Irish Sheep

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” (2). Giraldus contradicts himself, however, for he mentions later that the Irish sewed their hoods from parti-colored strips and frequently dyed their breeches in bright colors (3). Wool takes dye well, far more easily than does linen, so white wool could be turned into many different shades of fabric. Given that a woman's legal rights include a share of the farm's woad crop (4), it seems likely that blue-dyed wool was relatively common among the ranks of the free and lordly Irish.

Every Irish farm seems to have been expected to have sheep; even the poorest level of landowner would have kept a small flock to provide clothing for his family. As mentioned above, a typical small farm was legally assumed to have ten sheep ewes (5). Wool processing was still a domestic art at this time, so fleeces were not so much a trade commodity as a home-grown necessity. Every group around the farm worked with the sheep: children tended the lambs, older children herded the flocks, men sheared and butchered them, and women milked them and turned their fleeces into clothing.

The sheep kept by the Irish were probably horned, and the horns were used like a sort of medieval plastic after the sheep was butchered. It is possible that the ewes did not have horns, but the males certainly did; some even had four-horns, perhaps having been selectively bred for that trait specifically to furnish more horn for making combs and other items (6).

Irish sheep were prolific. The ewes seem to have had twins on a routine basis, but one sheep ewe, mentioned in the Annals of Connacht, is said to have given birth to ten lambs in one litter in the year 1355 (7).  Male lambs were generally castrated and allowed to mature through the fall, when they were butchered. Meat, however, does not appear to have been the primary purpose of keeping sheep; ewe lambs were far more valuable, since they would provide fleece year after year along with milk and new lambs.

The other important purpose for sheep was their skill at grazing land without damaging it. Cattle have sharp hooves which, when combined with their immense weight, tend to cut deeply into soil where they graze. Thus cattle must be moved frequently, or they turn their pasture into a mud bog. Sheep, however, do far less damage where they walk and feed. Unlike horses, their grazing method cuts the grass blades above the soil, rather than uprooting the grass plant—so the grass would grow back quickly and the sod remained intact. Their small hooves aerate the soil without killing the sod, and their poop falls as small pellets that disperse quickly into the grass (unlike the large, moist piles left by cattle). Sheep, therefore, were the perfect livestock for maintaining the land around a farmstead and on causeways or along roads—and they seem to have been moved to those locations deliberately, as a method of lawn-maintenance. Using sheep this way provided aeration and fertilizer, and kept the grass conveniently short, and meant that the clan's farmsteads could remain in place for centuries without erosion.

Sources:

1) Kelly. Early Irish Farming. p. 77.

2) Giraldus Cambrensis. Forester, Thomas, trans. The Topography of Ireland. Medieval Latin Series, In Parenthesis Publications, Ontario, 2000. Original from 1196. p. 69

3) Id.

4) Binchy. Corpus iuris hibernici. Book ii, 379.4-12.

5) Binchy. Corpus iuris hibernici. Book iii, 1058.12.

6) Kelly. Early Irish Farming. p. 74.

7) Binchy. Corpus iuris hibernici. Book ii, 378.4.