For 300 years the English government in Ireland tried to make it illegal for an Irish family to spend the summer with its cows.
The practice was called booleying. Every May the household left the winter village and walked the herd up into the hills, to a cluster of huts on the summer pasture, and lived there until October. Grandparents, children, the lot. The men came and went. The women ran the booley, and the booley ran on milk: fresh, soured, curdled, buttered, and eaten as the day's meals. The grass was free because it was up a mountain, and a family that owned 8 cows and a mountain wanted for nothing until the frost.
The English could not stand it. A people that walked away every summer could not be counted, tithed or made to plough. The Statute of Kilkenny, 1366, forbade the Irish to booley their cattle on any land held by the English, and licensed the English to seize the herd if they did. By 1612 the King's attorney general in Dublin could report that it had been made penal for an Englishman even to allow it.
Edmund Spenser, who had been handed 3,000 acres of confiscated Cork, wrote a whole pamphlet on what was wrong with Ireland, and this was near the top of it. Living out with the herd, he said, taught the Irish to be wild and to feed themselves without a master.
That was the objection, in his own words. Booleying was outlawed because it worked.
The remedy, over the next century, was to take the hills, fence the grass, put the family on a rented acre in the valley, and hand it a potato.
The last booleys in Ireland were still walked up the hills of Achill in the 1940s, by people who had been told for 600 years that their summers were a crime.
My understanding is that booleying did continue well into the 1800s, but it was only the younger family members (from the age of 15 or so) who took the cattle up to the booley hut. As a result there were many parties and lives changed up the hills in booley parties. It would have been a long lonely summer for the young without this social aspect. There are many remains of booley huts up the hills of Ireland, but since many tend to have been used until recent times, it is a grey area whether they are a protected structure or not. Meaning while this is the status, farmers may be free to clear them, even though one or two that were researched showed signs of prior use. It’s a shame. It’s a historical aspect of history that is currently unprotected.
That’s a brilliant addition. By the later period it sounds less like whole-family migration and more like a seasonal youth culture built around the cattle.
Bringing us right down to today, where the singular connecting focus of the wars and the 'climate agenda' seems to be to change people's diets so they stop eating meat, resulting in a weak, sick, slave population.
That’s the pattern I keep noticing too: restrict the animal food, centralise the food system, then call the dependency progress.
Not the English. An English king or one of the landed gentry. The actual English were busy trying to avoid being put in the workhouse or starving to death.
Agreed. Blame the institutions and people with power, not the farm labourer trying to keep his own children fed.
This and a thousand other ways is how the English criminalized ordinary Irish life and then deported the criminals to Australia or the sugar-plantations of Barbados.
That’s why the word “criminal” needs unpacking in this history. Plenty were punished for resisting laws imposed on ways of life that had existed for generations.
What did they eat during the winter? Did they plant grains and vegetable before they left?
Yes. That was part of the genius of booleying: taking the cattle uphill freed the lowland for oats, barley, hay and later potatoes. They came home in autumn to stored crops, preserved dairy and winter grazing.
'Cobbett in Ireland' is a great book. British MP and farmer who visited Ireland in 1831 and wrote of his travels. Said his pigs back home were treated better than the Irish. Starvation everywhere ... in 1831! The City of London psychopaths who starved us then are still active.
In irish its called: buaile. There are a lot of buaile huts across ireland. When I was younger my cousins/friends & I would go find these huts and camp in/next them. They have them on uninhabited islands in ireland too. Its magical, a way to reconnect with our ancestors.
Midst all the whining, always good to remind ourselves that in 1100, two Frenchmen owned the whole of England
And that the Statute of Kilkenny was written in Norman French, English being spoken only by farm labourers
And that in 1900, just 5000 individuals owned 80% of England
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