Late-thirteenth-century Ireland as a region

The population distribution of late-thirteenth-century Irish cities is used to determine the status of culture (the term used anthropologically) of the island as a region. The evidence derives largely from areas of the cities and from numbers of city lots (burgages) in the descriptions (extents) of city taxation. Around A.D. 1275-85, Ireland had a population of about 650,000. Its largest city, Dublin, had about 10,000 inhabitants, thus nearly the expected 1 1/2 percent of the region. The other large cities or clusters of cities seem to fall into the expected pattern of size. So, although sharp social and economic differences existed between the urban and feudal English and the pastoral Irish, the possibility of a normal political and economic region was present. Although Edward I granted common law rights to the Welsh, he refused them to the Irish, thus preventing integration with the English and prolonging the Anglo-Irish rift at the one most favorable time to have ended it.