of college architecture in Europe. A large proportion of the major city centre streets, squares and parks also emerged at this time. The famed Philiosophical society had scattered during the Jacobite war and a formal learned society did not emerge until the foundation of the Royal Irish Adademy in 1786. Nevertheless, Dublin still boasted a vibrant and respectable groups of writers, pamphleteers, scholars, intellectuals, antiquarians and philosophers. They representing all shades of Irish confessional and political opinion from new light Presbyterianism through high church Anglicanism to Jacobites and included such individials as Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, Edmund Burke, Lord Molesworth, Francis Hutcheson, James Arbuckle [editor of the Dublin Weekly Journal], John Toland, Samuel Madden, Henry Brooke, Anthony Raymond, as well as a coterie of poets and transcribers associated with the Ó Neachtain literary circle.

The expansion of the medieval city of Cork proceeded with such pace in the early eighteenth century that by mid-1750s it was described as being thrice as large as twenty years previously. Its distinctive urban waterways were first bridged in the early modern period and had almost totally vanished by the end of the century. Cork’s unprecedented growth stemmed from the cattle industry that also spawned a multiplicity of other ancillary industries from butchers, salters, coopers and other manufactures. The other great source of Cork’s prosperity was the butter trade that grew from changes in rural diets, the development of commercial dairying and Cork’s strategic location in close proximity to the fertile dairying centre of south Munster. In 1769 the Cork Butter Market was constituted under the auspices of the committee of merchants and it quickly adopted a tight system of quality control and grading, both of the butter itself and the conditions in which it was packed. The city was also strategically placed to become a major port of call for ships involved in the West Indian and North American trade, operating from Bristol. Its trade benefited from exemptions and the partial lifting of the Navigational Acts, as well as its situation close to the agricultural heartland of south Munster. The city flourished spectacularly in the course of the century, rising from the fifth to the second city of the realm by the 1770s.

The new plantation town of Londonderry, built on the site of Doire Cholmcille, the ancient monastic site of St. Colmcille, was fortified by the Yorkshire conquistador Sir Henry Dowcra as part of a military plan to drive a wedge between O’Neill and O’Donnell during the Nine Years’ War. Refounded as part of the City of London’s commitments under the terms of the Plantation of Ulster in 1609, it became the major showpiece for the whole plantation. Its defensive walls, the most complete surviving set of seventeenth century walls is Europe, comprises one of the great achievements of the whole plantation and are one of Ireland’s great national treasures. Located on a strategic bend of the river Foyle, which dissected the Fahan and Inishowen Peninsulas [the hereditary lands of the O’Neills and O’Donnells] the river would be its lifeline through three sieges. It would also comprise a central element in its industrial expansion and an impediment to its expansion in the early modern period. The city would have to wait until the end of the century until it was bridged which would enable it to transcend its 17^th century defensive shell.

The site of Belfast, along with other lands in South Antrim had been granted to Sir Arthur Chichester, Jacobean lord deputy of Ireland and primary Irish ancestor of the Chichester Earls of Donegall, a family whose fortunes would be inexorably bound up with this new town for the greater part of the early modern period. Between its foundation and the outbreak of the 1641 rebellion it had been enclosed by an earthen rampart and it layout was well established. The period between the arrival of the Scottish covenanting army and the end of the Cromwellian protectorate witnessed an influx of Scots and Presbyterians necessitating the construction of numerous churches and meeting houses. By 1660 it had become one of the major urban centres in Ulster although it still had a restricted range of occupations, mostly butchers clothiers and merchants. It had become the third largest town in Ulster after Derry and Coleraine, growing from the eight to the fourth biggest port in the country by the 1680s. The town stagnated in the late 1690 and early eighteenth century as a result of the war and the departure of the earls of Donegall after a fire in the castle, an economic paralysis that was enhanced by the lunacy of the 4^th Earl. By 1750 the city had a population of over 8,000 inhabitants and this would increase to over 18,000 by the end of the century. Many of the inhabitants lived in squalour off the main Georgian squares and thoroughfares of what had come to be known as ‘the Athens of the North’. The links of the massive industrialization of the Victorian era can be linked to this period. The corporation oversaw a massive increase in port trade and the town and heavily involved itself in the linen industry, which centred around the Brown and White Linen Halls. The forerunner of what became Belfast’s world renowned ship building industry William Ritchie’s shipyard on the Antrim side of Belfast Lough in 1791.

