Urbanization and Commercialization

The themes of continuity and change, regionalism and social diversity, and the interconnectedness of places and processes of social change, which permeate the discussion of economy and society in medieval Ireland, also dominate the debate on urbanization and commercialization. The few Viking ports excepted, it was once assumed that the Anglo-Normans were responsible for the initial urbanization of Ireland. In marked contrast, a well-established case can now be sustained that not only were the Hiberno-Norse towns much more substantial than was previously imagined, but also that indigenous urbanization developed in the earlier medieval period around monastic and secular cores. The extent of Hiberno-Norse urbanization in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, particularly at Dublin, Waterford, Wexford and Limerick, has been corroborated by archaeological investigation. Hiberno-Norse Dublin was an organized, planned town with property plots, houses and defences, very much part of the wider Anglo-Norman world prior to the invasion. Moreover, excavation has demonstrated the striking continuity of house plots and property boundaries from the tenth to thirteenth centuries, the Anglo-Normans not making any major effort to develop, improve or enlarge the city for at least thirty years after it fell under their control.

The dating and meaning of indigenous urbanization is, however, much more obscure. There is a significant danger of ‘urbanization by assertion’, while claims that substantial towns existed around Irish monasteries as early as the seventh century should be treated with circumspection. Nevertheless, as early as c. 1000, several centuries before the Anglo-Norman invasion, the economic and political benefits of defended urban settlements were already apparent, while the Viking towns all fell under the suzerainty of Irish kings during the eleventh century. As the defended town accompanied the growth of centralized authority throughout medieval Europe, it is difficult to conceive that those self-same Irish leaders were not engaged in efforts to stimulate urban development around their principal seats of power. Often these were located next to monasteries, or at sites where the monastery now appears as the more readily identifiable artefact. Because of its causal implications the term ‘monastic town’, which occurs widely in the literature, is ambiguous and probably best avoided. Many extant ecclesiastical monuments of this period actually reflect the exercise of royal patronage rather than the centrality within early medieval Irish society of religious ceremonial centres, nor is there anything unusual in European medieval towns developing around monastic cores. In ways not yet fully understood, it seems probable that, following the example of the Hiberno-Norse towns, which were themselves influenced by the Anglo-Saxon burhs of England, Irish kings were increasingly involved in the development of an indigenous urbanization during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a process that occurred around both castle and monastic cores.

Despite the many difficulties of the evidence, it is apparent that the actual number of early medieval towns must have been very small. Further, there is nothing to suggest that the elaboration of a hierarchical urban network was anything other than an achievement of the Anglo-Normans, who, in addition to the Hiberno-Norse towns, adapted some settlements, including Kells, Kildare and Athlone, which were most probably examples of early medieval indigenous urbanization. But continuity was not inevitable, as other important early medieval sites attest. Glendalough, Clon-macnoise and Clonard, for example, largely disappear from the documentary record, apparently because they sank into decline soon after the invasion. It could be that they were poorly located with regard to the colonists’ scheme of settlement or, conversely, that they were the victims of deliberate neglect as the Anglo-Normans consciously consolidated their political control by undermining existing mechanisms and centres of power. It might also be inferred that these settlements possessed only the most limited urban economic and morphological structures if they could be so readily abandoned.

The medieval urbanization of Ireland was simply part of a much more extensive development of European towns during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The chartered borough was one of the ‘standard’ methods of economic development employed throughout medieval Europe. For example, many such settlements were established in Normandy, England and Wales by feudal lords from the eleventh century onwards, the pace of foundation accelerating rapidly after 1100. The lord granted a charter which gave tenants - or burgesses - the rights to a plot of land - the burgage - within a borough on which to build a house, and usually a small acreage outside the settlement with access, for example, to woodland (for building timber and firewood), peat bog and grazing. Theoretically at least, burgesses were also granted a range of economic privileges and monopolies. The most common package of borough rights in Anglo-Norman Ireland was that modelled on the charter of the small Normandy town of Breteuil-sur-Iton.

While the borough charter held the promise of urban life, much of this potential was never translated into reality. Those boroughs that did evolve into towns generally possessed salient political and economic advantages. Inevitably, the capital manors of the most important and powerful lords were the first Anglo-Norman settlements to be granted charters in the various Irish lordships. Dominated by motte or stone castles, their sites were chosen with regard to strategic factors such as control of territories and communications, and are thus often one of the most obvious explanations of continuity. That these settlements were likely to become the largest towns replicated the experience of medieval England, where an early arrival was the most significant contribution to eventual urban prosperity.

