6 30 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



farms, had been set up near the castle or the priory outside the village land 

 even before the conquest. 



In Ireland, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the castle of the lord 

 or the knight was the apparent and necessary nucleus, with the cottages of 

 the lower retainers and workmen in the vicinity and the homesteads of the 

 rent-paying tenants each in the midst of its own farm of land. Some of 

 these collections of houses and homesteads would naturally become villages. 

 At any rate, " the English pale was planted with towns and villages." 1 

 Gomme cites the case of Kells and inclines to the opinion that the Danes 

 turned six tribal homesteads with their land into a Danish village which the 

 English afterwards took over. 2 It is difficult to believe, however, that the 

 early Celtic homesteads were sufficiently definite to have been so adopted by 

 the Danes. 



In any case the essential point for us is to know which crops were 

 grown by the English. No definite references to the crops grown within 

 the Pale can be found ; but Bonn cites several to show that some of the 

 Normans without the restricted Pale cropped their land on the three-field 

 system and, therefore, grew wheat, as well as barley or oats. " Agriculture had 

 improved and the three-field system had taken the place of the Celtic grass 

 system in many places." 3 



For instance, the Earl of Gloucester had 4 carucates of land, that is from 

 •100 to 480 acres, at Callan, of which 154i were wheat, 142 oats, the rest 

 fallow ; and at Dunfert there were 6i carucates, of which 4 were in wheat 

 and oats, while the rest was fallow. 4 But to judge from its prevalence in 

 Arthur Young's time, and remembering that, if it had not taken root before the 

 seventeenth century, it was unlikely to have been planted at all, the three-field 

 system was common within the Pale. Bonn points out that in Young's time 

 Louth, Meath, Kildare, Carlow, King's County, Queen's County and Kilkenny 

 were the centres of grain-growing, and that in these counties the three-field 

 system was frequent.* For Edward the First's wars, grain was requisitioned 

 from Ireland. In 1296-97 sixteen grain ships carried 4,500 quarters of grain 

 from Drogheda, Dublin, Waterford and Youghal to Gascony, and for Edward's 

 Scotch wars 8000 quarters of wheat, 10,000 of oats, and 2,000 of malt, and 500 

 head of oxen, 1,000 fat swine, and 20,000 fish were furnished by Ireland. 6 In 

 addition, it should be noted that, for the Scotch wars, a considerable quantity 

 of grain was brought over from England to be milled within the Pale. 7 



1 Carew mss., iii, p. xcvi. "■ Tbe Village Community, p. 153. 



3 Englische Kolonisation in Irland, i, p. 144. 



i Bid., i, p. 118. * Ibid., ii, p. 248. » Ibid., i, p. 144. 



7 The Wardrobe Accounts of Edward I (Liber liarderobej, pub. Soc. Antiquaries, 1787, pp. 21 L 



