A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  It must strike the most careless traveller to see whole strings of cars whipt into a ditch by a gentleman’s footman, to make way for his carriage; if they are overturned, or broken in pieces, no matter, it is taken in patience; were they to complain, they would perhaps be horsewhipped. The execution of the laws lies very much in the hands of the justices of the peace, many of whom are drawn from the most illiberal class in the kingdom.

  In almost every locality the landlord wielded supreme power. For example, the Earl of Donegall picked all thirteen members of Belfast Corporation and chose the ‘sovereign’, or mayor, of the town. Counties were governed by unelected grand juries composed of landlords, their relatives and their agents, and Church of Ireland clergy. The landlords too were the magistrates presiding over local courts.

  Early in the eighteenth century in particular, owners of great estates for convenience often let out their lands in large portions to ‘middlemen’, poorer members of the gentry, who in turn sublet farms to tenants. These middle-men were particularly hated since they did their best to extract as much rent as they could. A fortunate minority of farmers, known as ‘freeholders’, owned their land outright. The vast majority, however, rented their farms and were at the mercy, therefore, of landlords. The better off were ‘leaseholders’, that is, they had a legal document which fixed the rent and other obligations. Here, for example, is a lease signed on 21 November 1783 between Lord Welles of Dungannon and Joseph Dickson of Mullaghbawn, Co. Tyrone. The farm contained

  thirty-six acres English statute measure appertaining, situate, lying and being in the townland of Dristernan, parish of Donaghmore, barony of Dungannon ... excepting and always reserving out of this demise unto the said Thomas Lord Baron Welles, his heirs and assigns, all manner of mines, minerals, quarries of freestone, limestone, slate, and coals, all woods, underwoods, timber and trees ... all turf bogs, mosses and marl.…

  He the said Joseph Dickson his heirs, administrators and assigns, yielding and paying ... unto the said Thomas Lord Baron Welles his heirs and assigns, the clear yearly rent or sum of thirteen shillings sterling per acre.

  In addition to money rent, the tenant had also to supply labour and food from his farm. Joseph Dickson had to provide

  two days work of man and horse or four shillings sterling in lieu thereof, two couple of good fat hens ... nine bushels of good white oats ...

  Joseph Dickson also had to build a forty-foot-long dwelling-house, agree to have all his corn ground at his lordship’s mills (and pay the specified fees), plant a hundred apple trees, and

  cause to be made on the premises thirty perches of ditch, five feet wide and four feet deep, set with white thorn and crab quicks, at the usual and proper distance.

  Until 1782, Catholics were not permitted to have leases lasting longer than thirty-one years. After that year they, along with Protestants, could name three persons in the lease, and the lease with a fixed rent continued until the last person named had died. Joseph Dickson, for example, named his two young sons as well as himself. Those who named King George III—as many did—were fortunate: he reigned from 1760 until his death in 1820. When leases expired, however, tenant farmers usually faced greatly increased rents. It was then—faced with ruin and eviction—that some of them turned to violence. In Ulster they called themselves the Hearts of Steel and the Hearts of Oak.

  Episode 129

  HEARTS OF STEEL, HEARTS OF OAK

  Twice a year, after the ‘gale days’ in May and November when the rent had been paid, Lord Bandon, threw a party for the tenants of his large estate in Co. Cork. In the spring of 1793 the task of organising the revels was left to his land agent:

  None who were not tenants did I invite, except those named by you, viz., Father Morgan Flaherty, Tim McCarthy, Charles Casey, Doctor Leyne, and Father Nolan, son to Old John. These I asked as Catholics particularly attached to you.