Such towns, however, were relatively few in number - as were great lords. Colonization of the lordships and even the manors retained by the major magnates was largely the responsibility of those whom Adrian Empey calls immediate lords of the soil. Thus the majority of medieval Irish boroughs were founded by Anglo-Norman fiefholders of comparatively minor significance and functioned as the marketplaces necessary to the mutual dependence of peasantry and aristocracy. Their market tolls, fines, rents and taxes were a source of profit for feudal lords, while the peasantry could convert surplus production into cash, an increasingly important process as labour services were commuted in favour of money rents. The custom of Breteuil was granted freely, however, and, despite their legal status, most boroughs were never more than agricultural settlements.

Approximately 330 medieval Irish boroughs have been identified (map 8.2). There may well have been more, as only a very few possess extant charters, the remainder being identified from stray references to burgages and burgesses. These settlements can best be classified by their roles in the feudal economy. No more than twenty-five can be categorized as major towns, but a further eighty settlements possessed sufficient evidence of urban criteria to be classified as small towns, operating as the principal market centres within which peasant exchange occurred. Almost 70 per cent of these developed around a castle core, a proportion very similar to that found in Normandy. The remaining chartered settlements can be classified as agricultural rural-boroughs. Although manorial extents record some specialization of labour - millers, bakers, brewers and the like - their burgess populations were largely agriculturalists. It seems likely that this wholesale creation of speculative boroughs provided one means of attracting tenants to the Irish manors, burgess status and the expectation

Of freedom from all but the most minimal of labour services acting as a lure to prospective peasant migrants.

In terms of morphology, most towns seem to have had a predominantly linear layout. The houses often had their gable ends to the street with burgages behind. As

Elsewhere in Europe, these long thin plots, generally held at a rent of 12d. per annum, were perhaps the diagnostic morphological features of the Irish medieval town. The marketplace, occasionally marked by a market cross, was either the main street of a linear town or sometimes a triangular extension at one end. A few town plans were more elaborate, the most common such form, as at Clonmel, Carrick-on-Suir or Drogheda, being an irregular chequer. Uniquely Kells developed on a concentric plan, presumably dictated by its pre-Anglo-Norman morphology. Around fifty medieval Irish towns were walled, the most intensive period of construction occurring between 1250 and 1320. Not all walls were of stone, a number being of suitably reinforced earth, while the larger towns had between four and six gates. The most extensive enclosed areas were at Drogheda and Kilkenny, which were both twin boroughs, while New Ross was the largest unitary walled town.

Little is known about the relationships between urbanization and the economic organization of the lordships. Within any one territory, the network of towns and boroughs presumably acted as the framework for marketing circuits of the type identified in medieval England. Here, markets were granted on different days in the various boroughs so that middlemen - who collected the tolls - and itinerant traders could travel around from place to place. Very limited evidence points to similar arrangements within individual lordships in Anglo-Norman Ireland. But nowhere can the precise hierarchical relationships of settlements be worked out. Again, there is very little information on the urban division of labour. From the evidence of manorial extents, it can be assumed that the populations of rural-boroughs were essentially agriculturalists, but even in the small market towns and larger mercantile centres the degree of non-agricultural employment is unclear. Presumably, most industry took the form of food processing. There must also have been craftsmen of various sorts in the towns, but rarely is any evidence found of them. The major towns were dominated socially and economically by a burgess class of artisans, traders and merchants, most probably organized into guilds.

Medieval Ireland’s external trade was largely conducted through the twenty-five major towns, a process that is unusually well recorded because of the survival of customs returns for the period between 1276 and 1333. The southeastern ports of New Ross and Waterford, which served the fertile and densely colonized valleys of the Nore, Barrow and Suir, dominated Ireland’s overseas trade with Britain and continental Europe, accounting for almost 50 per cent of the customs receipts paid during this period. Cork, Dublin and Drogheda were also significant ports, while the most important inland centre was Kilkenny, centre of one of the greatest of the private lordships. The major towns were either directly in the hands of the crown, or conversely, held by the most powerful baronial families for whom the towns were vital economic assets. Youghal, for example, provided over 60 per cent of the income of the estates of the lords of Inchiquin in the late thirteenth century.