Belfast’s phenomenal industrial growth in this period was matched in the spheres of culture and literature. The Linen Hall Library, founded by the Belfast Reading Society [1788], renamed the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge [1792], emerged as one of the key centres for intellectual activity on the island and would become a focus of United Irish activity. The Belfast Harp Festival, founded in 1792, provided a key impetus for the survival and cultivation of Gaelic musical and culture. This cultural rapproachment between the different confessional groups would mainfest itself in the emerging United Irish ideology. The stated purpose of the festival was to preserve the last fragments of a lost tradition. Edmund Bunting was one of those employed to transcribed the harp melodies, providing the impetus to his life long obsession with the collection and and publication of Irish music, songs and airs. In addition, a host of Belfast merchants and industrialists including Samuel Bryson, Henry Joy McCracken, Thomas ‘Shipboy McAdam patronised Irish scholars such as Art Mac Bionaid, Peadar Ó Geallachain in the transcription and collection of manuscripts, poetry, literature. These justify Ó Buachalla’s claim in his classic work I mBéal Feirsde Cois Cuan that it was the Presbyterians of Belfast and not the early Gaelic Leaguers of the late nineteenth century who played the key role in the preservation of the Irish language.

The turbulent politics of the late 16^th and early 17^th century had adversely affected Galway’s trade. However, it quickly recovered and flourished in the forty years before the outbreak of the 1641 rebellion. The chief merchant families supported the royalist causes and duly suffered the consequences, while the city itself suffered major sieges and subsequent destruction. Moreover, post-war political infighting and the resulting bitterness poisoned trade and adversely affected the city’s prosperity. The Restoration witnessed a recovery and the Catholic mercantile interest was enhanced by the succession of James II in 1685. However, the subsequent establishment of Protestant control in the aftermath of the war, the sporadic imposition of penal restrictions on Catholic mercantile and trading interest, the restrictions of Catholics within the city’s walls and the imposition of curfews and other restrictions severely diminished the economic importance of the city in the second half of the eighteenth century. In spite of these restrictions, the Catholic population continued to grow. It is ironic that while the trade and prosperity of Galway steadily declined during the course of the eighteenth century Louis Cullen has shown the business interests of leading Galway merchant families such as the Lynchs, Kirwans, Bodkins and Blakes formed and extraordinary network of trade and commerce in the West Indies, Nantes, Bordeaux and other continental ports, as well as Dublin and London. In spite of the aformentioned stagnation the city would overshoot its medieval walls by the end of the century with houses being built around Meyrick [Eyre] Square, Prospect Hill and into Dominick Street on the western fringes of the city.

The two towns [Englishtown and Irishtown] which comprised the medieval city of Limerick effectively became three [Newtown] during the course of the eighteenth century. In 1691, after two destructive sieges, the city structure had sustained considerable damage, destruction accentuated by a massive explosion of the city’s gunpowder supply in 1693. This, in turn, destroyed one of the towers guarding the quay and de-roofed many of the city’s dwellings. However, the city would slowly recover throughout the course of the eighteenth century, although much of the rebuilding programme involved repair rather than reconstruction. Many of the city’s public buildings were rebuilt between 1690 and 1760, including the mayoralty house, the city and country court houses, the prison, bridewell and tholsel. Much of the spectacular urban development that transformed Limerick after 1750 can be associated with Edmund Sexton Pery whose ancestor had been granted the Franciscan friary by Henry VIII after the dissolution of the monasteries. Trade benefited from an encouragement of extensive riverside expansion, government sponsorship of an extension of the Shannon’s navigation as far as Killaloe and the construction of news quays [George and Charlotte]. The completion of David Ducart’s Customs House highlighted this new development. By the 1770s the city had burst out of its traditional medieval boundaries and set a pattern of development that culminated with the development of the Georgian Newtown by the 1820s.

Farming, tillage and pasture.

The first half of the eighteenth century witnessed a long-term transformation from tillage to pastoral farming. Rapid commercialization within the dairy industry, population growth and the increasing cultivation of marginal lands prompted a switch from the traditional diet of dairy produce, oats and barley to the potato. The greatest percentage of Ireland’s land was parceled out among a predominantly Protestant ascendancy class, the descendants of the political victors of the 1640s-1650s and 1690s. This apex of this group often inhabited large country piles and often maintained or rented expensive town properties. They comprised the pinnacle of Ireland’s political, religious, social and cultural pyramid. Speaker William Connolly, deemed to be the richest man in Ireland in the 1720s, provided the blueprint for architectural ostentation and splendour with his construction of Castletown House, an example that was copied in many other parts of the country. The country residences of the duke of Leinster, Lord Belmore and the marquis of Waterford vied with the country piles of their English counterparts. The engaged in the same recreational activities as the English aristocracy and nobility, collecting books, pictures, sculptures and organizing parties, balls, concerts, theatricals and embarking on grand tours of European capitals. Others took an interest in Irish antiquities, subscribing to works of history, antiquarianism and genealogy, collecting manuscripts, patronizing the remnants of the Gaelic literati and musicians, including the blind harpist Turlough O’Carolan,

