New settlements, industry and forms of land management radically alter the cultural character of the landscape and mark the advent of early capitalism. The response of the Gaelic-Irish to this change was varied. Some branches engaged in resistance while others interacted with the colonizers in socio-economic and political terms. The varying reactions to this transformation can be seen through architectural and landscape change."--Jacket.
In the late sixteenth century, the English started expanding westward, establishing control over parts of neighboring Ireland as well as exploring and later colonizing distant North America. Audrey Horning deftly examines the relationship between British colonization efforts in both locales, depicting their close interconnection as fields for colonial experimentation. Focusing on the Ulster Plantation in the north of Ireland and the Jamestown settlement in the Chesapeake, she challenges the notion that Ireland merely served as a testing ground for British expansion into North America. Horning instead analyzes the people, financial networks, and information that circulated through and connected English plantations on either side of the Atlantic. In addition, Horning explores English colonialism from the perspective of the Gaelic Irish and Algonquian societies and traces the political and material impact of contact. The focus on the material culture of both locales yields a textured specificity to the complex relationships between natives and newcomers while exposing the lack of a determining vision or organization in early English colonial projects.
A definitive history of the illustrious O'Sullivan clan, including new information concerning the true meaning of the name. The O'Sullivan tartan and the O'Sullivan battle flag are introduced and a detailed account of the O'Sullivan MacCragh sept of Dunderry Castle is provided.
This volume celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Society for Medieval Archaeology (established in 1957), presenting reflections on the history, development and future prospects of the discipline. The papers are drawn from a series of conferences and workshops that took place in 2007-08, in addition to a number of contributions that were commissioned especially for the volume. They range from personal commentaries on the history of the Society and the growth of the subject (see papers by David Wilson and Rosemary Cramp), to historiographical, regional and thematic overviews of major trends in the evolution and current practice of medieval archaeology. All the publications are fully refereed with the aim of publishing at the highest academic level reports on sites of national and international importance, and of encouraging the widest debate. The series’ objectives are to cover the broadest chronological and geographical range and to assemble a series of volumes which reflect the changing intellectual and technical scope of the discipline.
This book examines the environmental, political, and economic history of Ireland's marine fisheries from 1400 to 1600. It combines a wide range of historical sources with innovative digital research methods to provide a comprehensive and systematic overview. Government letters and court documents highlight the diverse range of fishing fleets from across Europe that visited Irish waters in the early sixteenth century, bringing wealth and cultural influence to the native Irish, who developed complex systems to protect and tax the visitors. Furthermore, trade records illustrate that fish was Ireland's premier export in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. However, a range of factors led to the industry's collapse by the end of the sixteenth century: the Tudor conquest which disrupted fishing operations and fundamentally altered who controlled fishing resources; the destabilization of Irish waters resulting from the terrestrial conflict, which allowed pirates to thrive; an influx of cheap cod from the newly exploited fisheries in Newfoundland which changed consumption patterns in Ireland and across Europe; and shifting climatic conditions and decades of over-exploitation which meant fewer fish and poorer catches. Overall, the book reveals that fisheries form a vital part of the broader environmental, political, and economic history of Ireland.
Gaelic literati were an elite and influential group in the social hierarchy of Irish lordships between c. 1300 and 1600. From their estates, they served Gaelic and Old English ruling families in the arts of history, law, medicine, and poetry. They farmed, kept guest-houses, conducted schools, and maintained networks of learning. In other capacities, they were involved in political assemblies and memorializing dynastic histories in landscape. This book presents a framework for identifying and interpreting the settings and built heritages of their estates in lordship borderscapes. It shows that a more textured definition of what this learned class represented can be achieved through the material record of the buildings and monuments they used, and where their lands were positioned in the political map. Where literati lived and worked are conceived as expressions of their intellectual and political cultures. Mediated by case studies of the landscapes of their estates, dwellings, and schools, the methodology is predominantly field based, using archaeological investigation and topographic and spatial analyses, and drawing on historical and literary texts, place-names and lore in referencing named people to places. More widely, the study contributes a landscape perspective to the growing body of work on autochthonous intellectual culture and the exercise of power by ruling families in late medieval and early modern northern European societies.
An Archaeology of the British Atlantic World, 1600–1700 is the first book to apply the methods of modern-world archaeology to the study of the seventeenth-century English colonial world. Charles E. Orser, Jr explores a range of material evidence of daily life collected from archaeological excavations throughout the Atlantic region, including England, Ireland, western Africa, Native North America, and the eastern United States. He considers the archaeological record together with primary texts by contemporary writers. Giving particular attention to housing, fortifications, delftware, and stoneware, Orser offers new interpretations for each type of artefact. His study demonstrates how the archaeological record expands our understanding of the Atlantic world at a critical moment of its expansion, as well as to the development of the modern, Western world.
