2 
In which John Dunton eats oatcake and hare boiled in butter in a Connaught cabin (1698)
How Ireland was planted with English, became a centre of the provisions trade and fed the emerging Empire
Supper was ready in the small cabin in Connaught where John Dunton was staying. His landlady drew a long stool in front of his bench of rushes, then pulled the linen kerchief from her head and smoothed it over the stool to act as a warm and slightly odorous tablecloth. She set before Dunton an oatcake and a ‘greate roll of fresh butter’ (3 lb at least) as well as a wooden vessel full of milk and water. Her daughter then brought in the hare that Dunton and his host had caught earlier that day, ‘swimming in a wooden boul full of oyl of butter’, in which it had been boiled. Yet, having watched the women of the household prepare the meal, Dunton found that he could not swallow a morsel and asked instead for an egg.1
An eccentric London bookseller and publisher, Dunton had travelled to Ireland in 1698 to escape his quarrelsome second wife. Without the help of a guide, it would have been impossible for him to venture into the rough county of Connaught, ‘for in these mountains there are no inns, nor indeed any roads’. At the beginning of the letter describing his adventures in this part of Ireland, Dunton commented that he was about to proceed into a part of the country where all ‘the barbarities… under which it so long laboured, and with which it was soe miserably infected, are all accumulated’.2
That afternoon, however, he had been received with greater humanity than he had expected from ‘persons appearing so barbarous’. His guide’s relatives welcomed him to their home with a syllabub made of a mix of sour and fresh milk that Dunton admitted was ‘pleasing’ to the taste. They then set about preparing him a meal. The ‘woman of the house’ sat on an old horse’s hide on the floor and, with a quern between her naked legs, lustily ground three pecks of oats. Dunton, who was no shrinking violet, claimed that he did not know where to look as she was exposed ‘to the bottom of her belly’. The oats ground, she mixed them with a little water to form a dough and fashioned it into a flat cake. This was propped against a tripod to bake before the turf fire. The woman’s mother was deputed to watch the cake which she did ‘while… sneezing into her nose or wipeing away the snivel with the same hands that she turn’d my oaten cake’. The performance made Dunton’s ‘gutts wamble’. Any remaining appetite he had for the food waned when the woman brought a wooden churn over to the fire and, gripping it in the same manner as the quern between her naked legs, set to work, using her right arm instead of a churn staff to turn the fresh milk into butter. With her left hand she wiped off any flecks of milk that splashed onto her thighs and put them back in the pot. Dunton remarked that it was no wonder Irish butter smelt ‘rank and strong… for surely the heate which this labour put the good wife in must unavoidably have made some of the essence of arms pitts tricle down her arm into the churn’. It was in this butter that the hare had been boiled.3
While the family devoured the food, Dunton ate his egg and drank his milk. Closing his eyes ‘for fear of making any ungrateful discoveries in my liquor’, he put the bowl to his lips. As he swallowed the last of it, he discovered a long straw between his teeth. ‘You may guess’, he wrote, ‘at what it almost occasion’d.’ His guide told him there was no hurt in it as it was ‘nothing but a piece of the strainer’, and they showed him the conical piece of birch bark stuffed with straw and grass that they used to strain out any hairs or dirt from the fresh milk. Countless English visitors before Dunton had complained that Irish milk was full of dirty specks due to the fact that the Irish had the unsavoury habit of straining it through ‘none of the cleanest’ straw. His experience confirmed Dunton in his belief that Connaught was a last bastion of the old Irish ways, which had been successfully eradicated from the rest of Ireland by the ‘planting of English among them’.4
