ABSTRACT
Over the past twenty-five years there has been an increase in research on this aspect of our past landscape although there has only been a limited amount of archaeological excavation in comparison to the level of work within medieval urban settlements. Before the 1960s there had been only a few excavations on medieval rural settlements, such as the work by Hunt and Ó Ríordáin in Lough Gur, Co. Limerick,1 but apart from these individual excavations there was no systematic study of the pattern of that settlement within the contemporary historical landscape. Nevertheless, from the 1970s onwards this has been balanced out somewhat by significant levels of fieldwork, especially of the earthwork remains of now deserted settlements, which has been accompanied by extensive research into the surviving manorial and taxation documents of the medieval Lordship. Both these lines of enquiry, which really need to be pursued in tandem, have produced a much better understanding of both the chronology and the processes behind the pattern of settlement in the period under discussion than was the situation during the first half of this century.
