The men who come over are builders, they’re masons, they’re smiths, they’re carpenters and they’re living in an all-male community. They live, it seems, in settlements together from the descriptions we have, and inevitably they are mixing with the local community in local cabin shebeens, is what they were mainly, and they are mixing with the local women in these cabin shebeens because many of the brewers, the local brewers in the area, in the Londonderry area (we have particular records from Draperstown) - most of the cabin brewers in the Draperstown area would have been Gaelic Irish women.

So you get the men from the building site coming in at night into these cabin shebeens and the stories are of them drinking all night. Inevitably you get fights but you also get, inevitably, sexual liaisons between the Irish women and the English men so it’s a very relaxed atmosphere in many ways, in those Early years, between the local community and the English men on the building sites.

And it’s only really I think when more settlers arrive, and particularly more Scottish settlers arrive in the 1620s and 1630s, that you begin to get a more inward-looking settler community because there’s more Scottish women coming over and so they are beginning to look for marriage partners within their own community, or sexual partners within their own community, and it’s at that that you get increased tension. We’d almost say that that’s one of the reasons for some of the really hostile relationships that you get developed in the 1630s, that then manifest themselves in the massacres of 1641.

Between 1609 and probably the end of the reign of James I, 1625, you have a much more relaxed relationship between the local community on the City of London’s lands and the English men working on the building programme of the City of London.