Henry VII had little to do other than name Newfoundland in order to incorporate it within the Crown’s sphere of influence. The English went there simply to exploit the seas and had barely any contact with the indigenous Beothuk, who shied away from the strangers and withdrew inland.7 In contrast, the attempt to unite the Irish lords in a ‘commonwealth’ held together by a (preferably English) common law and loyal to the English Crown was a far more challenging undertaking.8 In 1545, a small area around Dublin known as the Pale was governed directly by England. The northern and western uplands were dominated by Gaelic chieftains who spoke their own language and lived according to their own customs and law. Fynes Moryson, personal secretary to Lord Mountjoy, commander-in-chief of the English army in the early 1600s, complained that the ‘O’ or ‘Mac’ that the Gaelic lords placed before their clan names gave the impression that Ireland was peopled by ‘devouring giants [rather] than Christian subjects’.9 Leinster and Munster in the south were controlled by Anglo-Norman peers who had settled there in the twelfth century when Henry II attempted to bring the island under England’s control. But many of them had gone native: they were connected to the Gaelic chieftains through marriage; they conducted political negotiations in the Irish style at open-air gatherings; and they routinely cemented alliances in the Irish fashion by sending their children to be fostered in each other’s families. Particularly disturbing to the English was their inclusion of Gaelic bards and musicians in their household retinues, as the Irish accorded poetry an almost occult power.10 Constant rivalry between various petty chieftains, who indulged in endless bouts of cattle raiding and pillaging, meant that the country was chronically unstable and violent. Moreover, after the schism with the papacy in 1534, Protestant English monarchs worried that Catholic Ireland would provide political rivals with a base from which to launch an attack on their sovereignty.11
Tudor officials diagnosed pastoralism as the source of Ireland’s malaise. They argued that rather than following the path of historical progress ‘from the woods to the fields and from the fields to settlements and communities of citizens’, the Irish had remained a wild and nomadic people.12 The warm, wet summers produced rich upland grazing and many Irish peasants followed their cattle into higher pastures in the summer. They wore strange, straight trousers and loose coats quite unlike an Englishman’s wide breeches and waistcoat but well suited to the activities of wading through bogs and marching over heathland with their cattle. The mantles they wore added to their fearsome appearance, as they were so voluminous that they could serve as a ‘cabin for an outlaw in the woods, a bed for a rebel, and a cloak for a thief’.13
Since classical times, settled grain-cultivating farmers had dismissed pastoralists as uncivilised. For the Greek historian Herodotus, the use of cookery to transform raw ingredients was the mark of civilised farming populations; barbarian pastoralists drank raw milk and barely cooked their meat.14 Tudor observers of Ireland, steeped in classical learning, invoked these associations when they described the Irish diet.15 They were appalled by their practice of opening their cows’ veins to draw off the blood, which they consumed mixed with butter and salt. They claimed that the Irish devoured entrails so fresh that they were ‘breathing new’ and ate barely boiled flesh with ‘whole lumps of filthy butter’.16 Moryson declared Irish butter so revolting that no Englishman would touch it ‘with his lippes, though he were half starved’.17 But the English reserved their greatest disgust for what the Irish regarded as their finest ‘daintie’: bonny clabber. John Dunton was treated to this dish of sour curds the next morning. Confounded by the ‘unusualness of the mess and the sluttishness of the cookery’, he went without breakfast and bade the family adieu.18
The ‘wilde Irish man’ in this illustration for a map of Ireland is wearing the long hair and straight trousers English observers thought strange and uncivilised, while his companion the ‘wilde Irish woman’ is wrapped in one of the voluminous mantles favoured by the Irish and that the English considered fit only for a rebel or a thief. The cartographers will have drawn the figures from a set of instructions and had probably never seen an Irishman.
