So, what crops were grown, and farm animals kept, in the area around Poyntzpass and how did this change over the years?
Before the start of the 19th century, the main crops had been oats, potatoes, flax, and grass for grazing cattle, in proportions which varied over time (potatoes increased in importance and oats decreased) and with the quality of the land.
Joe Canning’s article[6] describes both Arthur Young’s visit to the Gosford estate in the late 1770s and Jonathan Binns’ visit to the Drumbanagher estate in 1836. Much had changed in the intervening sixty years.
Potatoes
Let’s start with our famous national tuber, first brought to Ireland by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1589, as described by The World Potato Congress(!)
“No other European nation has a more special relationship with the potato than Ireland. [They were] the first Europeans to accept it as a field crop in the seventeenth century, [and]…the first to embrace it as a staple food in the eighteenth. The potato emerged strongly in Ireland because it suited the soil, climate and living conditions remarkably well.
“What set Ireland apart from other European countries was the way the population took to the tuber – the potato was universally liked. Arthur Young…was impressed by the vast acreage of potato cultivation he encountered. The potato was seen as a safeguard against the tandem social plagues of unemployment, poverty, overpopulation and land hunger. By 1780, at a population level of four million, those afflictions had helped push the potato to dominance. In 1830, young adult males in Ireland were consuming 5 kgs per capita per day[1] – a matter of public record.”
But before the widespread adoption of the potato, most of the population got most of their calories from oats, which, even until recently, was colloquially referred to in the area as corn.
The names of the potato varieties grown in the years before the famine are unfamiliar to modern ears; a piece in the Newry Telegraph in 1839 by a Newry seedsman, Mr Buchanan, mentions Alexander Kinmonth as very successfully growing the varieties Prince de Rohan, Scotch Gray, and Lumper. Lumper was the most popular variety in Ireland at the time but was unfortunately also the variety most highly susceptible to the blight which struck just a few years later.
Around this time, a very active topic of debate in the local newspapers was the most effective and cheapest way to drain land. Some advocated trenches filled with stones, but others said these soon got blocked with soil and promoted the use of clay tiles to form the drain.
For a local history of the potato, see “Blues, Pinks And Golden Wonder” by Roy Copeland, BIF Vol 13, 2015
Flax For Linen
As the linen industry grew in importance in Ireland, the area around Banbridge and the Upper Bann became one of the most important areas of linen production, and in spring, fields in the area would have been a sea of blue flax flowers in the same way they are now yellow with rape. Every farm growing flax would have had access to a flax dam[2]. This was a pond or dammed stream where harvested flax was ‘retted’ – left to rot underwater for several weeks to separate the valuable fibres from the woody parts of the stem – before being dried in a field and then scutched in a local mill.
Most flax seed was imported rather than being harvested locally, mainly from the Baltic countries, Canada or The Netherlands.
In the late 1700s, as the population grew, and with fathers were desperate to pass on at least some land to each son. Farms became smaller and more fragmented, until many consisted of just a few acres. These tiny holdings were often not sufficient to support a family by farming alone, nor to allow the sort of mix of crops and animals later advocated by William Blacker and others.
A Farmer Or A Weaver?
We tend to think of these smallholders as farmers, but Coote (1804) gives us a very different perspective, one that was later strongly echoed by both William Greig and Dr MacDermott:
“…agriculture is but a secondary motive; It is merely pursued as the means of supply of provisions, rather than of trade from which a profit may be gained.
“Land is sought, for the more easily and comfortably carrying on manufacture; and notwithstanding the supposed superior profit on rearing flax, the raw material of their trade, I believe that the people would rather have nothing to do with agricultural pursuits, if the markets were more numerous, and constantly supplied with provisions.
“I know there are many wise men of opinion, that the management of the lands of this province should be entirely changed; that manufactures should be confined to towns; that the lands should be partitioned in large farms, and agriculture become a business in itself[3]; that it is a science, which requires undivided attention; and that manufactures would flourish better, if unconnected with the cases of husbandry; and they argue, that there are not wanting precedents sufficient to prove, how successfully manufactures are now carried on under such regulations.”
Davies (1837) made the same point over 30 years later:
“The great majority of small farmers, some years ago, were in the habit of connecting the weaving of linen with management of the little farms; and regarding their farms merely as places of accommodation, they look to the profits of their trade to enable them to pay their rents and all other demands.
At the time of which I speak 19-20th [95%] of the tradesmen were able to weave on their own account and all the profits on the webs wrought came to themselves for some years past 19-20th of them[4] weave to extended manufacturers who were not able to weave for themselves and the wages are so low that in general it requires close, constant and hard work, to clear from 7/-[5] to 8/- or 9/- in the week, and in doing so it requires a great part of another person’s time in the family to attend them; many of them fall considerably short of these sums if the yarn happen to be bad or if they not be exceedingly diligent.”
Even if a tenant was principally a conscientious and dedicated farmer, there were times of the year where agriculture would not occupy him fully, so having a hand loom was very common.
By the time Davies was writing, the Industrial Revolution was well under way in England, with the attendant ‘flight’ of workers from the countryside, and agriculture, to new jobs in rapidly expanding towns in the north of England, in huge mills driven by steam and powered by readily available cheap local coal.
But in Ulster, the weavers stayed on the farms. The attitude of the average small tenant farmer might be summarised as “The farmhouse gives shelter to me and my family, and somewhere to carry on my trade as a linen weaver. The profits from weaving let me pay my rent and taxes. We can grow food for our own consumption on our land, but my main job is to be a good weaver, not a good farmer.”
Lewis (1840) says of the area around Loughbrickland and Lough Shark.
“The manufacture of linen is carried on to a considerable extent, many persons being employed at their own houses in the weaving of damask, diapers, drills, shirtings, and sheetings, for the Banbridge manufacturers.”
Of course, for a landowner, such farms were very far from being as productive as they could be, were not being steadily improved, and did not yield the maximum possible rents, so it is little wonder that many landowners and agents, such as Col Close and William Blacker, made strenuous efforts to reverse the fragmentation and sub-letting of farms, and to educate their tenants in proper ‘scientific’ farming. However, William Greig’s report still recognised the importance of weaving as a secondary source of income, and so some of the designs for ‘ideal’ farmhouses included in his 1821 report include space for a loom.
[1] See “History of The Potato in Ireland”, World Potato Congress, Dublin 2022
[2] Flax dams were environmental disasters. The anaerobic conditions they created would have killed most aquatic life for a considerable distance downstream.
[3] This is the central proposition of Dr MacDermott’s ‘The Green Republic’.
[4] In other words, more than 95%
[5] 7/- is seven shillings or 35p