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The ‘Lordship of Ireland’ was, in practice, the conquered land ruled by the King of England who generally was also the Lord of Ireland. Over this lordship French feudal law, modified somewhat by English custom, prevailed. Elaborate rules regulated the services to be rendered to a lord, and the duties of a lord to protect those who gave service. At the top were the great lords who gave military service to the Crown in return for their estates. For example, Hugh de Lacy, Lord of Meath, had to provide fifty knights to Henry II. These barons sublet much of their land to ‘free tenants’ who had to provide military service as rent. These men in turn would sublet to humbler individuals who paid money or labour service for their farms. In the most densely-settled manors, the native Irish were forced out. Generally, however, Irish farmers were allowed to stay on, provided they accepted a reduced status in society – indeed, Hugh de Lacy offered free cows to Irish farmers to come back to the lands he had conquered in Meath. These Irish, equivalent to villeins and serfs in England, were known as ‘betaghs’ from the Irish word for a food-rendering client, biatach.
A manor was the lord’s estate. A 1304 survey of the manor of Cloncurry in Co Kildare showed that there were: forty-three free tenants; 112 burgesses holding two ploughlands – that is about 600 acres – for 112 shillings a year; forty farmers renting anything from twenty acres to half an acre; 63 betaghs holding thirty four and a half acres between them; and 24 cottars paying between two pence and four pence a year for their little plots. Some lesser tenants paid rent in the form of free labour but at Cloncurry the manor depended on paid service:
The weeding of an acre costs one penny and the cost of mowing, tying and stooking in the field of an acre of wheat is 10 pence, and of an acre of oats is 8 pence, and the cost of carting and stacking in the haggard and the thatching of the stack is 3 pence per acre. And the cost of threshing a crannock of oats is 2 pence. And 5 crannocks of wheat and of oats can be winnowed for one penny…And each driver and carter gets for his wages 6 shillings and the sower gets the same as the bird-scarer.
Fragments from manorial account books for Grangegorman and Old Ross include incidental expenses such as fifteen pence for a vet – described as ‘a certain medical man’; threepence-halfpenny for sulphur and twenty-one pence for butter to heal the sore necks of oxen; and a penny-halfpenny a day to a man to make holes in four thousand shingles destined for the granary roof.
The inclusion in place names of the element ‘grange’ provides a clue that the newcomers placed a greater emphasis than before on the cultivation of corn. Certainly the Irish grew a great deal of corn but the Normans wanted to increase output for export – they knew that there was a good market for it particularly in the cloth-making areas of Flanders. In this, they were helped by a distinct improvement in the weather in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Wheat became a more popular crop. On the larger manors there were now eight oxen in a plough team, which was reckoned to be able to plough twenty-five acres in a season.
The lord’s personal farm, which supplied his household, retainers and visitors, was a compact estate known as the demesne. All the rest of the manor was cultivated in large, open fields, where tenants held strips in each to take their share of good and bad soil. One man in Rathcoole, Co Dublin, had twenty-six acres of arable land widely scattered about in no fewer than twenty strips. The open fields, by agreement, followed a three-course rotation of crops: winter corn, spring corn and fallow – in other words, a third of the land was left uncultivated in rotation to allow it to recover fertility. The main income of manors still depended on domestic stock, however. The most significant change was the growing emphasis on sheep to provide wool for sale to the Frescobaldi, the Bardi and the Ricardi, great Italian wool merchants from Lucca and Florence.
In the Lordship of Ireland the growth in profits and population had been spectacular during the thirteenth century. There was little indication that the ensuing century would be marked by a succession of disasters which came close to destroying it.
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