Clare Island Survey — Agriculture and its History. 5 27 



willing to abandon their old habits or learn anything new. They, therefore, 

 only make patches of tillage ; their pastures are short of herbage ; cultivation 

 is very rare, and there is scarcely any land sown." 1 



Four hundred years later, in his longest tract, dealing with the country 

 as a whole, Davies tells us that he had considered, among other things, " what 

 were the true causes . . . why the manners of the mere (i.e. unmixed) Irish 

 are so little altered since the days of King Henry the Second, as appeareth 

 by the description made by G-iraldus Cambrensis." 2 In his letter to Salisbury 

 on the plantation of Ulster he justifies the " planting " of Englishmen and 

 Scotsmen alongside the Irish by saying of these last : " If themselves were 

 suffered to possess the whole country, as their septs have done for many 

 hundred of years past, they would never, to the end of the world, build 

 houses, make townships or villages, or manure 3 or improve the land as it ought 

 to be " ; 4 and he also says that in Cavan " the habitations of the people are 

 so wild and transitory as there is not one fixed village in all this county." 5 



No doubt there were variations in different parts of the country ; but, on 

 the whole, the proportion of tilled land to grass was very small. 6 In the Brehon 

 laws, we find oats and barley indicated with some frequency, but wheat seldom ; 

 and, more than likely, it was grown only in the south. The Brehon laws 

 ran in the south as well as in the north, although intermittently. The plough 

 and the spade were both in use ; and, while we read of farmers combining 7 

 to supply oxen to haul a plough, 8 we also find that " all over the north, at the 

 beginning of the seventeenth century, the plough was tied to the horse's tail." 9 

 Fynes Moryson tells us " the wild Irish do not thresh their oats, but burn 

 them from the straw." 10 The quern was in common use for grinding grain. 



With regard to stock, a few points only need be mentioned. Many of 

 the wealthier men — chiefs and rich bo-aires — were in the habit of letting out 

 cattle to the poorer. The cattle were grazed chiefly on the commons ; but a 

 farmer might graze them on his cultivable land if he pleased, so long as he 

 kept them away from his neighbours' corn. There were tribesmen who 

 wandered about with their stock, renting land from landowners for short 

 periods. 11 There were also tribes who had grazings to which they migrated 

 in early summer and returned to their winter quarters in autumn." 



I Bohn's edition, p. 124. ~ Ireland under Elizabeth and James the First, ed. Morley, p. 21S. 

 3 i.e. cultivate. * Ireland under Elizabeth and James, p. 387. 



5 Ibid., p. 374. c Bonn's englische Kolonisation in Irland, vol. i, p. 82. 



7 Ancient Laws of Ireland, ii, 359. s Four oxen usually hauled the plough. 



9 Quoted by Bonn from Barnaby Rich. The same practice is spoken to not only by Arthur 

 Young (1775-78), but also by Wakefield (1812). 

 10 Ireland under Elizabeth and James, p. 427. 



II Ancient Laws, iii, p. 131, and Bonn i, 47. n Ibid., i, p. 133. 



D 2 



