Farming, Food and Artefact Production

Cattle
Earliest detailed accounts in 7th-8th century law texts
Similar to Kerry cattle
Often black, but there are references to red, flame-red and brown cattle.
‘Brindled’ cow
White-backed cattle (also found in Kerry)
Long hair in winter – shed in spring
Most cattle had horns (which could be cut to indicate ownership)
No reference to hay-making
Oxen used for traction
Bulls could be owned by more than one person
Kerry Cattle
Breed closest in size and temperament to early medieval cattle.
Some colour variation.
Mixed colour cattle known.
Cattle
Calf in Book of Durrow
Cattle
Cattle consume grasses and other herbs, but are also partial to the leaves of most tree species, with the elm a particular favourite.
During spring and summer, grazing can be found in many areas, including rough ground and woodlands, with an implicit need for vigilance against predation, accidental loss and theft.
Controlled breeding would require the separation of bulls and cows. Over winter, a major pre-occupation on farms seems to be the provision of grazing for cattle.
There are references to the deliberate retention of ungrazed grasslands to provide winter grazing, and, allowing cattle access to the stubble of cereal-crops which appear to be harvested high up the stalk
There is evidence that holly and ivy were employed as winter fodder.
Cattle
In the early medieval period in Ireland, the optimum time for cattle to breed is suggested as 3¼ years, due to poor winter feeding.
Access to cow’s milk is facilitated by controlling contact between calves and their mothers, a task often assigned to childern, while the mothers hind legs were probably immobilised during milking.
Controlled mating of cattle can ensure a supply of lactating cows throughout the year, even through the winter.
The selective slaughtering and neutering of males can also provide a source of oxen.
Historically, the perceived value of cattle is indexed against age, gender, fertility and docility.
Apart from beef and milk products, cattle are also a source of hides, marrow, blood, tallow for candles, bone and horn as craft materials and dung as a fertilizer.
Cattle: management
Grazing Regime:
Spring: Rough ground, woodlandsSummer: Rough ground, woodlandsAutumn: Cereal stubble, ungrazed grasslandsWinter: Ungrazed grasslands, holly, ivy
Controls Needed: Contact between calves and mothers; bulls and cows; neutering of young males for oxen. Predator threat is low, except for calves. Prior to over-wintering.

ProductsBeef; milk products; hides; marrow; blood; tallow for candles; bone; horn; dung.
Sheep
Sheep appear to have been mainly seen as lowland grazing livestock in early historical references in Ireland, possibly due to the threat of predation on more remote pasture.
It has been suggested that older slaughter ages for sheep reflect the manipulation of sheeps fleeces to produce wool from this date.
Sheep
Weaving materials have been uncovered at a number of sites of this period such as loom weights, spindle whorls and bone combs.
Spindle Whorls
Sheep
Lambs are typically born in March or April, with the majority of young males castrated and slaughtered in their first year, while ewes are expected to lamb by their third year.
It is likely that sheep were only sheared once a year, in mid-summer.
Sheep were also a potential source of meat, skins, horn, tallow and possibly milk.
Where data is available, it appears that up to a third of lambs, probably young males, were culled in their first year, while a small percentage survived to 3½ years and beyond.

Sheep: management
Grazing Regime:
Spring: LowlandsSummer: LowlandsAutumn: LowlandsWinter: Lowlands
Controls Needed: Threat from predators, particular when lambs are born. Mid-summer shearing. Prior to over-wintering.
Products: Meat; fleece; skins; horn; tallow; milk.
Soay Sheep
Pigs
Pigs are omnivorous and conveniently consume much of the households scraps, whether it is of animal or vegetable origin.
They also will eat some grasses and herbs, and have a tendency to dig up ground looking for roots.
Sources suggest that pigs were often fed on the acorn and hazelnut crop of September and October prior to selective culling, or as preparation for over-wintering.
Unlike sheep and cattle, pregnant sows often prepare a nest, even if enclosed in a sty, and produces litters of up to 9, although the runt often needs to be hand-reared if it is to survive.
Piglets are particularly dependent for the first weeks of their life.
During the weaning period, the sows are probably fed mainly on refuse from the habitation site so as to encourage them from straying too far from the site.
Wild boar males have a tendency to break in and mate with domesticated sows (e.g. see MAFF 1998). 
Pigs
Appear to have been herded from late summer and taken to forage in woodlands and other areas, presumably, at a remove from crops and under constant supervision, given their innate destructiveness, although they can be used to root out weeds and manure newly prepared ground prior to planting.
Pig fat is considerably more palatable than cattle or sheep fat, and it appears that pigs were primarily reared for food products, the evidence from faunal assemblage suggests slaughter ages between 2 and 3½ years.
Pigs
Peniarth 28, f.25v
Pigs: management
Grazing Regime:
Spring: Habitation refuse; grass; roots.Summer: Woodlands and areas away from crops; grass; roots.Autumn: Acorns; hazelnuts; grass; roots.Winter: Habitation refuse; grass; roots.
Controls Needed: Protection of sows nest during littering; supervision around crops. Prior to over-wintering.
Products: Meat; blood; fat.
Other domesticates
Hens
Geese
Ducks
Doves
Peacocks (?)
Bees
Dogs

