OPERATOR

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Irish society can be described as traditional. It was a society that was only partially oriented towards a market for any goods which it was capable of producing. It was a predominantly rural society in so far as most people lived in the countryside. In 1750 Irish farming was overwhelmingly pastoral, and produced butter, pork, meat and hides with a certain amount of oats to feed the native population... By 1800 a relatively new crop, the potato, had expanded to become a dominant product, while the acreage devoted to wheat, oats and barley also increased enormously. In the west of Ireland much land was held in a quasi-communal manner known as rundale where each farmer had strips of land in a large plot near his house where crops were planted and the remaining land was used to graze cattle communally.3 This national situation was also mirrored in the parish of Aughrim in the mid eighteenth century. A detailed picture of the..