HOW THEY LIVED IN OLD IRELAND

Politically, Ireland was organized into a number of petty kingdoms or Tuatha, each of which was quite independent under its elected king.   Groups of Tuatha tended to combine, but the king who claimed overlordship had a title that was more honorary than real.

Not until the 10th century A.D. was there a king of all Ireland, as the Ard ri Eireann.  A division of the country into five groups of tuatha, known as the Five Fifths began about the beginning the Christian era. They were Ulster (Ulaid), Meath (Midhe), Leinster (Laigin), Munste (Muma), and Connaught (Connacht).

Surrounding a king was an aristocracy whose land and property were clearly defined by law and whose main wealth was in cattle. Greater landowners by ceili clients. These and other grades of society, carefully classified and described by legal writers of the Brehon law, tilled the soil and tended the cattle.  Individual families (the fine) were the real units of society and exercised, collectively, powers of ownership over their farms and territories.

At law the family did not merely act corporatively but was, by one of the oldest customs, held    responsible for the observance of the law by its family members, serfs and slaves.

There mere no urban centers and the economic basis of society was cattle rearing and agriculture.

The principal crops were wheat, barley, oats, flax and hay. (Potatoes came later, from America).

The land was tilled with plows drawn by oxen.  Sheep appear to have been bred principally for their wool and the only animal reared only for slaughter was the pig.

Fishing, hunting, fowling and trapping provided further food.  Transport of goods by land was by packhorse, wheeled vehicles appearing to have been few.   Sea transport was by currach, a wicker framed boat covered with hides.  The normal inland boat was the dugout.

The dwellings of the time were built on the post-and-wattle technique, and some were situated within protective sites called ring-forts. Excavations have shown that some of these may have existed even into the Bronze Age and that they remained a normal place of habitation down to medieval times.  Advantage was also taken of the rel­ative security of the islands in rivers or lakes as dwelling places; and artificial islands, called crannogs, were also extensively made.

The Irish Brehon Laws point to a large development of rural industry in the period in which they were first written down, shortly before the Norse invasions at the end of the 8th century.

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