No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2020
The central contention of this article is that early nineteenth-century Irish landlords were constrained in their ability to control their estates by the prospect of peasant resistance. The apex of that resistance took the form of what are generically known as whiteboy movements, and this article examines the impact of one particular such movement, the Whitefeet, active in the East Midlands and South-East in the early 1830s. The article argues that two forms of landlord versus tenant conflicts can be identified: an absolute form, in which landlords (or subletting rentiers called middlemen) behaved as if they had absolute rights over their properties and were the victims of retaliatory violence; and a negotiated form, in which landlords (or their agents) proceeded in a more restrained, and piecemeal fashion, and compromised in the face of opposition. The fact that the magistracy, at least in some instances, condemned the practitioners of absolute conflict would suggest that more measured approaches were the socially accepted norm, precisely because of the potential for retaliatory violence. The article will conclude with a discussion framing the foregoing in terms of moral economy. It will be argued that the balance between landlord power and tenant resistance created a grudging acceptance of respective rights.
1 Leinster Express, 19th November 1831.
2 Leinster Express, 30th March 1832.
3 Leinster Express, 5th November 1831; National Archives of Ireland, Chief Secretary’s Office, Registered Papers (hereafter NAI CSO RP) 1830/H87, Chief Constable Foott to Hugh Boyd Wray, 24th October 1830. The Chief Secretary’s Office papers are undergoing a process of recataloguing as we go to press, the references given here will remain in the catalogue and will be designated ‘original reference’.
4 Gibbons, Stephen Randolph, ‘Captain Rock in the Queens County’, in Lane, Pádraig and Nolan, William, eds, Laois History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County (Dublin, 1999), p. 502Google Scholar.
5 Leinster Express, 5th May 1832. A boycott of the steward’s funeral was also observed: Leinster Express, 12th May 1832.
6 NAI CSO RP 1830/H104, Chief Constable Foott to Hugh Boyd Wray, 28th November 1830.
7 NAI CSO RO 1830/H87, Chief Constable Foott to Hugh Boyd Wray, 24th October 1830.
8 Leinster Express, 2nd June 1832; Leinster Express, 31st August 1833; Leinster Express, 9th November 1833.
9 ‘Peasant’ is a fuzzy term, for the sake of clarity we are probably best considering this social group as being in the advanced stages of a process of transition from pre-capitalist peasants to simple commodity producers within capitalism.
10 Evidence of a regional countertendency to farm consolidation is in the Poor Inquiry: First Report from the Commissioners for Inquiring into the Conditions of the Poor in Ireland (hereafter First Report), appendix (F), [38], H. C. 1836, pp. xxxiii, 80–135.
11 James, S. Donnelly, The Land and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork: The Rural Economy and the Land Question (London, 1975), pp. 48–9Google Scholar; Cormac, Ó Gráda, ‘Poverty, Population and Agriculture, 1801–45’, in Vaughan, W. E., ed., A New History of Ireland V: Ireland under the Union 1801–70 (Oxford, 2010), p. 114Google Scholar; Solar, P. M. and Hens, L., ‘Land under pressure: the value of Irish land in a period of rapid population growth, 1730–1844’, Agricultural History Review, 61:1 (2013), 40–61Google Scholar.
12 Nolan, William, Fassadinin: Land, Settlement, and Society in Southeast Ireland, 1600–1850 (Dublin, 1979)Google Scholar; Terence, M. Dunne, ‘“Humour the people”: subaltern collective agency and uneven proletarianization in Castlecomer Colliery, 1826–34’, Éire-Ireland, 53:3/4 (autumn/winter 2018), 64–92Google Scholar.
13 Curtin, Gerard, ‘Land Tenure, Farm Economy, Labour and Society in West Limerick, 1820–45’, in Irwin, Liam, Tuathaigh, Gearóid Ó and Potter, Matthew, eds, Limerick, History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County (Dublin, 2009), pp. 333–56Google Scholar; Bew, Paul, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1852–82 (Dublin, 1978), p. 11Google Scholar.
14 Jones Hughes, T., ‘The Large Farm in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, in Dáithí Ó hÓgáin and Gailey, Alan, eds, Gold under the Furze: Studies in Folk Tradition presented to Caoimhín Ó Danachair (Dublin, 1982), pp. 93–100Google Scholar; Ó Gráda, ‘Poverty, Population and Agriculture, 1801–45’, p. 114.
15 Steele, E. D., Irish Land and British Politics: Tenant-right and Nationality, 1865–1870 (Cambridge, 1974), p. 11Google Scholar.
