Professor J. Hughes (University College, Dublin) suggested that the
primary unit of enclosure in Ireland was the townland and that too much
emphasis had been placed on fields. Considerable historical evidence was
quoted by Mr. Nichols (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies) and
Mr. R. Hunter (Magee College, Londonderry) to support the idea that
townland enclosure was proceeding in the 17th century in association with
the Plantation schemes. Professor Otway-Ruthven (Trinity College,
Dublin) pointed out that 16th century disputes on areas and townland
boundaries suggested that at this time there cannot have been any real
mark of delimitation in many cases.
ENCLOSURES IN THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
PROFESSOR
A. J. Orway-Ruthven
Trinity College, Dublin
The Anglo-Norman colony established in Ireland in the late 12th centurywas not, as is often thought, exclusively urban or aristocratic. Settlement
was largely rural in character, manorial organisation was introduced and
considerable bodies of English settlers, both farmers and artisans, were
established in the countryside of southern and eastern Ireland from Kerry
to Louth, and in counties Down and Antrim. Although no detailed terrier
or survey survives from the Middle Ages there are many medieval AngloIrish charters which show clearly that villages with open fields and scattered strip-holdings were of fundamental importance in the rural economy.
However, the demesne land of a manorial lord seems generally to have
been a compact area entirely separate from the lands of other classes
of the agricultural community. Besides the demesne there were numerous
other relatively large compact holdings. Some of these resulted from a
process of strip consolidation which was occurring piecemeal from the
13th century onwards, while others were not preceded by open-fields
but resulted from individual enterprise in clearing the then widespread
forest and bog for cultivation. However, any enclosure existing in association with these compact holdings seems to have been by ditches rather
than fences and hedges. The servile tenants (betaghs) who existed on
most but by no means all manors were, at least in the early medieval
period, almost exclusively Irish. Normally the betagh community would
occupy a quite separate area of the manor, perhaps a definite townland,
and the holdings may have been cultivated on a native open-field system
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which was smaller in scale and more fluid in pattern than the AngloNorman system.
The medieval rural organisation and cultural landscape of southeastern Ireland was thus essentially similar to that in lowland England
and indeed north-western Europe as a whole, with areas of open-field
cultivation surrounding villages and interspersed with compact holdings
and patches of common grazing land. Throughout the medieval period
enclosures (always called ' parks ' in medieval Ireland) can have occupied
only a small part of the landscape, though references to them become more
frequent towards the end of the fifteenth century.
REFERENCES
Dowdall Deeds. Edited C. McNeill and A. J. Otway-Ruthven. Dublin : StationeryOffice, for the Irish Manuscripts Commission (1960).
A. J. Otway-Ruthven, " The Organisation of Anglo-Irish. Agriculture in the Middle
Ages", The Journal of Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, LXXXI, Pt. 1 (1951)
SOME SOURCES FOR THE STUDY OF ENCLOSURE IN IRELAND BETWEEN
THE I6TH AND IQTH CENTURIES
Dr. J. H. ANDREWS
Trinity College, Dublin
The sources hitherto used by writers commenting on Irish enclosure
history between the i6th and igth centuries are of two kinds, neither of
them wholly satisfactory. Firstly, there are the general statements applied
by contemporary writers to extensive and ill-defined areas and often,
indeed, to the whole of Ireland, like that of Sir Henry Wallop already
quoted by Mr Aalen, or the statement, more than a hundred years later,
that " enclosures are very rare amongst them, and those no better than
a midwife's toothless gums ". 1 Secondly, there are highly localised and
seemingly precise sources such as town plans, battle plans and estate
maps, which are unfortunately too rare to be of much use in regional
studies. In these circumstances more should be done to explore the possibilities that lie between these two extremes. The military surveyors of
the late i8th century,2 for instance, such as William Roy, J.C. Pleydell
and Charles Vallancey, were keenly interested in fences as sources of
cover and obstacles to the easy deployment of cavalry. The enclosure
patterns described in their reports and depicted on their medium-scale
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