2003:560 - DUBLIN: 48–50 Newmarket/14–16 Newmarket Street, Dublin

Testing was undertaken in January 2003 in advance of a mixed-use development on the north side of the eastern end of Newmarket, immediately west of St Luke’s Church. Archaeology was found across the 80m by 20m site, at a shallow depth (14.35–14.65m OD) that would be breached by the carpark basement of the proposed development. An impact statement was also prepared for the former eastern curtilage wall of St Luke’s, as it had been partially removed during demolition in autumn 2002 before the presence of an archaeologist on-site. The wall, a composite of different post-medieval rear property walls, most dating to after the mid-19th century, had formed both the eastern boundary of the yard of St Luke’s and the wall of the factory building formerly occupying the development site, for which permission to demolish had been given.

The planned excavation (undertaken March–June 2003) was aimed at addressing a specific agenda prior to its commencement, based upon preliminary research and the results of the testing. Now that the data is undergoing more thorough analysis, the research focus of the project has been further fine-tuned.

Archaeology on the site consisted of five main phases: Phase 1, evidence for medieval/early post-medieval agriculture; two main phases c. 1670s–1725 (a lesser prebuilding Phase 2 and a Phase 3 encompassing the first intensive development and occupation of the site); a Phase 4 that encompasses the time-spans of both c. 1725–1790 and 1790–1830, a time of socio-economic decline for the area (the process of tenementing and descent into slum conditions), plus some more recent material from Phase 5.

The most detailed focus (as the general site phase outline following suggests) is on c. 1670–1725 (Phases 2 and 3, with the earlier part of Phase 4a also of some importance, albeit with less data surviving). This is an era of great importance for the Liberties area of Dublin, and indeed Dublin in general, although such importance has not always been acknowledged. The earlier Phase 1 is interesting as a contrast, but the scarcity of data has not allowed for a truly fine-grained interpretative focus. The same is true for the end of Phase 4a (c. 1725–90), Phase 4b (c. 1790–1830) and Phase 5 (after c. 1830), most of which had been severely truncated by modern building on the site. For Phase 5, much of what might be said, based on the data available, can be told better and more cheaply from historical and oral historical sources (both of which are rich for the area concerned).

Phase 1
In its earliest phase, the site was covered with enclosed fields and formed part of the rural agricultural hinterland feeding medieval and early post-medieval Dublin. Relic agricultural remains contained many abraded medieval potsherds. The stratigraphy was not complex, with buried ploughzone soils providing a wide, undifferentiated time profile from the 13/14th century up until at least the 16th century (represented unerringly by a few Spanish imports). What remains may all be late—15th to early 17th centuries—but the data is not resilient enough to confirm this. The one (reasonable-sized) field ditch has backfills with chronologically distinct artefacts; its basal fills may provide a more precise terminus post-quem upon completion of the pottery analysis.

Phase 2
The earliest (pre-building) phase of late 17th-century activity on the site consisted of animal pens and butchery waste from the slaughter yards on New Row Street and the tanneries across Newmarket. The phase spans a narrow time period: probably just a few years in the early 1670s. Newmarket was founded in the 1670s by the earl of Meath, William Brabazon, who modelled the size and layout of the place on Smithfield, with street-frontage Anglo-Dutch buildings (‘Dutch Billies’) and more traditional vernacular buildings constructed side-by-side along a new street plan, to house the growing artisan population of the Coombe area.

Early economic activity in 17th-century Newmarket focused on a burgeoning export trade to England, the New World colonies and (briefly in the 1690s) France in butter and cattle by-products, as well as a growing market for such products in Dublin, second in population only to London by the turn of the 18th century. Brabazon cannily located Newmarket on high ground on the west side of Dublin where animals could easily arrive on the hoof, yet not too distant from quays along the Liffey. His timing was precise, for only a few years earlier, in 1663 and 1667, Parliament had passed the Cattle Acts, protectionist legislation that forbade the transportation of live cattle into England or directly between its colonies, a measure designed to insulate the English rural economy from (Irish and other) competition. The new law meant that processing of Irish cattle before export was now mandatory (although exceptions arose at certain times during subsequent years).

Phase 3
This was the main building phase and the primary focus of interpretative interest. Spanning a time frame from the 1670s to the 1720s, it consisted of street-frontage buildings and their back yards. Varying back-plot deposits exhibited evidence of the trades in which inhabitants were involved and contained very good assemblages of domestic wares, etc., that were representative of upper ‘lower orders’ to lower ‘middling sort’ (with a very high proportion of English imports earlier on, even considering the Navigation Acts).

The first building sub-phase (3a) can be precisely dated to 1674/5–1682 and contained a mixture of building styles. The development process appears to have been closely managed by Brabazon’s agents, who contracted out to well-off middlemen leaseholders to build houses within seven years to accommodate the earl’s growing tenant population working in the Newmarket economy and the Liberties’ cloth industry. The houses were spacious affairs with large back gardens, reflecting the needs of their tenants: skilled artisans who needed room to work. Brabazon sweetened the deal by offering some of his leaseholders longer 40-year leases and, from 1681/2, running water. Organised rubbish/night soil removal was clearly also under way.