16 Cunningham, John, ‘Popular Protest and a “Moral Economy” in Provincial Ireland in the Early 19th Century’, in Devine, Francis, Lane, Fintan and Puirséil, Niamh, eds, Essays in Irish Labour History: A Festschrift for Elizabeth and John W. Boyle (Dublin, 2008), pp. 27–48Google Scholar; Cunningham, John, ‘“Compelled to their bad acts by hunger”: three Irish urban crowds, 1817–45’, Éire-Ireland, 45:1/2 (spring/summer 2010), 128–51CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Kelly, James, Food Rioting in Ireland in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: The ‘Moral Economy’ and the Irish Crowd (Dublin, 2017)Google Scholar.
17 Donnelly, James S. Jr, ‘The Whiteboy movement, 1761–5’, Irish Historical Studies, 21:81 (1977–8), 53–4Google Scholar; Aitchison, Peter and Cassell, Andrew, The Lowland Clearances: Scotland’s Silent Revolution, 1760–1830 (Edinburgh, 2012), pp. 98–103Google Scholar. See also Wells, Roger, ‘The Irish Famine of 1799–1801: Market Culture, Moral Economies and Social Protest’, in Randall, Adrian and Charlesworth, Andrew, eds, Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Liverpool, 1996), pp. 183–5Google Scholar.
18 James, S. Donnelly, Jr, ‘Irish agrarian rebellion: the Whiteboys of 1769–76’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature, 83:C (1983), 304Google Scholar.
19 Huggins, Michael, Social Conflict in Pre-Famine Ireland: The Case of County Roscommon (Dublin, 2007)Google Scholar.
20 Bartlett, Thomas, ‘An end to moral economy: the Irish Militia disturbances of 1793’, Past & Present, 99 (1983), 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Vaughan, W. E., Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Solow, Barbara L., ‘The Irish Land Question in a Wider Context’, in Campbell, Fergus and Varley, Tony, eds, Land Questions in Modern Ireland (Manchester, 2013), pp. 65–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Many famous late nineteenth-century evictions, such as in Bodyke or Luggacurren, were in response to rent strikes, they are part then of the story of the overthrow of landlordism more than of the power of landlordism.
22 Donnelly, James S. Jr, ‘Mass Eviction and the Great Famine’, in Póirtéir, Cathal, ed., The Great Irish Famine (Cork, 1995), p. 196Google Scholar.
23 Marnane, Denis G., ‘The famine in South Tipperary’, Tipperary Historical Journal (1999), 3Google Scholar.
24 Joan Flynn, ‘The Famine Years in Queen’s County, 1845–1850’ (MA thesis, National University of Ireland, St Patrick’s College Maynooth, August 1996), p. 2.
25 Donnelly, The Land and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork, p. 54.
26 Beames, Michael, Peasants and Power: The Whiteboy Movements and their Control in Pre-Famine Ireland (Brighton, 1983), p. 210Google Scholar.
27 Proudfoot, L. J., ‘Spatial Transformation and Social Agency: Property, Society and Improvement, c. 1700 to c. 1900’, in Graham, B. J. and Proudfoot, L. J., eds, An Historical Geography of Ireland (London, 1983), p. 227Google Scholar.
28 Palmer, Stanley H., Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780–1850 (Cambridge, 1988), p. 38Google Scholar.
29 Clark, Samuel, Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton, 1979)Google Scholar.
30 Beames, M. R., ‘Rural conflict in pre-Famine Ireland: peasant assassinations in Tipperary 1837–1847’, Past & Present, 81 (November 1978), 75–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For discussion of the shifting social composition of agrarian movements, see Donnelly, James S., Jr, ‘The Social Composition of Agrarian Rebellions in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The Case of the Carders and Caravats, 1813–16’, in Corish, Patrick J., ed., Radicals, Rebels and Establishments (Belfast, 1985), pp. 151–69Google Scholar.
31 Report from the Select Committee on the State of Ireland, with the minutes of evidence, appendix and index [677], H. C. 1831–2 (hereafter State of Ireland), p. xvi.
32 Gray, Peter, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843–50 (Dublin, 1999)Google Scholar; Ciosáin, Niall Ó, Ireland in Official Print Culture, 1800–1850: A New Reading of the Poor Inquiry (Oxford, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Relevant local histories include: Walker, Brother Linus, Beneath Slievemargy’s Brow (Portlaoise, 2001)Google Scholar; Walker’s drafts are in Laois County Archives as is an unpublished manuscript – Darrell John Hooper, ‘The Manor of Glenmore or The Irish Peasant: A Novel’ – a comparison between contemporary conditions with those described in the novel at Stradbally, Queen’s County, in 1828 (NUI Cert. in Local History Project, May 2006).
