Introduction: nature is a language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2012
Summary
For an instance of theire malice to the Englishe, an English man did strongly inclose a peece of ground for meadowe, and hee pitched out from thence an exceeding nomber of stones, and when he came to mowe his grounds he found more stones then he tooke out (for the Irish never went that way, day or night) but threwe in stones from under their mantles.
The preceding passage, an apparently innocuous part of a letter from an English settler in Ulster, provides a telling account of the way in which landscape and land use served as a focus for cultural difference in Tudor Ireland. For the English, cultivated fields and enclosed grounds were the sine qua non of civilized society. In fact, much of the work that follows aims to demonstrate the various ways in which English officials sought to transform the disordered land of Ireland and the wildehirrishemen that inhabited it through the introduction of agriculture, trade, and the civil life associated with counties and walled towns.
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- The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland , pp. 1 - 21Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011