Making of Modern Ireland 1603-1923 (eBook)

J.C. Beckett (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2011 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
9780571280896 (ISBN)

Infos

'Technically this book is a masterly achievement: the collection, sorting, selecting and balancing of material has meant an immense amount of hard and highly skilful work. The presentation is not only learned but cool, objective, unimpassioned and yet almost always alive and compassionate as well . . . As a reference book alone it is immensely valuable . . . As an example of a humane, scholarly, expert history, Professor Beckett's book will be difficult to surpass.' D. B. Quinn, Belfast Telegraph '[He] has brilliantly succeeded. The book is admirably constructed and written with clarity and economy which carry the narrative unflaggingly through to the end . . . This excellent book supersedes all previous histories of modern Ireland.' F. S. L. Lyons, New Statesman

Professor J. C. Beckett was born and educated in Belfast where he became a lecturer in Modern History at Queen's University; and in 1958 Professor of Irish History there. After his retirement from the chair in 1975 Professor Beckett spent 1976 as Cummings Lecturer at McGill University, Montreal and was visiting Professor at the Univeristy of Tulane, New Orleans in 1977. In 1980 he was awarded an honorary D. Litt. by Queen's University, Belfast. Professor Beckett died in 1996.

Textauszug

II

Ireland in the Early Seventeenth Century

(1)

That it may please her excellent majesty to conceive of this her kingdom of Ireland’, wrote Mountjoy in 1601, ‘that it is one of the goodliest provinces of the world, being in itself either in quantity or quality little inferior to her realm of England … abounding with all the sustenance of life, as corn, cattle, fish and fowl’. But he was speaking of what might be, rather than of what actually was; and Ireland in 1603, after nine years of warfare, bore little resemblance to this glowing picture. Whole counties had been devastated; cattle slaughtered; crops burnt; churches and castles laid in ruin. And war had scarcely ended when the country was swept by plague. About Michaelmas 1603 it appeared in Dublin, where it brought administrative and judicial business almost to a stand-still; for councillors and judges were unwilling to live, or even to meet, in the city. A year later it drove the president of Munster from Cork to Mallow; and another year was to pass before it had slackened sufficiently for things to return to normal. The country generally was in a desperate condition. Ulster was said to be a very desert or wilderness; for sixty miles westward from Cork the country was almost uninhabited, and lands formerly cultivated had been allowed to fall out of tillage for ten or twelve years at a stretch; in Roscommon the scarcity of labourers had forced wages up to an almost prohibitive level; in the ‘waste and desert places’ of Munster ‘those pestiferous wild beasts the wolves’ showed a frightening increase, and in seventeenth-century Ireland the wolf was a kind of barometer of human population. What that population was at the opening of the century we have no means of assessing. In 1672 Sir William Petty put it at 1, 100,000; but there had been a large influx of English and Scottish settlers during the interval, and in 1603 it cannot greatly have exceeded half that figure.

But though Ireland as a whole suffered from depopulation and consequent shortage of labour, communications were so bad and intercourse between one part of the country and another so scanty, that some areas suffered from over-population and unemployment. In the early years of James’s reign large numbers of Irish paupers, with their wives and children, drifted over to England, where they were complained of both as a charge on the country and as a source of infection. Some even got as far afield as France, where the government made similar complaints, and ordered them to be shipped home again.

The establishment of peace in 1603 soon brought a measure of economic recovery, for the simplicity of the Irish economy made it resilient. There were no centres of manufacturing industry; the bulk of the population depended directly on the land; and once the depredations of rival armies had ended it was not long before wealth began to increase. In Ulster, barely touched so far by the process of Anglicization, this wealth consisted almost wholly in herds of cattle, which were driven from one place to another as pasture became exhausted, a practice known as ‘creaghting’; there was little use of money, rents were paid in kind, and internal trade hardly existed. In those parts of Leinster, Munster and Connaught that had long been under English influence the agricultural system was more settled, though still backward; for example, the primitive practice of ‘ploughing by the tail’ was still common, and, indeed, survived into the eighteenth century. Fanning was generally carried on for subsistence rather than for the market, and internal trade, though more considerable than in Ulster, was of small extent. But Irish agriculture, underdeveloped though it was, produced an exportable surplus; and this, with a few other commodities, formed the basis of a foreign trade, limited and fluctuating, but by no means unimportant.

