Post #3926838

The dominant pattern of Irish community organization used to be something called the “rundale.” The rundale was a system for managing and dividing up village agricultural land according to need. The word derives from two Gaelic words—“roinn,” or division, and “daíl,” a meeting or assembly. The rundale, then, was “the meeting to divide up the land.” Each peasant village, or clachan, owned land in common. Some of it was used as common grazing land for cows and other livestock; some was used for gardens by individual households, and some was used as crop land to grow oats, rye, barley, and potatoes. Periodically—I presume each year—the clachan would meet in a daíl to redistribute crop land among households. 1/5