Water was piped from the Poddle tributary along Mill Street and Blackpits in wooden mains that fed narrower domestic wooden pipes emptying into barrel, drystone and mortared-brick cisterns in the back garden of each property. In total, over 100m of wooden piping was excavated, with a number of capillary pumps (‘dales’) in cisterns of reused barrels, mortared brick and drystone. A remarkably precise and consistent ratio existed between the volume of the cistern in each back garden and the area of each property, presumably to help manage the collection of water rates and indicative of the degree of centralised planning and management that was being exercised. The private water supply must have made these buildings very sought after by tenants, but it also helped solve a growing problem of the earl, who was responding to complaints that his industrious Coombe tenants along the Poddle tributaries were polluting the Dublin town water supply with their trade activities.

Finds from the late 17th- and early 18th-century deposits reflect the daily lives of Newmarket’s inhabitants: evidence for horn-processing (an ancillary trade to tanning), a number of dairy pans and butter crocks (many from North Devon and manufactured specifically for the Irish butter trade) and small but tantalising hints of the Liberties cloth industry (copper-alloy sewing pins and two lathe-turned fragments from a spinning-wheel). At the end of this period and into the start of Phase 4a, there are crucible fragments indicating some copper and ironworking going on nearby, but no furnace; probably it is now in St Luke’s north churchyard next door, as the property concerned had a Dutch Billy and further yard there before the building of the church in the early years of the 18th century. Interestingly, several of the buildings (all of the Dutch Billies) had crawlspace under floor cellars or creeps for the cold storage of dairy products; one of these also had a small wood-lined butter storage pit sunk into its cobble floor. The pottery and glass assemblages provide a glimpse of the socio-economics of the area: the inhabitants consisted mainly of more successful members of the lower social orders and less well-off people of the ‘middling sort’. They had few luxuries; wine bottles and teacups, for example, were rare on-site until well into the 18th century (17th-century tea was quite costly), but the number of clay pipes was vast. Tobacco was one of the top imports at the time and different smoking habits distinguished the middling sort, who smoked indoors, in their parlours and ale-houses, from the quick ‘drinking’ of tobacco during the workday by their social lessers. Interestingly, the assemblages suggest a gradual but near complete monopolisation of the local clay-pipe market by Irish manufacturers by about the 1690s. At least two of the buildings had fancy tin-glazed Dutch tiles around their hearths (and interestingly those from a house off Meeting House Square contained only secular scenes, in contrast to the Gospel scenes found elsewhere on-site). The cooking and tablewares found were utilitarian, with few aspirations to keeping up with fashion, yet many of them were English imports (especially North Devon wares and, increasingly from the 1680s, Irish-made wares similar to Surrey Red borderwares). These may reflect overseas trade links or perhaps the contacts of the residents, some of whom were Nonconformist refugees of the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes who arrived in Dublin via London and Bristol (the site included the courtyard and very corner of a Baptist meeting house, mentioned above). The growing dominance of Irish-made earthenwares in the assemblages of the early 18th century, as with the clay pipes, is testament to a burgeoning domestic industry in these wares (for the possible pottery manufacture site, see Alan Hayden, Excavations 2001, No. 372).

Preliminary spatial analysis of the bone assemblages, analysed by Lena Strid, suggests that the diets of the inhabitants of Dutch Billies (a larger percentage of the beef eaten was veal, different cuts predominated; of the sheep eaten, a larger percentage may have been lamb) differed from the diets of the inhabitants of the other buildings (more beef; of the sheep eaten, more was mutton), which may be an indication that the Dutch Billies housed better-off inhabitants. More intriguingly, but more speculatively until ongoing historical research is completed, the differing foodways of the Dutch Billies may also point to different ethnic diets, as the area was well populated with immigrants, even for the Dublin of the time. Unsurprisingly, most houses seem to have kept chickens, but the numbers may suggest that they were also used to thwart insect pests associated with the Newmarket.

After 40 years or so, the back-yard plumbing stopped working (and was eventually replaced by a public fountain system in the 1750s) and a number of the buildings began a gradual descent into disrepair, helped along by the expiration of leases and a variety of hard knocks to the animal-product and butter trade and the cloth industry. Two large clearance deposits from the early 1720s have yielded several coins, a complete onion bottle and almost 100 near-complete pots.

Phase 4
Evidence from the period 1725–1790 (Phase 4a), and especially from the period 1790–1830 (Phase 4b), was piecemeal, as much of it was more ephemeral to begin with, due to socio-economic circumstance, and because much of it had been removed by late 19th- and 20th-century activity. Evidence from the buildings indicated that tenementing and the general decline of existing buildings was taking place, although precisely when different alterations and sub-divisions were taking place was not always clear. Find assemblages (limited in number, so more an interpretative impression than a statistical argument) reflect the depressed socio-economics of residents. By the late 18th century the area was already known as a slum, with the decaying late 17th-century houses subdivided and inhabited as tenements. By the 19th century, typhus and other epidemic outbreaks were common in the grim ‘rookeries’, the heart of Liberty Boys’ turf, and Newmarket Street tenements housed an average of eighteen people per room. Significant archaeological evidence that was datable with some precision included the backfilling of disused cisterns, the reuse of some of them as privy pits and the delving of another large privy pit. The ‘garden soils’ are too mixed for detailed dating evidence. A number of environmental samples were taken from several privy pits, with the hope of eliciting some specifics about diet and living conditions (whilst hopefully avoiding the pitfall of stereotyping such neighbourhoods). Overall, the Phase 4 data is limited in its breadth and scope, so, interpretatively, it serves as the coda for the Phase 3 material.

Phase 5
Only bits of archaeology survive from after 1830, due to site truncation.

2 Killiney View, Albert Road Lower, Glenageary, Co. Dublin