At the heart of the English intervention in Ireland lay a value judgement about the right way for a people to cultivate their land. The English were in the grip of a movement for agricultural ‘improvement’ that promoted the practice of mixed livestock and arable farming as man’s most ‘natural and holie’ occupation.19 Reformers at Henry VIII’s court were blind to Ireland’s fruitful fields of oats and barley, its stone fortifications, churches and towns.20 Like Thomas More’s Utopians, who drove out of their land any natives who refused to assist in the project to make it yield its natural abundance, the English insisted that Ireland was a barren uncultivated wasteland and that it was incumbent upon them to impose tillage agriculture on its untended landscape.21 This, the reformers argued, could best be achieved by planting English settlers ‘among the weeds of Irish society’.22 The English cast themselves in the role of ‘new Romans’: just as Roman settlers had civilised the barbarous ancient Britons, so the English would civilise the Irish.23
The settlers would refashion the landscape to resemble the south-eastern English lowlands. Stone manor houses with adjacent orchards, vegetable gardens and fish ponds would dot the landscape, while the tenant farmers would live in orderly nuclear villages surrounded by well-tended enclosed fields. This configuration was considered the fundamental basis for a stable society.24 If such an example of good husbandry were held up before them, the Irish would surely be persuaded to take up the plough, transforming themselves from unruly cattle-raiding tribesmen into feudal villagers. Their ‘messy mish-mashes of gruel’, oatcakes, blood puddings and bonny clabber would be replaced with the food of settled farmers: white wheaten bread and well-roasted joints of meat.25 At the same time, the profitability of this new way of farming would teach them the value of the English principle of private property preserved from division by primogeniture.26 Thus these reformers conceived agriculture as a prime agent of civilisation.
Tudor rulers, however, showed little enthusiasm for expending the money and effort it would cost to subdue and civilise the Irish. Under Edward VI, English soldiers who had finished their term of service were granted land on the edge of the Pale. They brought English retainers over to farm the land and their estates created a secure buffer zone along the western borders of the area. Under Queen Mary, this strategy was formally extended to the counties of Leix and Offaly, renamed Queen’s County and King’s County in 1556. But it was not until the reign of Elizabeth I that a concerted effort was made to establish a plantation of English settlers. The prime instigators of this policy were drawn from a circle of men who had been exposed to the idea of Irish plantation at Henry VIII’s court and then rose to prominence under Edward VI and his sisters.27
The opportunity to put the strategy of settlement into practice came in 1569, when Sir Henry Sidney, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, installed Humphrey Gilbert as military governor in Munster. The Earl of Desmond rebelled in protest at the extension of English power into his domain, and Sidney and Gilbert responded with a scorched-earth campaign of terror. It was said that those Irish who wished to plead with Gilbert in his encampment were forced to walk along a path lined with the severed heads of their kinsmen.28 The young Walter Raleigh, Gilbert’s half-brother, was involved in the suppression of a second wave of rebellion. By the time the Earl of Desmond was executed in 1583, about a third of the population in the provinces of Munster and Leinster had been killed, starved to death or died of the plague. The poet Edmund Spenser, who also took part in the fighting, described how in the devastated countryside survivors crept out of the woods and glens looking like ‘Anatomies of death… crying out of their graves’, so desperate for food that they ‘did eate of the Carrions… and if they found a plott of water-cresses or shamrockes, there they flocked as to a feast’.29 About 400,000 acres were confiscated from the rebels; both Raleigh and Spenser received estates on what became known as the Munster Plantation.30
Meanwhile, northern Ireland appeared to be secure in the hands of Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, one of the few Irish lords who gained Elizabeth’s trust. He visited the English court three times and fitted in with ease, adopting English costume and habits. When he returned to his castle at Dungannon, he brought with him expensive English furniture and an English cook. Elizabeth even gave him special permission to import lead to make a fashionable roof. But when in the 1590s it became evident that the queen was determined to thwart his ambition to become supreme in Ulster as ‘the O’Neill’, he melted down his lead roof to make bullets, donned a suit of armour given to him by Sir Christopher Hatton (one of Elizabeth’s favourites) and led a rebellion that spread through much of the rest of Ireland.31 The unrest was not quelled until the Battle of Kinsale in 1601, after a failed attempt by O’Neill to join forces with Spanish troops; after the queen’s death, the Irish leaders fled to the Continent in 1607. The Crown confiscated about one tenth of Ulster’s land, and the Ulster Plantation was created on these 500,000 acres.
