1188. The first English account of Ireland ever written complains that the Irish will not plough, and gives the reason: they own cattle, so they own their time. Gerald of Wales came over with the Normans and wrote the country up for the King. His verdict on the people was that they lived on beasts and lived like beasts, had never progressed beyond the pastoral life, neglected the fields, and held that the greatest pleasure was not to work and the greatest wealth was to enjoy liberty. They lived, he noted, on milk and flesh. Then he described their bodies, and the indictment slipped. The Irish, he wrote, did not swaddle their infants or shape them as civilised mothers did, and yet nature alone produced in them tall and handsome frames, straight-limbed, with fine faces and good colour. He put it down as a marvel. It was the milk. He meant the whole thing as a charge. Read it again as a description. A family with a herd on a hillside had milk in the morning, butter for the winter, a calf to sell and nothing to plough, and answered to nobody for the grass. A family on a ploughland answered to whoever owned the land, the mill and the tithe barn, and spent its year bent over, short. Every English writer on Ireland for the next 400 years said the same thing in the same tone. The Irish keep cattle and go where the grass is. They will not settle, till and pay. Spenser said it in 1596. Gerald had said it first, before there was a plantation to sell. The bodies kept telling the story after the land was taken. In the 1770s the East India Company was forbidden by law to recruit Irishmen, and an Irish officer ignored the law and signed up hundreds. When the records of 1,000 of his men were set against the English recruits beside them, the Irish were taller in every age group and had reached their full height younger, out of a country everybody agreed was the poorer. They still had the cow and the buttermilk. The Englishman had the loaf and the wage. The word Gerald chose for a people who fed themselves from an animal without a landlord was not lazy, though he tried lazy. It was free. He wrote it as the charge, and then he measured the result and called it a wonder. Eight hundred years on, the countries with the most cattle per head are still the ones nobody has managed to make plough for somebody else, and the word still bothers the same class of writer.