Byrne's Dictionary of Irish Local History by Joseph Byrne Page B

enclosure on the summer pasture lands where cattle were milked. Also known as a shieling or bothy. Booley, bothy or shieling huts were constructed to accommodate the herdsmen and women who accompanied the herds. Booleying (transhumance) was a feature of the rundale system.
    boon work . Unpaid manorial labour service such as ploughing or harvesting owed to the lord by tenants.
    bord alexander . A kind of striped silk fabric used for altar cloths and vestments.
    bordure . In heraldry, a border round an escutcheon . A bordure is a mark of cadency (descent of a younger or cadet branch from the main family line) or, anciently, a mark of bastardy.
    borers . Narrow flint flakes, chipped on one or both edges and brought to a sharp point, probably serving to make stitch-holes in leather.
    borough . A town conferred with corporation status by a royal charter which also guaranteed the right to self-government. Prior to 1603 they numbered 55 in Ireland. James I enfranchised a further 46 to further the programme of plantation and to secure a Protestant parliamentary majority. Between them Charles I and Charles II added a further 16. The importance of the boroughs lay not in the civic duties they performed – which beyond providing the senior officials in the quarter-sessions, small debt and misdemeanour courts were negligible – but in their role in the election of members of parliament. From the seventeenth century 117 boroughs sent 234 MPs to an Irish house of commons composed of 300 members, thereby giving rise to the comment that the Irish legislature was a ‘borough parliament’.
    Many boroughs were tiny insignificant places, with few or no inhabitants. Harristown, Co. Kildare, for example, had no houses. Others were large and heavily populated but, as McCracken observes, size was irrelevant. It was the nature of the franchise that mattered. A large town like Belfast whose parliamentary representation was determined solely by a corporation of about one dozen burgesses was just as rotten as Harristown. The elective procedure by which members were sent to parliament varied considerably. In the eight county boroughs the electorate included the members of the corporation, the (often non-resident) freemen and the (largely fictitious) forty-shilling freeholders. In the 12 ‘ potwalloping’ boroughs the franchise was vested in £5 householders (including Catholics from 1793) who had resided in the constituency for six months (one year from 1782). Tightly controlled by their manorial lord, a tiny electorate of Protestant freeholders and resident householders sent 12 members to parliament from six manor boroughs . Each of the remaining 91 boroughs, Londonderry excepted, was controlled by a patron or patrons. The 55 corporation boroughs contained no freemen and the electorate comprised 12 or 13 burgesses. In the 36 freeman boroughs the freemen as well as the members of the corporation voted.
    Catholics were excluded from borough membership by law from 1691 and the franchise remained exclusively Protestant until 1793. Protestant dissenters retained the franchise and could sit in parliament but were denied membership of the boroughs between 1704 and 1780 by the provisions of the Test Ac t. The Act of Union severely curbed the elective power of the boroughs, only 33 of which survived with that right intact. By drastically altering the weighting of Irish representation from the boroughs to the counties, the union also paved the way for the Catholic vote to become effective. Nevertheless, the corporations remained exclusively Anglican until the reforms of 1840. See franchise, freeman, Municipal Corporations Reform Act (1840), Newtown Act, rotten borough.
    bote . Literally, compensation, bote was the right of a tenant to procure timber from the manorial woods for a variety of purposes. It was often incorporated into leases. See cartbote, estovers, haybote, houbote and ploughbote.
    bothach . (Ir., both , a hut) A cottier .