ABSTRACT
As the reader has probably realized by this stage, the majority of structures and artefacts recovered from medieval sites in Ireland, as in the rest of western Europe, are broadly dated to the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. This is not surprising as this was the period of maximum economic growth in the middle ages which only slowed down later in the fourteenth century. For England some economic historians have suggested that this socio-economic ‘downturn’ may have begun as early as the end of the thirteenth century because over-population caused extensive soil exhaustion on the available cultivable land resources which thus put many of the poorer sections of society on or below a subsistence level of existence.1