Livestock management (summary).
Spring: Habitation site contains pigs; sheep in immediate vicinity; cattle grazed outside immediate vicinity
Summer:Habitation site has sheep in immediate vicinity; cattle and pigs grazed outside immediate vicinity, beyond cultivated soils. Cattle visited or returned daily for milking.
Autumn: Habitation site has sheep in immediate vicinity; cattle and pigs grazed outside immediate vicinity and on former cultivated soils and in woodlands. Cattle visited or returned daily for milking.
Winter: Habitation site contains pigs; sheep in immediate vicinity; cattle grazed just outside immediate vicinity.

Animals and Disease
U700/701 Famine/pestilence
U709 pestilence
U748 Deep snow: mortality of cattle
U760 Famine
U764 Great snowfall and famine. U769 famine and leprosy
U777-9 and AI 779 cattle disease also smallpox in 779
U786 scamach
CS805 pestilence
U806 pestilence
CS814 great distress and severe illnesses
CS825 pestilence/famine
U825 pestilence/famine
U826 plague warning given



Food production
Obviously, much of what is produced by farming is converted to food.
Few traces of actual foodstuff survive (animal bone, bog butter, charred seeds).
Most of the archaeological evidence is in the form of the structures used to process food stuffs, including kilns, mills and burnt mounds.
Souterrains appear to have functioned as part of the storage regime in some areas, whilst burying food in peat bogs was employed in some other areas.
Bog Butter
Some finds appear to be adipose/tallow, others are definitely dairy butter and date to early medieval period.
Used the cool temperature in the depths of a bog to preserve the butter for longer.
Souterrains
Newtownbalregan, County Louth
Souterrains
Souterrains are underground complexes of passages and chambers
They are usually built of stone but can also be tunnelled into rock or compact clay or gravel, a small number built of wood area also known.
Souterrains are sometimes found apparently independent of any enclosure and are also found in Early Christian ecclesiastical enclosures.
Places suitable for storage (constant cool temperature) and probably refuge (concealed).
Souterrains
Distribution probably reflects agricultural production of perishables requiring additional storage facilities prior to trade.
Souterrain complex
Donaghmore, Co. Louth
Smaller Souterrain
Newrath BigKellsCo. Meath
Dating
Earliest dates are from 7th or 8th century AD
Latest dates are from the 13th or 14th century AD (such as finds of medieval pottery from construction material).

Wooden example
Coolcran,Co. Fermanagh
Wooden souterrainoaks found that were dated to 822+/-9 AD
Dunisky, Co. CorkRock-cut souterrain
Crops
The parts of the landscape designated by the term faithche (basically lower ground) could contain tilled fields (gort).
Texts indicate that corn (ith), vegetables (lub) and orchards (aball) were known.
There was some hay (fer) but this may not have been fodder.
Also woad (glaisen) as a dye.
Achad and clúain refer to the fields used as pasture.
Corn-drying Kilns
The Irish climate is not suitable for drying cereals outdoors.
Long term storage is promoted by drying grains and cereals to prevent germination.
This is normally done in a drying-kiln, like this one from Derrysallagh 3 in Laois.

Drying kilns tend to have a hearth, flue and chamber.
Milling terms in early Irish texts
Milling terms in early Irish texts
Cup - hopper
Comla - sluice gate
Lind - dam
Oircel - chute
Bel in muillinn
- eye of the millstone
Lia - Upper millstone
Indeoin - Lower millstone
Fothach - wheelhouse
Sciatha - vanes
Milaire - pivot
Oirmtuid – gudgeon

