User:Jnestorius/Medieval boroughs in Ireland

About 300 ancient boroughs are recorded as having existed in Ireland in the centuries after the Norman invasion of Ireland. Most were founded by Normans, or at least had charters from the English Lord of Ireland or one of his magnates. However, some Hiberno-Norse settlements, such as Dublin, and Celtic Christian monastic sites, such as Killaloe, may have had borough status before or without Norman involvement. Some "rural boroughs" were agricultural rather than urban in character; others declined after an initial period of growth. Many were abandoned in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as English control was largely confined to the Pale around Dublin and a few other coastal regions; the location of some boroughs named in ancient records is uncertain. Of the boroughs represented in the Irish House of Commons in the eighteenth century, some were ancient boroughs (whether of continuous existence or refounded after the Tudor Reconquest of Ireland) while others were established by the Tudors or Stuarts during the Plantations of Ireland.

Context
Otway-Ruthven:
 * Hand in hand with the erection of castles went the settlement of an immigrant farming population, recruited by methods at which we can only guess, but which are vividly suggested by the existence at a number of places which can never have had any real urban character of the rudiments of an urban organization: land held in burgage tenure and a hundred court. We know of more than twenty such places, scattered over the country from Donoughmore in Imail to the New Town of Leys (? near Stradbally, bar. Stradbally) and from Cloncurry to Dunmanogue, and it is reasonable to suppose that there were many more of which no evidence has survived. They can hardly represent anything but the use of the favoured position represented by burgage tenure to attract the small settler." Certainly such settlers came: in the few cases where detailed extents have survived we find that the small free tenants and farmers bear English and Welsh names, though there are also Irishmen among them.

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