Aside from these occasional forays into native culture they tended to live in splendid, carefree and isolated existence from the hewers of wood and carriers of water whose poverty contrasted dramatically with, but ultimately funded, their carefree extravagance. This crushing weight on the Irish economy was further accentuated by the drain on from her coffers of the numerous payments to absentee landlords and clerics, as well as the mistresses, bastards and pensioners of the Hanoverian monarchs. Arthur Young estimated that absentee landlords drew some 732, 000 pounds per annum from the Irish economy, an enormous sum when one considers that the total revenue was less than one million per year, Attempts to impose a capital tax on these lost absentee revenues failed in the teeth of English parliamentary opposition. A whole series of diarists, writers and commentators from Swift and the Irish Jacobite literati through to the Victorian historians Lecky and Froude shed light on what might be deemed the soft under-belly of the Protestant Asecedancy; the duelling, drunken, swaggering, rack-renting, tyrannical ‘squireen’ [little squire] class.

Endemic absenteeism, general extravagance and the political, confessional, social and cultural chasms between themselves and the greater populace, meant that the large ascendancy estates were often leased out to middlemen and large tenant farmers. They, in turn, sub-let small holdings of 10/12 acres for three lives to Protestant farmers (31 years in the case of their Catholic counterparts). The farms, homesteads and town houses of an increasingly self confident and culturally aware middling class of merchants, tenant farmers, strong-farmers and proto-industrialists often lacked the ostentatious display of their social betters. However, they contrasted sharply with the houses and shacks of the poorer classes whose single-storied, one-roomed, mud-walled, straw and sod-roofed abodes which could be easily be demolished and rebuilt to inconvenience and confuse the heart-tax collector. The many travellers who visited eighteenth century Ireland in the from the diarist Mrs Delany to the political economist Arthur Young noted, almost without exception, the grinding poverty of Ireland’s poorer inhabitants.

During the course of the eighteenth century and in spite of political, economic and climactic setbacks, a surging tide of British economic and colonial expansion lifted the delicate Irish economic and industrial barge. This growth manifested itself in increasing industrialization, commercialization, monetarization, unprecedented export-led growth and a drive to regional specialization in agriculture and manufacture. Mixed subsistence farming of cattle rearing, tillage and sheep-farming still predominated along the marginal lands of the western seaboard, Dairying asserted itself in what would become known as the Golden Vale of Cork and South Tipperary . East Connaught, north Leinster and mid-Munster emerged as the pastoral heartland of Ireland from the 1690s onwards, victualling the larger urban markets of Ireland and providing a large tonnage of the ‘Roast beef of old England’. North America and the colonies provided the major markets for Irish beef although the American war and the resulting embargo initially stifled exports. This lost market would be quickly filled by Britain’s increasingly huge military commitments in North America and post-Revolutionary Europe. The increased acreage under pasture, stimulated by export bounties in the 1750s and 1780s, pushed small farmers, labourers and tenants further onto the economic and geographical margins, increasing their dependence on the potato. Their close proximity to major urban centres and ready markets meant that Louth, Dublin and South Leinster remained the centre of tillage cultivation, while small-scale farming in Ulster fed the increasing numbers engaged in a cottage industry centred around the linen manufacture.

Ireland’s geology and geography, small population, underdeveloped markets and her inadequate roads and infrastructure mitigated against the emergence of an integrated industrial base. Those industries that did emerge were based primarily on the process of agricultural, fish and timber products [in particular beef, leather, mutton, wool and woollen goods, brewing and milling. A thriving woollen indistry fell victim to restrictive legislation imposed by the English parliament although the industry survived to service domestic markets and a vibrant smuggling trade with continental Europe. Linen had stepped into this industrial vacuum created by the stagnation and contraction of the woollen industry to become the great success story of the eighteenth-century economy. Exports trebled in the first half of the eighteenth century, aided by Ireland’s suitable climatic conditions, low labour costs, the influx of Huguenot, Flemish and English know-how and by strategic infrastructural and monetary investment by local landlords.