Clare Past Forum

I don’t know to what extent the rundale system of farming was practised in Co. Clare - a group of houses on a map does not always signify rundale. But I was surprised to find that in some parts of the west of Ireland rundale was practised right up to the beginning of the 20th century. In the Great Blasket Island, for instance, the land that most of people farmed was held in common until about 1910 - see last paragraph in this piece: https://www.blasket.ie/an-baile/. Then officials from the Congested Districts Board visited the island and formed separate farms. That process was called “striping”. One person who was pleased with the result was Tomás Ó Criomhthain; in his book, An tOileánach (1929), he says:
"Dhein an Bord maisúlacht a chor orainn sa tslí is gur féidir linn smut a chur i gconaí gach uair is maith linn. Ní raibh an scéal mar sin againn roimhe sin; mura mbeadh an chomharsa chun cor le hais leat beadh ort stad; ní fhéadfa aon chosaint a dhéanamh mar bhí faltas gach duine ró bheag." (caibidil 24).
Robin Flower’s translation, The Islandman, (1937), gives it as:
"The Board improved our holdings so that every man knows his own plot and has it fenced so that he can do his sowing in a part of it whenever he likes. It wasn’t so with us before: unless your neighbour was ready to sow with you, you had to stop, for you couldn’t fence your plot; every man’s allotment for sowing was too small."

I would like to hear of any late 19th century or early 20th century examples of rundale in Co. Clare.

Sheila

In 1844 the Parish Priest of Meelick/Parteen, Father Maurice Fitzbibbon, gave this evidence to a government commission of enquiry
into agrarian conditions, sitting in Limerick

Are there farms held in common or in joint tenancy.
There are some on the outside you see here to the north of the city
What is the condition of the people, generally speaking. holding those farms ?
—They are small farmers of ten or twelve acres of land, and hold in common, what they call " partners," which is a very bad system. They very often do not agree, and it lays the foundation for disputes; they encroach upon each other. They are only imaginary boundaries and the cattle cross from one to the other. {House of Commons Papers, 1845, 616]

Thank you for that example, Matthew.

I’ve read a few pages of an article*, by Eoin Flaherty. It is too scholarly and difficult for me, but I have noted a couple of bits.
* Flaherty, E. (2015) ‘Rundale and 19th Century Irish Settlement: System, Space and Genealogy’. Irish Geography, 48(2), 3-38, DOI:
10.2014/igj.v48i2.623: https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/ ... undale.pdf
Flaherty says the word “Rundale” was used by agricultural commentators, and not by the native farmers. It seems it is difficult to define Rundale exactly - researchers have differed quite a lot. Flaherty says that problems of definition were apparent at the time of Arthur Young’s tour of Ireland: “ Arthur Young remarked, on his tour through Mayo in 1776: ‘Farms are generally let in partnership, but the term Rundale not known’ (1892, p. 259)”.

What fascinates many about Rundale is the scarcity of historical record. Griffith’s Valuation shows land held by several tenants bracketed together, but it is not clear whether the land was held in common, or whether there were divisions that were known to the tenants themselves. In note 4 on pages 11, 12, Flaherty says, “Copies of the instructions issued by the late Sir Richard Griffith in the year 1853… H.L. (144) 1882. Paragraphs 30 and 32 of the instructions to valuators and surveyors indicate that each occupier of a rundale settlement was to be enumerated separately. However, documents from Griffith’s valuation of 1852 for the Barony of Aran indicate that this was not always possible; the townland of Inisheer, comprising 84 individual occupiers, was here enumerated as a single joint unit comprising 1,400 acres, under immediate lease from Peter and Henrietta Barfoot. Such difficulties lend further weight to the possibility of under-enumeration of rundale, owing to potential inconsistencies in the manner in which rundale settlements were recorded. Unfortunately, more precise investigation of the organisation of production at settlement level – an examination of rent rolls and leases remains patchy, and as McCabe has indicated above, may not in itself indicate the presence of communal cultivation, merely a residual formality of payment by townland or in bulk. See Reilly(2003) for further notes and examples of rundale enumeration in Griffiths valuation (according to Reilly, Griffith’s field staff held to the convention of bracketing joint tenants in their final returns –a practice Reilly accepts as indicative of rundale. Unfortunately, it is difficult to surmise from the forms alone whether a settlement reporting such joint occupation or bulk payment was likely to exhibit classical ‘diagnostic criteria’ of rundale such as communal regulation by council, or periodic redistribution)".

Flaherty explains the demise of the Rundale system of farming: " In the post-famine era, a succession of landlord and state-endorsed redistribution schemes served to re-establish former occupants of these ‘congested districts’ as discrete private proprietors, albeit with considerable variation according to local estate management regimes (Bell, 2007; Breathnach, 2005). Contradictions internal to the system also hastened its demise, such as the accumulation of private capital which in turn undermined the capacity of rundale to reproduce itself as a communal entity (Slater and Flaherty, 2009). Furthermore, the system was prone to interpersonal conflicts concerning boundary demarcation which often ended in troublesome litigation (McCabe, 1991".

That mention of litigation makes me think that Petty Session records may contain references to communal land-holding. Petty Session records** are available on Findmypast and Ancestry.com, but I’m not a subscriber. And, anyway, trawling through those records would take a lifetime.
** Petty Sessions, National Archives: https://nationalarchives.ie/collections ... -pre-1922/.

I don’t know if there is any record of how the Rundale system was treated under the Gregory clause***. Indeed I don’t know anything about the implementation of that clause; was it the landlord who decided when the clause should be applied? I doubt there was a form to fill at the door of Poor House, or at the soup kitchen! So how did the landlord, or official, or anyone, know how to convert a farm into statute acres, which, previously, had been reckoned in terms of collops (a collop was the grazing of a cow and varied according to the quality of the land)?
*** Gregory Clause: https://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading- ... xt=Gregory.

Wherever the records are, they are not in the newspapers of the time (as far as I've noted). After the Great Famine, there seems to have been very little complaint about how the extra land that became available was allocated. Yet we know that the Rundale system continued in parts of Ireland. I am interested in whether it continued in any part of Co. Clare.

Sheila