A barrier to commercial development, though one not peculiar to Ireland, was the wretched state of the currency. A debased silver coinage had been issued at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, and this ‘base’ or ‘mixed’ money was so unpopular that the merchants either refused it altogether, or only accepted it at far below its face value. To remedy this state of affairs James authorized (August 1603) the minting of new silver coins for Ireland, and the ‘calling down’ of the Elizabethan coinage to one-third of its face value. This brought some improvement; but even the new Irish currency was inferior to the English—the Irish (or ‘Harp’) shilling was worth only ninepence in English money. There were thus three standards of coinage: English coins, which were regularly current in Ireland, and the Irish coins of Elizabeth and of James. But though this state of Affairs produced uncertainty and confusion, it was probably a less serious hindrance to trade than the general shortage of currency, which made the accumulation of capital very difficult and forced up the rate of interest on credit transactions to thirty, or even forty, per cent. Proposals for solving these difficulties, either by establishing a mint in Ireland, or by putting the Irish coinage on the same basis as the English, came to nothing; and the economic development of Ireland long continued to be hampered by an inadequate and inefficient currency system.

One serious hindrance to overseas trade under which Ireland at this time laboured was the prevalence of piracy on the southern and south-western coasts. In summer, when the royal galleys of France and Spain patrolled the seas further south, the pirates took refuge in the long inlets of Munster. They would arrive in regular fleets often or twelve sail apiece, each under its own admiral; and neither merchant nor fisherman was safe from their depredations. The government, with no forces available to deal with such powerful combinations, was obliged to negotiate, offering pardon on easy terms, in the hope of setting one pirate leader against another. Such intrigues produced no more than temporary relief; and sometimes they led to trouble with the French, the Spanish or the Dutch, who were all menaced by the virtual freedom of the Irish coast that the pirates enjoyed. In 1611 the Dutch, tired of waiting for the English government to take action, fitted out a fleet of their own, and scattered the pirates for the time being. But it was not until the 1630s, when Ireland was under the firm hand of Wentworth, that a sustained, and largely successful, effort was made to stamp out piracy in the Irish seas.

(2)

Manufactures contributed little to Ireland’s trade. An Elizabethan statute had restricted the free export of certain commodities, including wool, flax, and yarn, partly to encourage industry, but mainly to increase royal revenue. Licences for the export of the prohibited commodities were granted regularly to the ports, and frequently to individuals; and even apart from this draining away of raw materials Ireland did not possess the resources necessary to develop textile manufactures on a large scale. Some very narrow linen cloth was woven for home use, but linen does not figure at all among the exports of the period except in the form of yarn. The only woollen cloths woven in Ireland were coarse friezes and ruggs’, the export of which was not very considerable. In 1617 an attempt to establish a woollen manufacture at Bandon, where raw wool was readily available, and where there were many English settlers familiar with the technical processes, broke down for lack of capital.

The great bulk of Irish exports was made up of agricultural commodities, sheep-skins, wool, cattle, and cattle products—hides, tallow, and beef. There was some export of grain, but the quantity varied considerably from year to year; in 1608, for example, the export had to be prohibited altogether, in order to ensure an adequate supply of bread for the army. Apart from this trade in agricultural produce, there was a long-established export trade in fish; herrings were the most important item, but Derry was already known for its salmon, and Barnaby Rich thought the eel-fishery on the river Bann the best in Europe. The export of pipe-staves,1 begun towards the end of the Tudor period, was to increase very rapidly in the early seventeenth century. The chief markets for these Irish exports were England, France, and Spain, which sent in return fine cloths and hardware, salt and wine, and various other luxury and semi-luxury goods.

(3)

One feature of the economic revival of the early seventeenth century was the rapid exploitation of the woodlands. During the Tudor period the destruction of the woods had already begun, though mainly for military reasons: they blocked the passage of the royal armies, and afforded secure fastnesses into which the more lightly-equipped Irish troops could easily retreat. It was therefore a constant policy of the government to open up passes; and during the later Elizabethan wars this was extended to a general clearance of large areas. Fynes Moryson, who travelled extensively in Ireland at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, declared that he had ‘been deceived in the common fame that all Ireland is woody’, for in the course of a journey from Armagh to Kinsale he found, except in Offaly, no woods at all, beyond ‘some low shrubby places which they call glens’. But Moryson’s description cannot be applied to the whole country. At the beginning of the seventeenth century there were still extensive woodlands in Munster; the great wood of Glenconkeyne in Ulster was reckoned by Sir John Davies to be as big as the New Forest in...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 3.11.2011
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Schlagworte: Faber Finds • Identity
• ISBN-13: 9780571280896 / 9780571280896