In the midsummer of 1763 six of the nine counties of Ulster temporarily passed out of the control of the landed élite and into that of the Hearts of Oak. People gathered in their thousands across most of Ulster, with the exclusion of Counties Antrim, Donegal and most of Down, to protest at the levels of the taxes levied by the grand juries, the collection of small dues by the clergy of the established church and the compulsory six days’ labour on the roads. At the time one Dublin newspaper expressed its horror at this outbreak among the ‘loyal Protestants of the North of Ireland’ and warned that ‘our neighbours [might] be glad to make a handle out of this to our great prejudice and scandal, as they did about the Whiteboys last year’. Among many observers the belief was that these embarrassing disturbances by Ulster’s Protestants, particularly by the Presbyterians — who had long been seen as a difficult element — should quickly be put down and the insurrection regarded as an aberration.
The scale of subsequent events in late eighteenth-century Ulster made it easier to forget the Oakboy disturbances. They were neither as long-lasting as the Steelboy outrages, nor as violent as the later clashes between the Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders. In the early nineteenth century the narrators of rural unrest, Richard Musgrave and George Cornewall Lewis, believed the Hearts of Oak disturbances to be of little importance, while historians like Lecky saw all agrarian rioters as largely cut from the same apolitical cloth. This was to remain the perception until the late 1970s and 1980s and a series of groundbreaking articles, several of them resulting from the research of James S. Donnelly. These showed a fresh insight into eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Irish agrarian troubles, accompanied by a willingness to use theoretical models of unrest in pre-industrial societies and the responses of their legal systems.