In Ireland the same conditions obtained so late as the sixteenth century; the native Irish retained their wandering habits, tilling a piece of fertile land in the spring, then retiring with their herds to the booleys or dairy habitations, generally in the mountain districts in the summer, and moving about where the herbage afforded sustenance to their cattle.[239] An eighteenth-century traveller in Ireland was assured that the quarter called Connaught was "inhabited by a kind of savages," and there is record of the capture of a hairy dwarf near Longford, who appears hardly to belong to civilisation.[240] Similar conditions obtained in the northern counties of England, and in other parts.[241] Special circumstances kept the borderland outside the influences of ordinary civilised thought and control, and these circumstances have been recorded by an eighteenth-century observer, from whom I will quote one or two facts as to the mode of life of these people: "That they might be more invisible during their outrodes and consequently less liable to the effects of their enemies' vigilance, the colour of their cloathes resembled that of the scenes of their employment or of their season of action, that is, of a brown heath and cloudy evening. Thus examples of what might condemn their conduct were never offered to them, and immemorial custom seemed as it were to sanctify their wildness. Every border-man, almost without exception, was brought up in a state which we would call unhappy, and every circumstance of his life tended to confirm his partiality for an uncertain bed and unprovided diet."[242] The evidence which this acute observer collected led him to conclude that the "almost uniform train of circumstances which affected these countries from their border situation, and the little difference there was between one of the dark ages and another, strongly induce me to believe that the Northern people were little altered in manners from very remote times to those immediately preceding the reign of Queen Elizabeth," and this is confirmed by what we actually find from the report of the Commissioners appointed to settle the peace of the Marches by fixed and established ordinances, who collected "their ordinances from the traditional accounts of ancient usages that had been sanctified as laws by the length of time which they had endured. These laws were different from most others, nay, almost peculiar to the men to whom they belonged."[243]