ABSTRACT
The wider European context is significant, for Ireland’s well-established trading links with the countries of western Europe ensured the continued development and relative prosperity of the port towns of Ireland. In addition, the Catholicism of the majority of the population meant that ‘as the religious animosities of the post-Reformation era developed, an unconquered Ireland was increasingly feared as a spear-head of Counter-Reformation’, and the country thus became involved in the political and territorialist intrigues arising from religious antipathies of Europe. In the late Middle Ages there was, in fact, a marked reduction of English interest in Ireland, because of the involvement of political and military energy in the French Wars and Wars of the Roses. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Irish urban system and its individual components still bore the hallmarks of a medieval system. Peripherally located-on the coast for the most part-the towns were mainly walled, small in area and relatively static in terms of growth.