  Twenty-two favoured tenants were seated in the parlour; others in the breakfast parlour; the remainder were accommodated in a large tent on the avenue. The agent continued:

  In the parlour your claret was made free with, as Stephen tells me he opened 34 bottles. In the breakfast parlour port-wine and rum-punch were supplied in abundance; and abroad large libations of whiskey-punch. We had two quarter casks (above 80 gallons) of that beverage made the day before, which was drawn off unsparingly for those abroad, and plenty of beer besides.... Pipers and fiddlers enlivened the intervals between the peals of ordnance.... An ox was roasted whole at one end of the turf-house, on a large ash beam, by way of a spit, and turned with a wheel by Tom O’Brien ... six sheep were also sacrificed on the occasion.... All was happiness, mirth and good humour. ‘God save Great George our King’ was cheered within and abroad, accompanied by fiddles, pipes, etc.

  Wise landlords like Lord Bandon understood that it made good sense to keep the tenantry happy. Others could be negligent or ruthless. Landlords had a habit of encouraging what was known as the ‘hanging gale’—that is, allowing tenants to fall behind in payment of rent by six months or more. These tenants, having broken the terms of their leases, could then be legally evicted and replaced with others prepared to pay higher rents. When their leases expired, tenants found that they had to pay heavy sums known as ‘fines’ and greatly increased rents to renew their leases. Worse still, they could be evicted and replaced.

  During 1770 the seething resentments aroused by such practices reached boiling-point in Co. Antrim. Tenants had been evicted by the Upton family from their Templepatrick estate and had been replaced by speculators, including the Belfast merchant Waddell Cunningham, who had been able to outbid them when leases expired. In the same year the leases of Lord Donegall’s Co. Antrim estate expired; leases were renewed only if heavy fines were paid—fines many tenants could not pay.

  On the morning of Sunday 23 December angry farmers gathered at the Presbyterian meeting-house in Templepatrick and, armed with firelocks, pistols and pitchforks, set out for Belfast. They numbered at least 1,200 as they advanced on the town’s North Gate, now North Street. Calling themselves the ‘Hearts of Steel’, they surged around the army barrack intent on forcing the release of a comrade held prisoner on a charge of maiming cattle. Dr Alexander Halliday, a leading citizen, attempted to negotiate the release of the prisoner. A contemporary letter describes the sequel:

  The Doctor had just reached the Barrack on his embassy, passing through an immense multitude ... when the gate was thrown open by the military, who fired upon the assailants, killed five persons and wounded nine others.

  In the meantime Cunningham’s house in Hercules Lane (now Royal Avenue) was burning fiercely, putting the whole town in danger. At one o’clock in the morning the sovereign, or mayor, saw no alternative but to give up the prisoner to prevent the destruction of Belfast.

  The revolt of the Hearts of Steel spilled over into mid-Ulster, merging with another group calling themselves the ‘Hearts of Oak’ which had been resisting the ‘cess’, a rate imposed by grand juries to pay for roads and bridges. In March 1772, when Sir Richard Johnston of Gilford, Co. Down, captured ‘the ring-leader of this banditti’, his house was besieged next day, as a witness relates:

  They began to fire at the windows and set the offices on fire ... upon which Mr Morrell a dissenting minister ... desirous to prevent further bloodshed, drew up a window in order to speak out to them, but was saluted by four musket balls in his head and breast. He fell dead out of the window.

  Johnston hung out a flag of truce and escaped through a back window. He gathered together a posse of 150 men, but judged it better to await the arrival of the army.

  This was only one incident in a series of disturbances causing the Irish parliament to rush through ‘An Act for the more effectual punishment of wicked and disorderly persons in Antrim, Down, Armagh, the City and County of Londonderry, and County Tyrone’.

  Retribution swiftly followed.

  Episode 130

  CLEARING THE LAND

  In March
1772 the Hearts of Steel—tenant farmers of eastern Ulster who had risen against their landlords—issued their proclamation which blamed the ‘heavy rents which are become so great a burden to us that we are not scarcely able to bear’. It continued:

  Betwixt landlord and rectors, the very marrow is screwed out of our bones.... They have reduced us to such a deplorable state by such grievous oppressions that the poor is turned black in the face, and the skin parched on their back, that they are rendered incapable to support their starving families ... that they have not even food, nor yet raiment to secure from them the extremities of the weather.

  The government’s response was to spread soldiers through Ulster to crush the risings. Men were tried and hanged, and some were drowned while attempting to escape to Scotland in open boats.

  Most of those who had risen against their landlords were farmers who had some legal protection in the form of leases. The great majority living on the land, however, had no such protection. They sublet land from better-off farmers, and many of them walked to hiring fairs to sell their labour, particularly at harvest time. Pretty thatched cottages with windows, half-doors and chimneys were beyond their reach.

  Yet the ordinary people of Ireland were almost certainly better off than they had been in the previous century. It could be said that the great theme of eighteenth-century Irish history is the contest between population growth and growth of productivity. In most years prosperity was winning the race. The land was being cultivated and grazed more intensively than it had ever been. The result was a drastic transformation of the Irish countryside.

  Since the beginning of the seventeenth century the great forests of Ireland had been swept away by ruthless felling. Losing their habitat, the native red deer became extinct except in Kerry and a few other areas in the west. The last wolves were killed in the Sperrins and in Co. Carlow in the 1760s. No attempt was made to coppice trees, and the landlords recklessly squandered the woodlands not only to build homes and towns but also to export barrel-staves, boards and ship timber. For a time ironworks and tanneries had flourished. Sir Richard Boyle, the first Earl of Cork, had grown rich by making charcoal and smelting iron in Munster. Sir Charles Coote of Cavan once employed 2,500 men in his iron-founding concern, and it must have been a prodigal consumer of wood—it took two and a half tons of charcoal to make one ton of bar iron. Tanners, such as Thomas Waring, five times sovereign of Belfast between 1652 and 1666, had a tannery in the town in Waring Street and others at Toome, Derriaghy and Lurgan. Tanners preferred to strip bark from living oak, and eventually their depredations deprived them of their raw material.

  As early as 1718 it was noted that wood was ‘extraordinary dear’ in Ballyclare, Co. Antrim. In 1780 a mighty tree forty-two feet in girth, known as the Royal Oak, was felled on Lord Conway’s estate near Antrim. Part of it was sawn up to build a fifty-ton vessel for Lough Neagh, but—as a striking illustration of the soaring price of wood products—the bark alone of this single oak was sold for £40. Cities such as Dublin, Cork, Waterford and Limerick could not have existed if they had not been able to import coal from Britain.

  An exotic vegetable, the potato, had been introduced in the sixteenth century. Increasingly it formed a crucial part of the Irish diet. Almost certainly the potato improved the health of the people because—though nobody knew it at the time—it provided vitamin C, which had previously been somewhat lacking in the Irish menu. Scurvy, which had in past times plagued the people of Ireland, now largely disappeared.

  The potato, which tolerates a wide range of soils, was considered the best crop for clearing land. The favoured implement for preparing and cultivating new land was the loy, from the Irish láighe, a spade with a long shaft, one footrest and a narrow iron blade—this was ideal for cutting and turning the sod. Potatoes were grown on raised ridges known—by those who never had to do the job themselves—as ‘lazy beds’. Sods were carefully turned over (with elaborate local variations in technique), ashes spread over these as fertiliser, and potatoes planted on top and then covered with mould from the adjacent furrow. Potatoes became part of the rotation with barley and sometimes flax, if the soil could be made fertile enough.

  Previously the hillsides had been forested or used only for summer grazing. Now the growing population was settling here all year round and farming the land intensively.

  Episode 131

  THE PEASANTRY

  As the population rose during the eighteenth century every available scrap of land was being dug over or ploughed, and hillsides, previously kept only for summer grazing, were now being cultivated almost to the summits. Of course, the labour of removing furze and heather and the prising out of rocks or stumps was unremitting. In his book The Antient and Present State of the County of Down, published in 1744, Walter Harris described farming above Dromara on the slopes of Slieve Croob:

  The face of the Country hereabouts is rough, bleak and unimproved; yet produces the Necessaries of Life sufficient to support a large Number of Inhabitants, who have little other Bread Corn but Oats, of which they make great Quantities of Meal to supply not only themselves, but the neighbouring Markets. They are an industrious hardy People, and may be properly said to eat their Bread in the Sweat of their Face, the Courseness of the land obliging them to great Labour. The Coldness of the Soil occasions their Harvests to be late; yet by due Care and Culture it yields Rye and great Quantities of Flax. The Plenty of cheap firing got out of Bogs and Mosses throughout this whole Country does not a little contribute to the Service of the Linen Trade.

  Coastal farms could draw on the bounty of the sea to fertilise the thin leached soils of the west. Seaweed was rightly seen as an excellent manure and was gathered on every shore. Native Irish-speakers carefully distinguished between the various species, while English-speakers referred to seaweed as wrack, sea-bar and kelp. Knotted, bladder and saw-wrack were carefully cultivated—the rectangular plots or ‘cuts’ marked out with boulders, giving anchorage for the weed, can still be seen today, especially in Strangford Lough and the shore line at the foot of the Mourne Mountains. Storms blew in kelp from the deeps. Shells and shell-sand cast onto peaty, acid soils much improved fertility—indeed, onion-growing today on the Dingle peninsula in Kerry would hardly be possible without the shell-sand laboriously spread there to sweeten the soil by the peasantry more than two centuries ago.

  Better-off farmers—known as ‘strong farmers’—lived in the thatched stone cottages, whitewashed with lime, now considered to be characteristically Irish. The majority had much humbler dwellings, often no more than single-room cabins—there was no point in erecting more permanent houses for those who rented land from year to year, often forced to move on the following season. The English traveller C. T. Bowden described homes he saw in Co. Tipperary in 1790 as ‘less calculated for any of the comforts or conveniences of life than the huts of the savages I have seen in the back settlements of North America’. Here there were no beds; instead the whole family would sleep on rushes strewn on the mud floor. Furniture consisted of little more than a deal table, an iron ‘cruisie’ filled with fish oil to provide light, a couple of three-legged stools, and an iron pot for boiling potatoes on an open fire. A rush mat served as a door, and smoke had to find its way out without a chimney. Beggars had to make do with even less, as the English agricultural writer Arthur Young observed in the 1770s:

  A wandering family will fix themselves under a dry bank and with a few sticks, furze, fern, etc., make up a hovel much worse than an English pigsty, and support themselves how they can, by work, begging, and stealing.

  Even in quite substantial dwellings farm animals were allowed to roam freely, as the Chevalier de Latocnaye discovered when he spent a night in 1796 with peasants in Co. Waterford:

  Half a dozen children almost naked were sleeping on a little straw, with a pig, a dog, a cat, two chickens and a duck. I never before saw such a sight. The poor woman ... spread a mat on a chest, the only piece of furniture in the house and invited me to
lie there.... It rained very hard ... so I lay down on this bed of thorns. The animals saluted the first rays of the sun by their cries.... I transported myself in imagination into the Ark, and fancied myself Noah.... The dog came to smell me ... the pig also put up her snout to me and began to grunt; the chickens and the duck began to eat my powder-bag, and the children began to laugh. I should add that I had no small difficulty in making my hostess accept a shilling.

  The surprising fact is that houses like this were even to be found in the area at the heart of Ireland’s flourishing textile industry.

  Episode 132

  ‘SUPERFINE CLOTH, OF HOME MANUFACTURE’

  It is not widely known that eighteenth-century Ireland was an industrial country. There were few tall smoking chimneys and ‘dark satanic mills’, it is true. But in every town of any size, and right across the island, people were busy producing yarn and cloth.

  Even though an act of 1699 prohibited the export of Irish wool, the home market continued to flourish as the country’s population rose. And, of course, smuggling made many prosperous. Cloth was stuffed into small butter casks, known as firkins, and sent out illegally to Portugal and the West Indies. It was rumoured that the O’Connell family of Cahirciveen in Co. Kerry grew rich in this way.