JOURNAL OF THE COUNTY DONEGAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY Vlllt\GES AND THE RUNOALE svs·ret11 by ·vERY REV. PEADAR Mac LOINGSIGH, P.P. TIH!E natural tendency of man, from the beginning, has been to live in villages, as much for the sake of sociability as. for mutual aid and protec~ion. Even cave dwellings are, in a· way, villages. When man began to live by tillage and when individual ownership became desirable the question .arose as to how to divide the land equitably. The difficulty was that, even within a small area, the land was of different qualities and value. The value depended not only on the fertility of the soil, but also on the ease with which it could be worked; its situation in regard to the sun .and winds; and its distance from the village. iRichard Griffiths in his Instructions to Valuators (1839) mentions proximity to lime-stone quarries, to sea-manure, and to towns as other factors in the valuation of land. To base a division, therefore, merely on quantity would be · ·obviously unjust. And to give larger shares of poorer land, that could be made fertile only wlt.h much time, and fa1bour, to one who wanted immediately to grow food for his family, would be poor consolation indeed." What seemed fairest and what was done was that land wa& classified according to quality· and a portion of each class was given to every participant in the scheme. The necessary re'Sult was that a farm was not one continuous stretch but was made up of several ~mall lots scattered among other similar farms. Thus the rundale system and villag-e life became twin institutions over 115 most of the world .and they are still found united here and there in c:ur own Donegal, not to mention other places. In Hall's Ireland, written in 1841, we read "Rundale was, till of la.te years, the common· practice in the North of Ireland. It was thus-three or four persons became tenants to a farm, holding it jointly, on which there is land of different qualities and value. They divide it into fields and they divide the fields into as many shares as there are tenants." Instead of holding the farm jointly the more usual practice in Ireland seems to have been that each tenant was individually and directly respansible to the landlord for his rent. But there were instances also of the respansibility for the whole rent being placed on a head-tenant who in turn collected tpeir due portions from his fellow-tenants. Griffiths in his Instructio.ns draws attention to the division of gra.1Z1ing land into "inner" and "outer" grazing and says they were usually separated by a fence. The outer grazing was always held in common, the inner usually so. The rights of grazing were more or less according to the larger or smaller quantity of .arable land held by each tenant. The size of the holding of ara1ble land also determined the; rent. iMay LI say, in passing, that the customs which regulated graizdng rights on the common.ages would make ,an interesting study. They were probably
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