Complex series of objects manufactured for mills.
Technology and Culture, Vol. 15, No. 2, Apr., 1974 The Horizontal Mills of Medieval Pistoia, pp. 194-225 John Muendel 
Can parallel all of these in medieval Italian examples
Evidence for wooden objects
Paddles from the wheel often survive in the waterlogged undercroft of the mill.
Millstones
Amongst the largest stone objects manufactured during the early medieval period (certainly the largest secular objects)
Evidence of quarrying and selection for particular types of stone.
Cooking
The basic battery de cuisine involves the use of moist heat (boiling, blanching etc), direct heat (grilling in the flames) and indirect heat (roasting, baking etc).
Bread appears to made on the stones around a normal hearth.
Cooking
Roasting Pit – many such features are actually hard to identify!
Cooking
John Derricks woodcut (16th century)
Cooking: Giraldus Cambrensis
Cooking
We know some of the basics from illustrations such as the Book of Leinster (Feasting Hall at Tara).
Cooking equipment
Bir, Locht, Dabach and a Cant.
Cooking
Cooking spits are illustrated in a number of sources.
Burnt Mound v Fulacht Fiadh?


Cooking Spit
Cooking: Burnt Mounds
Spread of heat shattered stone.
Employ shallow fresh water wells to get water
Cherrywood, Site 3, County Dublin
What can they tell us?
Where the stones survive from the last use, we can gain some idea of how they were used…
Pit and spread of heat-shattered stone.
Killoran Site 26, Co. Tipperary.
Shows typical layout – shattered stone spread around the pit or trough.
Dates for Ireland

Plot showing the volume of stone required to raise the temperature of 1 litre of water by 1° C, relative to the temperature to which the stone was heated.

Production was not confined to cooking meat.
Cooking meat
Food production
The earliest dated text, is from the medieval Latin Life of St. Munnu.
The text dates to before the fifteenth century but is likely to derive from an early medieval tradition.
In a discussion of the ascetic lifestyle followed by the saint his diet is described as including unsieved flour, mixed in a basin with water, chaff and all, and cooked with fire-heated stones.
Keating’s account
'However, from Bealtaine until Samhain, the Fian were obliged to depend solely on the products of their hunting and of the chase … And it was their custom to send their attendants about noon with whatever they had killed in the morning's hunt to an appointed hill …

… and to kindle raging fires thereon, and put into them a large number of emery stones: and to dig two pits in the yellow clay of the moorland, and put some meat on spits to roast before the fire and to bind another portion of it with súgain in dry bundles, and set it to boil in the larger of the two pits, and keep plying them with the stones that were in the fire … until they were cooked. And these fires were so large that their sites are today in Ireland burnt to blackness, and these are now called Fulacht Fian by the peasantry.

Cooking in hides
A further recorded description is of how the 'meaner sort of people' on the Hebrides cook beef either in the hide, or in a water-filled dug-out trough to which hot stones are added (Burt 1754: 279).

Seething the flesh in the hide
In another episode, related by French, Irish soldiers on the continental mainland were using heated stones to cook in a water-filled bag as late as 1544.
This account may explain the reference in Spensers A View of the State of Ireland (from 1596) where he states that the northern Irish, like the Scythians, used to ‘seethe the flesh in the hide’. Fynes Morysons claim from his Itinerary, published in 1617, that the Irish ‘…seeth in a hollow tree, lapped in a raw cowes hide, and so set over a fier…’ may be a further, garbled, account of the same practice.
Tallow and grease
A further account, 'The Romance of Mis and Dubh Ruis', was written down in 1769, but is likely to be earlier in date.
As well as cooking, the tale of Mis and Dubh Ruis, mentions the use, or collection, of the grease from, boiling meat by this technique.
This process is also found among the Nunamiut and along the north-west coast of Canada.
Butter and cures
Butter production has been described as another potential function of hot stone technology. A modern account of an attempt to make soft cheese employing this technique is given in Wood (2000: 92), who dropped some heated stones into a pot of milk mixed with sour cream. Once this boiled the curds and whey separated and the mixture was sieved through rushes.
In his account of the use of the lapis hecticus, or white hectic stone, Martin Martin describes how the natives of Skye use these stones as a remedy by heating them and dropping them into milk and water which they then drink. He claims these drinks were a remedy against dysentery, diarrhoea and consumption.
In an account of a miracle by St. Senan, he is said to have taken hot stones from a kiln and dropped them into a drink as a curative. The use of stones to heat milk is also recorded on Cruit Island in Donegal in the late nineteenth century.
Brewing
In an account of the life of St. Lughiadh of Clonfert, he is described as brewing beer by immersing a red-hot iron in it. In 1906, the burnt mound process is recorded in use to manufacture Steinbier at Kärnten in Sweden.