5 38 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



swine as he will (not exceeding 10)." 1 But so many were brought in, or so 

 many of the kind brought in were bred from, that, by the middle of the 

 eighteenth century, nearly all the cattle in the low-lying and more fertile 

 parts of the country were Longhorns or Longhorn crosses — the breed of the 

 English midlands and north-west. Cattle were brought to the south from the 

 south of England, and perhaps also to the north from Scotland ; but these 

 were in no great number. 2 



In the same way a new race of sheep was brought into Ireland, and these 

 spread over practically the same area as the Longhorn cattle. Their 

 descendants, the Eoscommons, unlike the Longhorn cattle, still survive in 

 the country, although their territory is now smaller than it once was. 3 



The history of the horse in Ireland is, so far, only conjectural. The Celtic 

 pony was in the island in very early times. There is high probability that the 

 Norsemen brought in horses as well as cattle. The Norman horses were 

 larger and stronger than those in the country before them, and, to judge from the 

 Bayeux tapestry, contained many of the features of the Suffolk Punch and 

 the older Hackneys of the east of England. 4 The horses brought in by the 

 planters would approximate to the Norman horse, excepting that they would 

 have a cross of the " Great War Horse" of the Middle Ages. ' In the eighteenth 

 century, probably also in the seventeenth, the kind of horse that produced the 

 modern thoroughbred came to Ireland in considerable numbers. 



The next changes in Irish agriculture might be expected to have crept in 

 about the middle of the eighteenth century, shortly after Tull's and 

 Townshend's work had begun to tell in England. But the general result 

 of that work was scarcely the same in Ireland as in Britain. The two new 

 crops, turnips and red clover, arrived in the eighteenth century ; but " the new 

 husbandry," as it was called, was not adopted widely for many years. It meant 

 not only the abandonment of the fallow and the " inclosed " system of cropping, 

 and the growing of two new crops, but it meant also the adoption of drill culti- 

 vation, new and more complicated machinery, and greater care and attention 

 to the details of cultivation. The four-course system, modified frequently to 

 suit local conditions — as, for instance, by sowing grass-seeds along with the 

 clover and leaving that crop down for several years — spread widely and 

 quickly in Britain and had reached as far north as Morayshire by the time 



1 Irish State Papers, 1611-14, p. 43. 



'See "The Origin of the Dexter-Kerry Breed of Cattle" and "The Scandinavian Origin 

 of the Hornless Cattle of the British Isles," Sci. Proc, Royal Dublin Society. 



3 The data on this question have already been collected by the writer of this paper, but have 

 not yet been published. 



4 Question: Is what is now called the 'Old Irish Draught'-horse related to the Norman 

 horse f 