34 For an overview of rural/agrarian social conflict in modern Ireland, see Mac Sheoin, Tomás, ‘What happened to the peasants? Material for a history of an alternative tradition of resistance in Ireland’, Interface: A Journal For and About Social Movements, 9:2 (November/December 2017), 188–275Google Scholar.
35 State of Ireland, pp. 82–3; for the southerly expansion down to Rosbercon, see Kilkenny Moderator, 13th March 1833; Kilkenny Moderator, 16th March 1833; Kilkenny Moderator, 27th March 1833; Kilkenny Moderator, 6th April 1833; also details of landlord assassinations in the Rosbercon area are in Murphy, James, Rosbercon Parish: A History in Song & Story (Kilkenny, 2000), pp. 310–26Google Scholar.
36 NAI CSO RP 1832/1037, D. O’Donoghue to Sir William Gosset, 14th June 1832; NAI CSO RP 1832/1039, Hugh Boyd Wray to Sir William Gosset, 14th June 1832.
37 O’Donnell, Patrick, The Irish Faction Fighters of the 19th Century (Dublin, 1975)Google Scholar; Roberts, Paul E. W., ‘Caravats and Shanavests: Whiteboyism and Faction Fighting in East Munster, 1802–11’, in Clark, Samuel and Donnelly, James S., Jr, eds, Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914 (Manchester, 1983), pp. 64–101Google Scholar; Donnelly, James S., Jr, ‘Factions in pre-Famine Ireland’, in Eyler, Audrey S. and Garratt, Robert F., eds, The Uses of the Past: Essays on Irish Culture (Newark and London, 1988), pp. 113–27Google Scholar; Kelly, James, The Liberty and Ormond Boys: Factional Riots in Eighteenth-Century Dublin (Dublin, 2005)Google Scholar.
38 The present author’s published works on threatening letters in 1830s Leinster include: ‘Captain Rock’, in John Cunningham and Emmet O’Connor, eds, Studies in Irish Radical Leadership: Lives on the Left (Manchester, 2016), pp. 9–21; ‘The Law of Captain Rock’, in Kyle Hughes and Don MacRaild, eds, Crime, Violence and the Irish in the Nineteenth Century (Liverpool, 2017); ‘Letters of blood and fire: primitive accumulation, peasant resistance and the making of agency in early nineteenth-century Ireland’, Critical Historical Studies, 5:2 (spring 2018), 45–74; ‘“Wolf Hill I dread you”: threatening letters and other alternative documentary sources for the Leinster Colliery district’, Journal of the Mining Heritage Trust of Ireland, 16 (October 2018), 33–7; ‘“We the regulators of the County of Kilkenny”: threatening letters and social conflict in the 1830s’, Old Kilkenny Review, 70 (2018), 119–27.
39 State of Ireland, p. 180.
40 NAI CSO RP 1830/H7, D. O'Donoghue to William Gregory, 5th February 1830.
41 Ibid.
42 NAI CSO RP 1829/H26, Sir John Harvey to William Gregory, 4th May 1829.
43 NAI CSO RP 1829/H26, Thomas P. Cosby to Sir John Harvey, 3rd May 1829.
44 NAI CSO RP 1829/H84, Chief Constable Clancie to Hugh Boyd Wray, 30th October 1829.
45 NAI CSO RP 1831/G30, Robert Wright to Hugh Boyd Wray, 20th August 1831; NAI CSO RP 1831/G30, D. O’Donoghue to Sir William Gosset, 21st August 1831.
46 Appendix VIII: STATEMENT respecting the Tenants served with Ejectments at Ballylehane, and Murder of Mr Gregory, State of Ireland (hereafter Ejectments at Ballylehane), pp. 114–16; State of Ireland, pp. 381–2.
47 Ejectments at Ballylehane, pp. 114–16; State of Ireland, p. 97.
48 Ejectments at Ballylehane, pp. 114–16.
49 State of Ireland, p. 97.
50 Ibid.
51 State of Ireland, p. 102.
52 NAI CSO RP 1831/G30, D. O’Donoghue to Sir William Gosset, 21st August 1831.
53 For instance, John Marum, assassinated in 1824 in an earlier phase of conflict in the western portion of the borders of Kilkenny and Queen’s County, was also described in these terms; see Macháin, Pádraig Ó, Six Years in Galmoy: Rural Unrest in County Kilkenny 1819–1824 (Dublin, 2007), pp. 30–4Google Scholar.
