Slios Bruguaine

Pigs  Pigs had special prominence in Irish culinary preferences. In some cases, pork seems to have been preferred even over beef (1) , and pigs fattened on acorns and milk were considered the very highest quality. Apart from meat, pigs also provided ivory tusks, bristles, thick leather and dense, strong bones, excellent for carving and tool making. Laws pertaining to pigs and pork in Ireland ranged from guesting laws, requiring specific allotments to the table of hospitality, and fosterage laws specifying amounts of meat for foster children, to damage laws itemizing the fines caused by escaped pigs, or exemptions from liability for the farmer if someone was stupid enough to climb into a sow's nest when she had piglets. Pigs, it seems, were ubiquitous and sometimes dangerous—although there are enough references to pet pigs to demonstrate that raising runts by hand-feeding them milk was common practice, and that the resultant pigs were friendly and followed people around (2) ....

Goats in Medieval Ireland Goats were common in Early Medieval Ireland, but not as prized or important to the Irish as sheep were (1) .  Their highest purpose was for dairy, and their milk was valued higher than that of sheep (2) , probably because of their much greater capacity for milk production. Goat wethers may have been used to pull small loads or carts, and pack goats would likely have been useful in more mountainous terrain, but the majority of male kids were probably butchered every fall. Female goats were the key to dairy production, and a single buck could service many goat does; intact male goats have a distinct, unpleasant odor that prevents them from being popular animals to keep around the farmstead. The same odor often flavors buck meat, making it very unlikely that intact males were raised for food—wethering, or neutering, is an easy task with both sheep and goats. Although the goats were less important to the Irish, their bones and horns appear at many exca...

Sheep in Medieval Ireland The Early Medieval Irish prized sheep almost as much as cattle, though for very different reasons. Cattle were valued for meat and milk and dung; sheep, however, were prized first and foremost for their wool. The fleece of sheep provided fiber for the majority of Irish clothing, especially for working clothes and the garments of lower-status individuals. Wool was the cheapest and most readily available fiber for making textiles, so everyone who had any clothing at all had wool; it could, however, be of fine quality and used for rich garments, and sheep with particularly fine fleeces were more valuable as a result. White fleece, in particular, was considered more desirable than other shades (1) . In the late 1100's, when Giraldus Cambrensis escorted Prince John on a tour of the Norman-English controlled territories, he described Irish clothing as “barbarous” because everything is made from black wool, “that being the colour of the sheep in this country” ...

Horses in Ireland Book of Kells f. 89r In Ireland, the wild horse of prehistoric times went extinct during the most recent period of glaciation (1)  (which also killed several other large fauna species in Ireland, such as the elk and the mammoth). This means that there were no horses in Ireland during the Neolithic period, and that the horses brought to Ireland in the Bronze Age were already domesticated by the humans who transported them. The first evidence of the presence of these domesticated horses comes from Newgrange, about 4,400 years ago (2) . This date might suggest that the horse arrived in Ireland with the same culture that introduced bronze metal-working, Celtic language and the new genetic profile that eventually came to be the ancestors of the native Irish today. Book of Kells f.255v These imported horses were small, around 10 or 11 hands high (3) , but the Irish bred them over the next two millennia to be slightly bigger, so that the hors...

The Legal Existence of Irish Farmers  Early Medieval Ireland existed primarily as a complex society of rural, clan-based agricultural communities spread widely across the landscape. Farming of cereal and vegetable crops was important, but livestock defined the prosperity of a community; cattle, in particular, formed the basis for Irish economic values and transactions. Understanding Irish society requires a thorough grasp of the dynamic interactions between livestock, the people and the land. Within the social hierarchy of codified status in Ireland, farmers played an important role. They had well-defined legal rights and protocols, in accordance to their level of wealth, land ownership (or tenancy) and what type of livestock they owned. In Críth Gablach (1) , a legal tract defining distinctions of status, different categories of farmer and landowner were described and valued, in cumals. A cumal was usually equal to the worth of three healthy milch cows (2) , but measurement...