Clare Island Survey — Agriculture and its History. 5 31 



Outside the Pale in the South of Ireland were the two races, separate at 

 first but eventually amalgamated. Southward from the Pale " the colonists 

 occupied, in a narrow line, portions of the King's and Queen's Counties, 

 and Carlow; they held the counties of Kilkenny and Wexford, and the 

 eastern part of Minister ; they occupied Limerick and the adjoining districts, 

 and their castles extended to the mouth of the Shannon. In Connaught, the 

 territories of the De Burgos stretched from Galway northward and eastward 

 over the plain portion of Connaught." 1 The colonists were few, and, with their 

 settlements flanked by the Celtic population on several sides, sometimes well 

 nigh surrounded, and an entire lack of sustained support from the English 

 headquarters, they were frequently hard pushed to maintain their position. 

 Left to themselves as they were, the colonists struggled for a while; but 

 Edward Bruce's invasion early in the fourteenth century crippled the English 

 power in Ireland and hastened the amalgamation of the Normans and their 

 adherents with the Irish people. Naturally there resulted some kind of 

 compromise between the Feudal and the Brehon laws and customs. The 

 Normans retained primogeniture, so far, at any rate, as they themselves were 

 concerned, and it is probable they also retained the hold of feudal lords upon 

 the descendants of the original English and their land, if not also upon the 

 Irish, excepting that, in their case, the letting of farms among the common 

 tribesmen may still have been regulated by the Brehon laws. 



All this, however, has been neglected by historians ; and we can only 

 say, from our present point of view, that the English introduced the cultiva- 

 tion of wheat on some scale to the south of Ireland, and that, although the 

 reversion to tribal customs and the inter-tribal fighting which naturally 

 followed may have hindered its extension, it is unlikely that so valuable a crop 

 would be subject to anything approaching complete decline. We are not 

 astonished, therefore, to find an export of wheat and other grain in addition 

 to such things as hides and skins, cheese and butter, salt beef and fish, which 

 were exported from the south of Ireland during the Middle Ages. 2 



The foundations for the modern development of Irish agriculture were 

 laid in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the planters and under- 

 takers of Elizabeth and James the First. The advance made since those 

 days could not be represented diagrammatieally by a continuous straight 

 line. Social and political differences, and the great catastrophe of the 

 nineteenth century, have caused the line to bend and sag again and again ; 

 but, on the whole, lost ground has usually been regained and the general 

 direction of the line has been upward in the main. It might be asserted that, 



1 Bichey, p. 173. - For details see Mrs. Green's Making of Ireland and its Undoing. 