54 National Library of Ireland, Ormonde Papers, MS 25/058, tenants’ notebook of the estates of the Marquees of Ormonde, c. 1847–71.
55 NAI CSO RP 1833/88, Matthew Singleton to Sir William Gossett, 2nd February 1833.
56 State of Ireland, p. 110; NAI CSO RP 1832/853, Matthew Singleton to Sir William Gosset, 9th May 1832; NAI CSO RP 1832/685, Michael Hackett to Sir William Gosset, 9th April 1832.
57 NAI CSO RP 1832/2174/233, Robert Wright to Hugh Boyd Wray, 12th January 1832; NAI CSO RP 1832/2174/233, Robert Wright to Hugh Boyd Wray, 30th January 1832; NAI CSO RP 1832/2175/255, Robert Wright to Hugh Boyd Wray, 30th January 1832; NAI CSO RP 1832/2174/214, D. T. Osborne to Sir William Gosset, 30th January 1832.
58 NAI CSO RP 1832/2175/255, Robert Wright to Hugh Boyd Wray, 30th January 1832.
59 State of Ireland, p. 110; NAI CSO RP 1832/2186/1586, Michael Hackett to Sir William Gosset, 17th August 1832.
60 NAI CSO RP 1832/2187/1668, Matthew Singleton to Sir William Gosset, 2nd September 1832.
61 Lyne, Gerard J., The Lansdowne Estate in Kerry under the Agency of William Stewart Trench, 1849–72 (Dublin, 2001), p. xxxiiiGoogle Scholar. Other illustrious Petty-Fitzmaurices include the Earl of Shelburne, British Prime Minister at the time of American Independence, and Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne, who was Governor-General of Canada, Viceroy of India and advocate of a compromise peace during the First World War.
62 State of Ireland, p. 425; ironically, someone apparently evicted by Price was later hung for allegedly shooting dead a colliery manager on the Wandesforde estate; see Kilkenny Journal 24th July 1839; Kilkenny Moderator, 24th July 1839; Kilkenny Journal, 24th August 1839; Kilkenny Moderator, 24th August 1839.
63 State of Ireland, p. 255.
64 State of Ireland, p. 420.
65 Moran, Gerard, Sending out Ireland's Poor (Dublin, 2013)Google Scholar; Rees, Jim, Surplus People: From Wicklow to Canada (Cork, 2014)Google Scholar; Reilly, Ciarán, The Irish Land Agent, 1830–60: The Case of King's County (Dublin, 2014), pp. 132–3Google Scholar.
66 State of Ireland, pp. 7–8.
67 State of Ireland, p. 424.
68 State of Ireland, p. 420.
69 Ibid.
70 Evidence taken before Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the state of the law and practice in respect to the occupation of land in Ireland, Part III [657] H. C. 1845 (hereafter Devon Commission), pp. 717–29, 584–8.
71 Coffey, Leigh-Ann, The Planters of Luggacurran, County Laois: A Protestant Community, 1879–1927 (Dublin, 2006)Google Scholar.
72 Delany, Ruth, The Grand Canal of Ireland (Newtown Abbot, 1973)Google Scholar.
73 National Archives of Ireland, Office of Public Works (hereafter NAI OPW) 10/1/69, 28th August 1830 meeting, minute book of the court of the directors of the Grand Canal 1830/1831 (hereafter Grand Canal minutes), p. 100; NAI OPW 10/1/69, letter from John Edge, 24th September 1830, Grand Canal minutes, 1830/1831, p. 147; NAI OPW 10/1/69, John Edge, 11th March 1831, Grand Canal minutes 1830/1831, p. 342.
74 NAI OPW 10/1/69, John Edge, 11th March 1831, Grand Canal minutes 1830/1831, p. 342; State of Ireland, p. 170.
75 NAI OPW 10/1/69, John Edge, 8th September 1830, Grand Canal minutes 1830/1831, p. 118.
76 NAI OPW 10/1/69, John Edge, 24th September 1830, Grand Canal minutes 1830/1831, p. 147.
77 NAI OPW 10/1/69, John Edge, 29th March 1831, Grand Canal minutes 1830/1831, p. 369.
78 NAI OPW 10/1/69, Letter from John Edge, 11th March 1831, Grand Canal minutes 1830/1831, p. 342.
79 NAI OPW 10/1/69, letter from John Edge, 5th Apr. 1831, Grand Canal minutes 1830/1831, p. 372; Trinity College Dublin, Hartpole-Bowen, MS 4813–4/18, agreement by Charles Jones Bowen and John Lecky to proposals of John Edge for new lease of Clonbrock and mines if Grand Canal Company surrenders their lease, 12th April 1831.