A mix of wealthy English adventurers and disbanded ex-soldiers who had fought to put down the rebellions were given land on the Plantation. They were known as ‘undertakers’, because they were granted estates on the understanding that they would undertake to import English tenants to farm the land. Although it was far more difficult to entice English settlers than the masterminds of the plantation schemes envisaged, between 1580 and 1650 at least 100,000 English, Scottish and Dutch emigrants settled in Ireland.32
Historians dispute whether Ireland was England’s first colony, but for contemporaries, plantations were all part of the same colonial endeavour whether they were established in North America or Ireland. A propaganda pamphlet promoted the Plantation of Ulster as belonging within ‘this our new world’.33 It assured prospective settlers that honest, hard-working English labourers would find just as many opportunities to make their fortunes in Ireland as they would in the Americas. Indeed, for the Lord Deputy, Arthur Chichester, it seemed an ‘absurd folly to run all over the world in search of colonies in Virginia or Guiana, whilst Ireland was lying desolate’.34 The Crown even forced the London livery companies to withdraw their support for the venture to settle Jamestown in Virginia–with disastrous consequences for the settlers in America–so that their funds could be channelled into the setting-up of Londonderry in the Ulster Plantation.35
Even before the settlers arrived, Ireland had begun to undergo a process of commercialisation. While the sixteenth-century English economy suffered from inflation, the Irish economy benefited from price stability, and between 1560 and 1630 it began to expand. Irish beef gained a reputation for being sweet and savoury, and a live-cattle trade with England emerged. By the 1630s, about 15,000 animals a year were being imported into England via Chester.36 In the north, the peasantry participated in the burgeoning of trade by cultivating flax and spinning it into yarn. In the south, peasants hired dairy cattle and sold the butter their wives made from the milk; and they fattened the calves before selling them on for slaughter.37 At about the same time, the potato became a popular subsistence crop among Munster dairy farmers. They would normally have relied on butter as a staple food, but now they ate potatoes mixed with the sour milk left over from butter-making and instead sold their butter. It was from here that the potato gradually spread over the rest of the country in the eighteenth century.38 An English commentator observed that Irish men were at first ashamed to be seen at the markets making a cash profit from the industry of their wives, and ‘sold their yarn and butter by night, and as privately as possible’, but gradually commerce became an accepted way of life.39 English consumer goods began to flow into Ireland: ribbons and buttons; spectacles and looking glasses; luxury textiles from the Continent; as well as New World goods such as rice, tobacco and sugar.40 These were mainly consumed by merchants in the port towns, but the flax and dairy farmers also used the proceeds from their yarn and butter to acquire halfpenny combs, coarse hats and woollen stockings, snuff and tobacco brought into the countryside in the packs of pedlars.41
Munster’s predominantly West Country undertakers were able to attract English settlers from around the Severn Basin to settle on their estates. Catholic and Protestant proprietors outside the Plantation also encouraged these skilled farmers as tenants, and artisans and settlers from the West Country spread throughout the southern counties.42 They brought with them the English creed of agricultural improvement and applied it with vigour. The miller Richard Harman, for example, raised the annual income of his farm in Tipperary from £7 to £17 by building a corn mill and investing in a herd of English cows.43 The project of ‘improvement’ was less well advanced in Ulster. However, the introduction of English bulls and milch cows did improve the region’s livestock, and settlers managed to build up valuable herds. The grandson of the Welsh soldier Edward Blayney, who had been rewarded for his service with 2,000 acres in County Monaghan in 1609, in 1641 owned livestock worth an impressive £925.44 Determined to get their hands on superior animals, the ‘wild’ Irish would frequently raid the settlers’ herds.45
The Ulster Plantation began supplying Dublin with butter and cheese, and a thriving trade in Irish butter, wool and hides developed with France.46 A veteran of the campaign to suppress the Desmond rebellion, Sir Richard Grenville, lord of Bideford manor in north Devon, acquired an estate on the Munster Plantation.47 Bideford was at the time the centre of English pottery production. The town began sending cargoes of earthenware pots to Ireland, where they were filled with butter and sent back to Devon, from where they were re-exported to France.48 Clearly the salted butter produced on the Plantation was not the ‘rank and strong’ stuff that had disgusted John Dunton.
