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It’s quite clear that the buildings of the towns in Coleraine and Derry, fortified towns, that there was nothing like this in the province of Ulster previously. People would not have been unfamiliar with castles, but there were altogether a greater number of fortified houses being constructed than had been in existence previously in the province of Ulster.
Besides that, you have the development of a significant number of inland towns which, again, must have been quite spectacular as far as the native population was concerned. The houses that would have been constructed for the farming population by the undertakers, and to some degree by the servitors, would have been larger, more spacious, perhaps more comfortable than the traditional houses which the Irish farming population would have held.
On the other hand, a significant number of the houses which the incoming Scottish farming population constructed, seem to have been of a very primitive kind and wouldn’t have been anything more sophisticated than what existed among the native population in Ulster previously. Equally well, the farming methods of the incoming Scottish particularly, wouldn’t have been significantly more advanced than those which are obtained in Ulster previously.
I mean, we must remember that in the Ulster before, immediately before the Plantation, that it had been able to sustain - for a prolonged period of time - a large military force which had presented the most formidable military challenge to the government of Queen Elizabeth. In that sense, the food output and the agricultural technology which are obtained in Ulster, in the more fertile parts of Ulster, previous to the Plantation, was capable of significant outputs. And in that sense, there wasn’t an agricultural revolution immediately following upon the Ulster Plantation; there was a restructuring of society, rather than a dramatic transformation in the economy.
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