ABSTRACT

Discourses on the walled city and community organization at the turn of the seventeenth century were framed in England by organized efforts to transplant English community into Ireland, first in Munster starting in the late 1580s and then in Ulster in the first decades of the seventeenth century. A “plat” for the Munster Plantation written in 1585 assigns to each prospective undertaker the responsibility for “the present peopling and building of one whole parish” within larger subdivisions composed of nine parishes. If the more substantial undertakers struggled to meet their obligations, Edmund Spenser had no reasonable hope of doing so, but he nevertheless lived well at Kilcolman, improved the property, and also fortified it as need be. Irenaeus espouses a different model based on his experience, one that would anticipate the Ulster Plantation and which Eudoxus, indeed, calls his “plot for Ulster.”