By the 1630s, southern Ireland was increasingly prosperous and Munster was ‘probably the wealthiest of any of England’s overseas settlements’.49 Tenant farmers slept in comfortable beds dressed in fine bed linen, ate from pewter ware rather than wooden trenchers and–judging by the sixfold rise in imports of hops–drank well-hopped English-style beer rather than sweeter un-hopped Irish ales. They wore fine hats and linen clothes and were able to admire themselves in looking glasses on their walls.50 In the early decades of the seventeenth century, Ireland fulfilled the role of a model overseas plantation: it produced commercially desirable raw commodities for export to England and in return acted as a market for English manufactured goods.51
But then, in 1641, the country was plunged into more than a decade of warfare when the English conflict between Charles I and Parliament spilled over into Ireland and sparked a rebellion. It soon degenerated into an ethnic conflict between the native Catholic Irish and the new Protestant settlers. Many of the English settlers were driven from their homes by bands of Catholics ‘resolved to die in that quarrel’ and declaring that ‘Noe Englishman or protestant must live among [the Irish].’52 The Irish Confederation that ruled the rebellious parts of Ireland allied itself with the royalists in England’s civil war. This brought Oliver Cromwell to the island in 1649 determined to protect the newly established English Commonwealth from the Catholic threat. Cromwell’s campaign of reconquest was merciless. One English soldier described how it was possible to travel twenty or thirty miles through the devastated countryside without seeing a living creature. The skin of the few survivors was blackened ‘like an oven because of the terrible famine’.53 Hunger, the plague and the practice of selling Irish captives to the West Indies as indentured labourers reduced Ireland’s population by at least a fifth.54
Under Cromwell’s land settlement of 1652, 8.5 million acres (about 40 per cent of Ireland’s land) were confiscated from Catholic landowners and allocated to a motley group of English adventurers and decommissioned army officers.55 After 1652, Protestant settlers, who made up only a quarter of the population, now owned an estimated three quarters of the land and controlled two thirds of the trade.56 By 1700, this power shift in favour of the Protestant English had been firmly established. English officials ran the administration of Ireland, their authority reinforced by a large occupying army of English soldiers, and penal laws restricted the economic and political activity of the Catholics. Catholic landowners had been pushed west into the inhospitable province of Connaught, which Dunton described in 1698 as the stronghold of old Irish barbarism.57
During the Commonwealth, the ideology of agricultural improvement was reinvigorated by the redefinition of the pursuit of profit not as sinful covetousness but as a contribution to the nation’s wealth, now understood to be the sum of private wealth. Thus the farmer who harnessed the fertility God had bestowed upon the soil in order to increase yields, helped to ensure the prosperity of the Commonwealth as a whole.58 The parliamentarian Sir Oliver St John applied these ideas to Ireland when he declared, ‘Great good will come to this kingdom [Ireland] by transporting cattle and corn from hence into England: for this kingdom will be able to spare great quantities of both, which will bring money into it, and make this barbarous nation feel the sweets thereof, the love of it will sooner effect civility than any other persuasion whatsoever.’59 The market had become the agent of civilisation.
In the 1660s, Ireland appeared to take St John’s advice, and the trade in agricultural exports revived. An annual flow of at least 50,000 cattle and more than 100,000 sheep, as well as several hundredweight of Irish butter, helped to meet England’s rising demand for meat and fat as living standards improved among the middling classes.60 Meanwhile the butter trade with the West Country, which had connected southern Ireland to the French market, now pulled the region into the web of Atlantic trade.
