194 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



many thousand acres, whose farms I have so divided, I do not 

 know more than two or three who complain." ' 



Proceeding, Keane corrected the testimony of the Rev. Timothy 

 Kelly, who had stated that on one farm nineteen or twenty 

 houses had been levelled. Again we perceive the extreme sub- 

 division of a small township and the process by which it had 

 come about. ** The fact is, that only eleven families were turned 

 out, and fewer than eleven houses were levelled. . . . only 

 one [tenant] had so much as five acres; the remaining ten had 

 [together] less than twenty acres. . . . The person who had five 

 acres was never known as a tenant, but was the younger son of a 

 tenant who had divided his land without permission . . . most of 

 them were persons who had divided their holdings, or had been 

 brought in by such persons without permission . . . the whole farm 

 contains 185 acres of arable land besides bog, and there are left on 

 it twenty-six tenants, making an average of less than eight acres 

 to each; only one tenant of these has more than twelve acres 

 of arable, and that man has not thirteen acres." ^ 



These descriptions of Irish farms in the nineteenth century 

 confirm the Scottish reports of a half-century earlier and assist in 

 explaining them. In Ireland, as in Scotland, the farm or town- 

 land was occupied by several tenants. The arable was in rundale, 

 the parcels of a tenant being considerably scattered and inter- 

 mixed with those of other tenants. What is new in the Irish 

 account is the description of the rapidity with which the sub- 

 di\'ision could be achieved. In the Donegal townland two 

 generations had been sufficient to transform an undivided area 

 of 205 acres into 422 separate lots held intermixedly by twenty- 

 nine tenants. In the last quotation a townland of 185 acres was 

 deprived of eleven tenants because they had, not long before, 

 become tenants through unwarranted division. The witness 

 from Roscommon commented on the frequency with which the 

 " lower orders " divided their holdings among their sons and 

 sons-in-law. 



The Irish evidence thus supplements the Welsh and Scottish 

 by accounting for the appearance of rundale. Rundale was pri- 



1 Pari. Papers, 1845, xxi, no. 1063 (14-16). ^ Ibid., xxi, no. 1063 (4). 



