Crannogs by the Gaelic Elite Essay

Total Length: 2556 words ( 9 double-spaced pages)

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Examples of the mention of the use of the 'crannog' in Lough Laoghaire is stated by Brady and O'Conor to be referenced directly in the Annals of Ulster in 1436. These annals are "contemporary Gaelic records of the high profile events that occurred in Ireland, and such mention carries with it an automatic association of status and dramatic event." (Brady and O'Conor, nd)

III. O'SULLIVAN (1998)

Aidan O'Sullivan writes in the work entitled: "The Archaeology of Lake Settlement in Ireland" (1998) that in the Late Middle Ages...the Gaelic Irish experienced a revival in military power, giving rise to what is commonly known as the 'Gaelic Resurgence'" which was a time when raids increased on the English settlements which were richer and there was a "state of endemic warfare across the country." (O'Sullivan, 1998) Cultural and military renewal among the Gaelic Irish were drivers of the 'Resurgence' as well as the "continued Gaelicization of the Anglo-Norman Lords (the Gaill) and a discernible economic decline in both the Gaelic Irish economic landscape and in the English settlements of the Pale and elsewhere." (O'Sullivan, 1998) the landscape in Ireland was structured primarily around a "dispersed settlement pattern...prior to the coming of the Anglo-Normans..." (O'Sullivan, 1998)

O'Sullivan writes that the countryside while "intensively managed with farmsteads, field systems and routways..." The people in this area lived in "ringforts and cashels, crannogs, royal sites, monastic or church enclosures, and other types of dispersed settlement." (O'Sullivan, 1998) Towns were located at ports and some "monastic sites.
..may have served as towns."(O'Sullivan, 1998) the manors and granges of Anglo-Normans were important factors in the settled landscape. The manorial farms which were "centered around a manor house and a church" were inhabited by English peasant farmers. It is believed that the Anglo-Norman farms were most likely "worked by Irish tenants, who lived away from the manor house and the church, and therefore nucleated settlements may have been scarcer there." (O'Sullivan, 1998) it is likely therefore that the norm on the borders of the Anglo-Norman territory were dispersed settlements...with farmsteads scattered through the landscape such as mottes and ringwork castles." (O'Sullivan, 1998)

There is still much to be understood about the nature of Gaelic Irish settlements during the medieval and late medieval times however, it is apparent that both ringforts and crannogs were used as a site for those in the upper classes of that society with the towerhouses used a residences by the Gaelic Irish societies upper classes beginning in the "...fifteenth century onwards." (O'Sullivan, 1998) it is stated that the Gaelic Irish of west Ulster were "by the late medieval period...moving continuously through the countryside with their cattle herds and cruchs, in a nomadic settlement system..." And "riverine water-meadows and lakeshore grasslands were seen as valuable, self-renewing resources by farmers." (O'Sullivan, 1998)

O'Sullivan states that a "range of archeological and historical evidence for lake settlement in the medieval period and the late medieval period." (O'Sullivan, 1998).....

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