Rethinking settlement values in Gaelic society: the case of the cathedral centres

Abstract:The idea that settlements of Gaelic peoples were primarily dispersed and eschewed urban form has dominated interpretations of later medieval and early post-medieval Gaelic settlement arrangements in Ireland, but to what extent do the categories of urban and rural even apply to places where people were settled in late medieval Gaelic polities? Through an investigation of cathedral-centred communities inter Hibernicos, which were closely identified with the political territories in which they were situated, it is suggested that altogether different values from the urban–rural paradigm motivated the continuity and development of such social formations between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries.