This is a book about man-made constructions and artefacts and their effects upon Irish history. So why this photograph of the Irish countryside, so seemingly natural and timeless, without a building in sight? Because everything here is the work of man’s hand: this landscape is as much a product of human intervention as any house or building or piece of engineering. The Irish countryside is beautiful because it is artificial.
Ancient Ireland was a vast forest. At the dawn of history, to quote one historian, ‘a dense forest canopy covered the island so completely that a red squirrel could travel from … Malin Head to Mizen Head … without ever having to touch the ground’. In many respects, the story of Ireland’s past has been the story of the clearing of the forests for agriculture. This has been a painstaking, piecemeal process from the earliest development of agriculture and has been carried on progressively in every age. It accelerated with the arrival of each wave of colonists and settlers. As we saw (chapter 14), the great earl of Cork stripped vast areas of forest to provide timber for his charcoal works: he was not the only seventeenth-century New English arriviste to do this.
By the early eighteenth century, the lowland forested areas had been substantially cleared and most available agricultural land was being farmed. For the greater part, it was subsistence agriculture: there was not yet a developed market in agricultural produce. Local markets did indeed exist, as is evidenced in place names such Aonach Urmhumhan, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary (the fair of Ormond). Even here, there is an ambiguity, because aonach meant both a fair and a place of assembly for recreation.
Local fairs and markets served local needs in the era before the development of fixed-shop retailing — itself greatly facilitated by the development of a national distribution system with the coming of the railways in the nineteenth century. They also were sufficient to the needs of subsistence, non-commercial agriculture. More developed markets, often focused on export, were confined to the larger urban centres, as butter in Cork and linen in Belfast.
The eighteenth century saw two major developments in the Irish countryside: the gradual move to commercial agriculture and a dramatic rise in the island’s population, especially in the later decades. The commercialisation of agriculture was an improbable outworking of the Enlightenment. It meant bringing rational planning to the countryside, in an effort to increase efficiency and yields. It was one of the century’s fads: an elite, top-down project encouraged by such worthy bodies as the Dublin Society (later the RDS, founded 1731). Its prescriptions were accurate: the effects of the commercialisation of agriculture achieved all that the improvers predicted. In the short run, however, it offended against the immemorial customs of the countryside and drew the wrath of a deeply conservative peasantry who — quite correctly — saw that an agricultural revolution was unlikely to benefit them.
Traditionally, most land had been held in common. Commonage was the norm in Ireland. Land was farmed by strip systems such as rundale, in which clusters of farming families had equal access to areas of open-field commonage, a system which was as fair as it was inefficient. In a part-subsistence economy like pre-modern Ireland — or many other pre-modern agricultural economies across Europe — fairness was more important than yields. But once agriculture is commercialised, yields become more important than fairness and the organisation of the land becomes a telling issue.
Enclosure meant the consolidation of strips of open-field farms into a single holding with a single owner, its boundaries marked by hedges, walls or fences. In England, the process had been proceeding erratically since the early sixteenth century. Its final surge came in the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as the French and American wars — which effectively ran, with only limited respites, from 1756 to
1815 — hugely increased the demand for agricultural produce and put a premium on efficient production. Enclosed farms were more efficient, although perhaps not by as much as their promoters claimed — but their gains were bought at the price of social inequality. Where commonage had facilitated a rough equality of access to land, enclosure rewarded the larger tenants and the landlords and punished the poor.
In England, all enclosure had been a pretext for agrarian unrest. So it proved also in Ireland. The disadvantaged rural poor formed secret societies, of which the Whiteboys in Munster were the best-known and came to stand for similar groups elsewhere. In many respects, they were similar to the later Captain Swing revolt in England, where the rural poor rebelled against the development of a market-orientated rural economy, replacing the traditional ‘moral economy’ of mutual obligation and customary rights upheld by paternalistic landlords. In Ireland, however, all rural agitation was complicated by ethnic and confessional factors. There was still a strong sense of historical resentment against landlords whose titles were grounded in the Cromwellian confiscations and whose religion was not only alien but was a source of deep disaffection because of the legal obligation placed upon Catholic tenants to pay tithes for the upkeep of the Church of Ireland.
Most grievances were local and economic, so the agrarian secret societies never threatened to federate in a national movement — it was far too early for that, and the idea of a national political consciousness was yet to be born, although the elements for it lay scattered about. The societies were conspiracies of the powerless against the powerful and expressed themselves in gusts of anger: destruction of boundary markers, threats and intimidation, maiming of livestock. They succeeded in thoroughly frightening the landlords: the judicial murder of Fr Nicholas Sheehy in Clonmel in 1766 following a guilty verdict delivered by a local Protestant jury (after a Dublin jury had acquitted him) was one of the consequences of local establishment hysteria.
Enclosure has given us the typical field pattern of the modern Irish countryside, the domestic rural furniture that seems so familiar. It was not always so, and in historical time it is a relatively recent makeover. It also established the primacy of landlords and their bigger tenants in the rural pecking order, leaving the cottiers and landless labourers at maximum risk. The dramatic increase in population after 1780 was greatest among these latter groups but the instability of the situation was partly disguised by the ubiquity of the potato which provided a rich and easily cultivated source of protein. Until the catastrophic failure of the potato crop in the Great Famine of 1845–52, rural Ireland got away with it. But then came total catastrophe, as it was the poor who bore the brunt of starvation and emigration. Ironically, many landlords were ruined as well, leaving the stronger tenants in the best long-term position. It was their children and grandchildren who took possession of the land under the various land acts of the late nineteenth century that finally unpicked the Cromwellian settlement.
The controversies surrounding enclosure find a faint echo today in complaints about the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. It is designed to sustain small rural communities by central provision of subsidies to farmers who would otherwise be unable to compete in an open market. It draws the hostility of free traders — the modern equivalent of the rational, eighteenth-century enclosers and improvers — who deplore its support for agricultural inefficiency. The CAP stands for a version of moral economy, its opponents for cold science and rationality.
