field systems

field systems, the size, shape, and arrangement of agricultural fields and the way these reflect the social, economic, and environmental circumstances of their creation. Despite recent structural farm improvement programmes, funded since 1973 by European Union regional aid schemes, Ireland retains its characteristic ‘bocage’ landscape. In this, numerous, frequently small, fields are separated by banks, ditches, and hedges to produce a highly subdivided agrarian landscape. The variations in the size, shape, and boundaries of the fields in different parts of Ireland provide much of the country's regional distinctiveness, and reflect its varied history of enclosure.

Archaeological research has demonstrated that similarly small and irregular field systems existed during the neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages, but no evidence has been adduced to suggest direct continuity from these to the present landscape. Rather, the extant field systems are of relatively recent origin: generally post‐plantation in the east, and immediately pre‐Famine in the west. In eastern districts, farms have traditionally tended to be larger and their fields more extensive (9–10 acres) and more regular than those further west, reflecting the more overtly commercial pressures which historically have affected agriculture in these areas. Over much of east‐central Leinster, in counties such as Dublin, Kildare, Louth, and Meath, this regularity reflects the widespread enclosure carried out in the 18th and early 19th centuries by landlords and, particularly, their major tenants. This created a landscape of dispersed farms held in severalty, but in so doing largely destroyed the earlier ‘champion’ or ‘commonfield’ landscapes which had originated in areas of Anglo‐Norman manorial settlement and survived in a recognizable form until at least the 17th century.

These commonfields were complex and far from unchanging. Surviving manorial charters from the 13th and 14th centuries suggest that they existed throughout most of Leinster, and west as far as Tipperary, Limerick, and Westmeath, and were characteristically subdivided into scattered strips. A tenant might hold several plots in widely scattered locations throughout the arable area. In return for these and for the grazing rights allocated with them on the meadows and waste, and on the arable itself after harvest, he owed his manorial lord a variety of labour and other services.

It has been suggested that these manorial references amount to evidence for the existence in medieval Ireland of the so‐called ‘two or three field’ commonfield system, in which separate fields were allegedly given over in their entirety to the spring and winter cereal and fallow stages in a three‐course rotation. However, this is debatable. What is clear is that the commonfield systems in eastern Ireland experienced widespread engrossing between the 13th and 16th centuries. This consolidated separate strips into larger, compact holdings within the framework of the existing commonfields, suggesting a continuing process of functional adjustment in response to changing socio‐economic conditions. Where separate arable strips survived to be enclosed in the 18th century and after, they gave rise to characteristically linear field patterns, as at Rathcoole, Co. Dublin, and Booleyglass, Co. Kilkenny.

In western regions and in marginal areas generally, where the pressures of pre‐Famine population growth and unrestricted subdivision were most acutely felt, other types of field system developed. On the margins of cultivation small, irregular fields developed as hillsides and boglands were enclosed piecemeal by landhungry peasants. Where these tenancies were held on a joint basis by extended kin groups, farms might very quickly experience the rapid subdivision and fragmentation of holdings which was the characteristic response of these regions' ‘rundale’ agriculture to mounting population pressure. The fundamental principles at work here were partible inheritance and the equal allocation of land. Left unchecked, they eventually created a patchwork landscape, not dissimilar to the medieval commonfields of the Pale, in which individual farmers held numerous widely scattered strips that became increasingly uneconomic in size as subdivision continued. In the worst‐affected areas of the west and north, some landlords attempted to alleviate this in the immediate pre‐Famine years by unilaterally reorganizing their tenants' farms. At the cost of some population displacement, these landlords replaced the rundale system with smaller numbers of individually larger and regularly laid‐out farms, in processes commonly known as ‘squaring’ and ‘striping’. The so‐called ‘ladder farms’ created by the latter remain as a widespread feature of marginal upland areas throughout the west and north, where they run in a characteristic parallel pattern from valley floor to mountain side. Similar rationalization was subsequently undertaken in the later 19th century by the Congested Districts Board and its successor, the Land Commission.

Bibliography

Buchanan, R. H. , ‘Field Systems of Ireland’, in A. R. H. Baker and R. A. Butlin (eds.), Studies of Field Systems in the British Isles (1973)

Lindsay Proudfoot