By the 1660s, Newfoundland had become a permanent English settlement of about 2,000 people. Somewhere between 100 and 200 ‘planters’ had established year-round permanent fishing stations varying in size from humble enterprises with only a couple of fishing boats to large operations employing numerous fishermen and household servants.61 As European settlement encroached on their land, the native Beothuk people who had traditionally lived on seal and fish were forced to rely on alternative food sources. But as Newfoundland’s interior supported very little game, scarcity of food resulted in a dramatic declinein the aboriginal population. By 1829, the Beothuk were extinct.62
Ironically, even though the Europeans monopolised access to the region’s rich marine food sources, they were themselves dependent on food imports. Ireland supplied the settlement with flour, biscuit, salt butter and meat. The supply line came full circle as the fishing settlement that had provided salt cod for the English army in Ireland was now supplied with food from the Irish plantations.
A triangular trade developed conducted by networks of merchants, often with family ties. In 1680, John Smith, a Bideford merchant of southern Irish origin, sent a cargo of 25 dozen earthenware pots with the Bideford vessel the Delight to his brother Edward in Ross, Ireland. Later that year, Edward sent back 18 hundredweight of butter packed into the pots. Bideford ships took cargoes of Irish butter to Newfoundland, where it was exchanged for inferior salt cod to be carried on to Virginia, where it was used to feed the African slaves working on the tobacco plantations. John Smith sent his butter directly to Virginia, where another Smith brother, Joseph, was a tobacco planter.63 By the late seventeenth century, Bideford had become England’s main tobacco trading port. Through such interconnections, Ireland became a supplier of provisions to Britain’s emerging empire.
The Caribbean sugar islands were to become Ireland’s most important market. Sugar was introduced into the West Indies in the mid seventeenth century. It was such a valuable crop that the planters did not want to waste land growing food and the islands became dependent on imported provisions. Irish beef exports doubled between 1641 and 1665 as the trade in barrelled beef developed in tandem with the expansion of sugar cultivation.64 When, in an effort to protect the higher price of English beef, the English placed a ban on imports of live Irish animals in 1667 and Irish butter in 1681, the New World colonies became Ireland’s main market for their exports of salt provisions.65
The city of Cork flourished as a result, doubling in size between 1660 and 1685 and doubling again by 1706.66 In May, the market bustled as great firkins of butter were carried in on horseback from the countryside. The city’s connection with the Newfoundland trade gave it access to superior Portuguese salt, and the top-grade ‘Rose’ butter remained ‘sweet and fresh’ even in the tropical climate of the Caribbean.67 In the autumn, Cork’s streets would fill with herds of cattle being driven to the slaughterhouse. Old dairy cows and oxen were made into low-grade ‘small beef’, often with hooves and hide mixed in with the scrawny meat. This was destined for the French West Indies, where it was fed to the African slaves: there was no market for such poor-quality meat in the English West Indies, where the slaves were given the redshanks–spoiled salt cod–from Newfoundland.68 The necks, fore-and hind-shanks of better-quality animals were packed into two-hundredweight barrels and sold as ‘cargo’ or ‘common mess beef’ to provision ships. Prime beef cattle were only driven into the city in November, to be processed into ‘planters’ beef’ and shipped to the West Indies just in time to provide wealthy sugar planters with fresh provisions for their tables at Christmas.69
It is unsurprising that when he travelled through Connaught at the end of the seventeenth century, John Dunton thought that this was where old Ireland had survived. The north-west of the island remained poor, dominated by small subsistence-level farms. Although the farmers here participated in the cattle trade by rearing calves, they made little money, as the larger share of the profits went to the farmers in the midland pastoral zone who fattened the cattle and sold them on to the slaughterhouses.70 In contrast, in southern Ireland the Tudor reformers’ vision was realised. Many of the woodlands, bogs and heaths that had been home to the ‘barbarous Irish’ had been cut down, drained and brought into cultivation. Mixed tillage farms dominated, and tenants lived in villages ranged around a school, a church, and a mill for grinding corn. By 1700, the English plan had succeeded in refashioning Ireland’s landscape and it had begun to take on the features familiar to us today.71 However, it was not English arable farming that had won out, but a commercialised version of Irish pastoralism. In the process, the once wild and unruly country was now firmly integrated into the emerging British Empire.