80 State of Ireland, p. 170.
81 State of Ireland, p. 96.
82 Leinster Express, 22nd October 1831.
83 State of Ireland, pp. 170–1.
84 State of Ireland, p. 253.
85 State of Ireland, p. 180.
86 State of Ireland, p. 103.
87 State of Ireland, p. 273.
88 State of Ireland, p. 102.
89 State of Ireland, pp. 53, 253.
90 National Archives of Ireland, M. 5469/1, ‘Rental and Observations & on the Lordship of Timahoe’, 1811.
91 Finns Leinster Journal, 21st October 1818.
92 Laois County Archives, Cosby Papers Ref/P1/85, Lease Listing c. 1742–c. 1872, ‘Leases of the Manor of Timahoe made by Thomas Cosby, Esq., dated January, 1821’ (note acreage in this document is given in Irish/plantation acres not English/statute acres – this is apparent from later lease renewals).
93 State of Ireland, p. 421.
94 Horner, Arnold, Mapping Laois from the 16th to the 21st Century (Dublin, 2018), pp. 154–5Google Scholar.
95 Andrews, J. H., ‘The Struggle for Ireland’s Public Commons’, in Flanagan, Patrick Ó, Ferguson, Paul and Whelan, Kevin, eds, Rural Ireland 1600–1900: Modernisation and Change (Cork, 1987), pp. 1–23Google Scholar; Clare, Liam, Enclosing the Commons: Dalkey, the Sugar Loaves and Bray, 1820–1870 (Dublin, 2004)Google Scholar; Dickson, David, Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630–1830 (Cork, 2005), pp. 342, 349–50Google Scholar; Colm Breathnach, ‘An Historical Geography of Social Class in Early Nineteenth-Century Dun Laoghaire’ (PhD thesis, University of Dublin, Trinity College, 2005), pp. 118–59.
96 Hovenden Stapleton, State of Ireland, p. 103.
97 Ibid., p. 162.
98 For instance, a rare surviving Whitefeet ballad contains the lines ‘As for Timahoe town, we may call it our own; In Timahoe town we may march up and down, And at Billy Dunne’s corner we’ll make them lie down’, David Copper, ed., The Petrie Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland (Cork, 2002), pp. 132–3; performed by Seán Corcoran here: <www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY7Tgce2F28> [18th December 2019]. Additionally, the Rev. James Delaney described Timahoe as an early centre of the Whitefeet (State of Ireland, p. 251).
99 NAI CSO RP S C 1821/315, letter from Thomas Cosby, Queen's County [Laois], reporting on the administering of unlawful oaths.
100 Donnelly, James S. Jr, Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824 (Cork, 2009)Google Scholar.
101 Thompson, E. P., Customs in Common (Pontypool, 2010), pp. 339–40Google Scholar.
102 Scott, James C., The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in South-East Asia (Yale, 1976), p. 6Google Scholar.
103 Cox, Laurence and Nilsen, Alf Gunvald, We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism (London, 2014), p. 57Google Scholar.
104 Thompson, Customs in Common, p. 344.
105 Ibid., p. 343.
106 Ibid., p. 6.
107 Ibid., p. 13.
108 Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant, p. 6.
109 Thompson, Customs in Common, p. 226.
110 Steele, Irish Land and British Politics, pp. 7–10; Bull, Philip, Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin, 1996), pp. 8–9Google Scholar.
111 NAI CSO RP 1832/2267. The threatening letters referred to here are from a collection of letters made by the authorities in the 1830s; the entire collection is designated under the single document number 2267.
112 Ibid.
113 Ibid.
114 Ibid.
115 Ibid.
116 Wiggins, John, Report on Three Cases of Successful Improvement of People and Property in Ireland, Effected between the Years 1815 and 1835 (London, 1836)Google Scholar.
117 Hoyte, Henry, A Treatise on Agriculture Addressed to the Noblemen and Gentlemen of Landed Property in Ireland; With Hints, the Practical Application of Which Must Ultimately Ameliorate the Condition of the Peasantry, and Greatly Improve the Landed Interest of This Kingdom (Dublin, 1828)Google Scholar.
118 Bartlett, ‘An end to moral economy’, 42, 62.
119 McKenna, Kevin, ‘Elites, Ritual and the Legitimation of Power on an Irish Landed Estate, 1855–1890’, in O’Neill, Ciaran, ed., Irish Elites in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin, 2013), p. 71Google Scholar.