Dá Derga.—See an interesting Essay on the Curragh of Kildare, by Mr. W.M. Hennessy, read before the R.I.A., February 26, 1866.
Profit.—The trustees of the estates forfeited in 1688 notice this especially. Trees to the value of £20,000 were cut down and destroyed on the estate of Sir Valentine Brown, near Killarney, and to the value of £27,000 on the territory of the Earl of Clancarty. Some of these trees were sold for sixpence a piece.
Merchants.—Wright says that "theft and unfair dealing" were fearfully prevalent among the Anglo-Normans, and mentions, as an example, how some Irish merchants were robbed who came to Ely to sell their wares.—Domestic Manners, p. 78. It would appear that there was considerable slave-trade carried on with the British merchants. The Saxons, who treated their dependents with savage cruelty (see Wright, p. 56), sold even their children as slaves to the Irish. In 1102 this inhuman traffic was forbidden by the Council of London. Giraldus Cambrensis mentions that, at a synod held at Armagh, A.D. 1170, the Irish clergy, who had often forbidden this trade, pronounced the invasion of Ireland by Englishmen to be a just judgment on the Irish for their share in the sin, and commanded that all who had English slaves should at once set them free. Mr. Haverty remarks, that it was a curious and characteristic coincidence, that an Irish deliberative assembly should thus, by an act of humanity to Englishmen, have met the merciless aggressions which the latter had just then commenced against this country.—Hist. of Ireland, p. 169.