The English Market in Cork is one of the sights of the city and is beyond any question the finest food market in Ireland. Nothing else comes close. The present splendid enclosure dates from 1862, although it required significant restoration and re-development following serious fires in 1980 and 1986. None the less, the basic integrity of Sir John Benson’s original design has been triumphantly retained and the market has won a Europa Nostra award for architectural preservation.
All this is to the great credit of the Cork city authorities and is as it should be. For Cork has a long and distinguished reputation as a centre of the provision trade. The English Market did not just happen. As with everything, there is a context and a backstory.
The market was established in 1788. At first, it catered to the more prosperous elements in the city. This distinguished it from the Irish Market, on the far side of Patrick Street off North Main Street, where prices were generally lower. This English/Irish distinction echoed similar contrasts in the names of districts, as in Limerick (see chapter 19), where English Town meant the older, more central and more ‘civic’ area while Irish Town was a rougher suburb, usually outside the city walls. Any Irishtown in any Irish town generally runs true to this sharp difference.
Following the devastating Desmond wars and the settlement of New English landowners in Munster in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the province recovered and prospered with impressive speed. The port of Youghal controlled most of the trade to the west of England, Kinsale was a major importer of tobacco — for which the Irish market seemed insatiable — and Cork itself had a vigorous trade with the continent. Over time, Cork eclipsed the smaller ports and became the dominant regional entrepôt. The greater geographical range of Cork’s maritime trade was very marked: in the 1680s, only a quarter of its trade was with England, almost as much as it was doing with the Caribbean islands, whereas the greatest proportion was with France, the Low Countries and the Iberian peninsula.
By 1700, Cork had taken advantage of its central location in south Munster and the size of its natural outer harbour to overwhelm smaller ports from Dungarvan to Dingle. It was a major export point for wool, still a significant element of Irish trade. But as the eighteenth century wore on, it was the provision trade that came more and more to dominate the commerce of the southern capital. Until about 1750, the principal commodities in the city’s trade were beef, butter and woollens in that order. The second half of the century — the period in which the English Market was first established — saw a dramatic expansion. The beef trade, in particular, flourished. Even in the early part of the century, Cork controlled more than 40 per cent of the Irish export market; by the second half, its regional dominance had grown so overwhelming as to be nearly total. The concentration of slaughterhouses and abattoirs in the city was also a factor in this dominance.
As with beef, so went the butter trade, although not to the same volume or degree. Youghal had been a major port of departure for salted butter but had lost this advantage to Cork by 1700. Once again, export markets were diverse and in some instances far-flung, so that the city’s commercial bets were spread over the widest possible number of customers: if one market failed for any reason — war was a frequent cause of problems — another could be exploited in its stead.
The commercial trade in salted beef and butter reached its apogee in the 1760s. Thereafter the nature of the trade changed, and much of this change was driven by war. War is famously bad for commerce and Britain was at war with France (and for a time, with its American colonies, who had French assistance) more or less continuously from the start of the Seven Years’ War in 1756 until the battle of Waterloo in 1815. Intervals of peace were blessed remissions, but the whole period — the span of two adult lifetimes — was a time of international conflict.
For one of the biggest centres of the provision trade in Europe, located on the western margins of one of the principal combatants, the wars brought unprecedented prosperity. Ireland became the bread basket of the British forces and Cork was the port with the most developed supply infrastructure. (This was a theme that repeated itself in World War I, when the most cogent British argument against imposing conscription in Ireland was not political, but practical: young men employed in agriculture were of more benefit on the farm than at the front.)
The long series of wars from 1756 to 1815 brought high prices for the staples that sustained Cork’s prosperity: beef and butter, as we have seen, and now increasingly pork and bacon. In relative terms, beef lost its pre-eminence from its high point in the 1760s; by the 1790s, it had fallen to a level equal to pigmeat in terms of the quantities exported through Cork. Pork and bacon, in turn, had risen from a low base and while never approaching the quantities achieved by beef exports in earlier decades became the leading export meat commodity early in the nineteenth century. The rise of pork was a direct consequence of the war. The demand for pork from the military increased spectacularly. The relative ease with which pork can be salted and preserved is a consideration here but so is price, although the gap in cost between pork and beef narrowed over time.
The restored Victorian splendour of the English Market might lead one to suppose that here is a monument to nineteenth-century retail developments. It is all that, but more besides. It renews a tradition that is older than the market itself; that marked Munster and Cork as the centre of the Irish provision trade, which in turn was a key factor in Britain’s rise to empire. It is little surprise that the English Market is here and not somewhere else, or that the capital of Irish gastronomy is just down the road in Kinsale, or that Ballymaloe House a few kilometres to the east has been the greatest single influence in transforming modern Irish attitudes to food, or that so many world-class cheeses are being developed in the region. Traditions die hard.