Urban populations - and those of the rural-boroughs too - seem to have been primarily colonial. But that is not to say that the Gaelic-Irish were excluded, for people with Gaelic names were always present in towns. There must have been some form of segregation, however, because ‘Irishtowns’, presumably inhabited by people of Gaelic-Irish ancestry, survive in a number of medieval towns, including Ardee, Athlone, Clonmel, Drogheda, Dublin, Enniscorthy and New Ross, while those at Kilkenny and Limerick were both separately walled. Indeed, Irishtown at Kilkenny possessed its own borough constitution. Again, there may have been separate suburbs at Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, Cork and Limerick for the descendants of the Hiberno-Norse - the Ostmen.

Direct demographic evidence is rare and we are largely dependent on urban population estimates, which have been calculated from data on burgage rent. These assume the standard rent of 12d. per burgage and a household multiplier of five, a calculation that excludes the non-burgess household in a town and overlooks the evidence that ‘burgages’, particularly in smaller settlements, may have included agricultural land. Total burgage rents must therefore often have included the latter and thus cannot always be used to calculate burgess populations. Given these vagaries, estimates suggest that very few towns had populations in excess of 2,000, while most had fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. Although projections for Dublin range from

10,000 to 25,000, the next largest town seems to have been New Ross, which, based on evidence from burgage rents, may have had a population of between 2,500 and 3,000. There is, however, no demographic data at all for a number of important towns, including Limerick, Cork, Drogheda and Waterford. Again, we know little of the impact of the Black Death of 1348-50 on urban populations, although one contemporary account talks about the cities of Dublin and Drogheda being almost destroyed and ‘wasted of men’.

A further enigma in relation to medieval urbanization in Ireland concerns those parts of the island especially in the north and west, but also in the midlands, which lay beyond the area of Anglo-Norman colonization. It is difficult to conceive that the Gaelic leaders in these regions lacked contacts with the colonists, if only through war. There is, moreover, evidence of intermarriage, while many Anglo-Norman lords were assimilated to some extent into Gaelic society. Why then did Gaelic lords not adopt the concept of towns as a means of developing a territory when in eastern Europe, for example, Slavic princes followed the model of German settlers and became enthusiastic sponsors of towns? The problem is exacerbated by the absence of documentary evidence that might compare to the fiscal and legal records of crown administration in medieval Ireland, which provide much of the evidence of Anglo-Norman urbanization. The pastoral nature of the economy may have militated against urbanization, restricting its occurrence to a handful of ecclesiastical centres such as Armagh, Clogher and Clonfert. Another example, Rosscarbery, was described as a walled town with two gates and almost 200 houses in 1519. One interesting possibility concerns Killaloe, where the borough may have been incorporated prior to the Anglo-Norman settlement of the lower Shannon region. But the only other evidence of Gaelic lords founding chartered settlements, either immediately before or after the invasion, concerns a solitary and probably abortive attempt to establish a market. Nor, Sligo excepted, does there appear to be any record of an Anglo-Norman borough continuing to exist under a Gaelic secular lord during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In contrast, ample evidence survives to show that Gaelic lords were enthusiastic builders of castles, and these may have acted as nuclei for settlement agglomerations and exchange. Nevertheless, virtually nothing is known of the organization of marketing in Gaelic Ireland, any evidence being very late. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, for example, English merchants in the ancient market towns of Meath were complaining about Irish markets at Cavan, Longford and Granard, which suggests that these may have been a recent development. But in terms of the evidence, it is not until the sixteenth century that a ‘real town’ of Gaelic provenance grew up under the protection of the O’Reillys at Cavan.

Meanwhile, there seems to have been a substantial continuity of urbanization in the Anglo-Irish lordships. The fate of the several hundred rural-boroughs is obscure, not least because of gaping lacunae in the documentary record. Deserted medieval settlements can be identified in the landscape, but it is exceptionally difficult to date their abandonment. Some evidence suggests, however, that the principal period of desertion of medieval settlements did not occur until the seventeenth century. Few larger towns disappeared, and indeed there is ample evidence of urban wealth in the fifteenth century. Trade continued to flourish with England and Europe and between the various Irish lordships. Town walls were maintained, or even expanded, while urban tower houses and substantial church-building attest to the existence of wealthy urban elites. Thus the evidence of urbanization and commercialization again supports the conclusion that the political decline of the English in late medieval Ireland was not matched by a parallel downturn in the economy.