Irish Yeomen in the 18th Century
Jul 28th, 2010 by Conor McCabe
Following on from yesterday’s post on John Feehan’s talk in UCD in 2005, I just came across a mention of Irish Yeomen which dates from 1766. It’s quoted in Michael Beames’ book Peasants and Power: The Whiteboy Movements and Their Control in Pre-Famine Ireland (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983).
I’ll just quote the whole thing. Beames is talking about the effect of the cattle industry on Irish rural life in the 18th century.
The influence of the forces of the external market are particularly apparent in the origins of the first Whiteboy disturbances. The early and middle decades of the eighteenth century witnessed a movement in Irish agriculture towards increasing pasture at the expense of tillage. There were a number of reasons for this. The exclusion of Catholics from durable and profitable tenures under the Penal Laws encouraged them to undertake pastoral agriculture which required little effort or capital. From 1735 onwards, following a resolution in the Irish House of Commons, tithes were not charged on pasture land. But most important were the increasingly favourable marketing conditions - continental demand increased after the peace treaty of 1713 , and was further enhanced by a cattle murrain in Europe. Then, in 1758 and 1759, the Cattle Acts were suspended and the British market opened to Irish cattle, beef and butter. In response to these changes in the market, landlords increasingly let their lands to graziers who cleared them of small farmers and turned the land over to pasture. One effect of this process seems to have been the destruction of a large number of village communities. Viscount Taaffe wrote in 1766:
… keeping the lands uncultivated had the further consequences of expelling that most useful body of people called yeomanry in England, and Sculoags in Ireland - communities of industrious housekeepers who in my time herded together in large villages and cultivated their lands everywhere, till as leases expired some rich grazier negotiating privately with a sum of ready money took the lands over their heads… The Sculoag race, that great nursery of labourers and manufacturers, has been broken and dispersed in every quarter, and we have nothing in lieu but those miserable wretches on earth, the cottagers.
By 1760-61, the pressure for new pasture was strong enough in the province of Munster to tempt graziers into enclosing lands previously understood to be commons. It was these enclosures which sparked off the earliest Whiteboy disturbances: ‘the law indeed, is open to redress them; but they do not know the laws or how to proceed; or if they did know them they are not equal to the expense of a suit against a rich tyrant. Besides the greatest part of these tenures are by verbal agreement, not written compact.’ In such circumstances, the only option left apart from quiet submission was some form of violent protest.
Where grazing in the 18th century ties into NAMA and the current bank crisis is in the development of the Irish Catholic Middle Class - the graziers and middlemen - who consolidated their power in the 1920s; who were able to resist native industrialisation as it would have been against their ‘free-trade’ export business interests to England; who insisted on the Irish currency being tied to sterling, crippling financial growth; who agreed to the transplanting of fully-formed foreign industry on Irish soil as a kind of ‘third-way’ compromise between the need for growth and their own economic needs, creating a native non-agricultural-based capitalism which is centred around construction, finance and real estate (the interface businesses between foreign investment and the Irish State); that by the late 1990s construction, finance and real estate have such a hold on the Irish economy that almost everything is focused on facilitating their needs; and when the banks and speculators start to fold in late 2008 they are in a position to close ranks and use the entire resources of the State to protect themselves and fuck everyone else.
Anyway. Here’s the Smiths.
Conor, just a note to thank you for the excellent posts of late. Putting the current crisis in the historical context saves us from the sound-bite analysis and surface ‘insights’ which dominate the discourse. One would think everything was gravy until a few years ago and it was only because of (insert name of inividual or agency) that we lost our way. That the roots are deep, that the narrative was started long ago, is never entertained. And, so, our analysis and prescriptions suffer. No where is this going to be more clear than in the debate over privatisation - where public enterprise will be treated either as (a) cash cows) and/or (b) just oh so Fordist and/or (c) surplus to economic need. Your longer term treatement of these issues should give us a stronger footing in the debates to come - and, just as importantly, more passion.
Choice of the Smiths is pretty apt Conor - I suppose Mozzer and Marr are the ‘graziers’ to Joyce and Rourke’s ‘yeomen’
(thinking of the royalties courtcase(s) )
They’re all certainly descended from those forced out of Ireland by the economic basketcase set up from that time.
On another point of aptness - did you know about Mozzer having lifted whole phrases for this very song from a cult novel by Henry Green ?
Said novel being Loving / more on ‘Loving’ here . It seems to be a pretty clever 20th Century re-working of the Irish ‘Great House’ novel. Watch out on Google as the phrases ‘This Charming Man’ and ‘Novel’ end up with a majority of hits from Marian bleddy Keyes.
Finally - you should maybe change that phrase up there to ‘very selective free trade’ as I believe one of the major factors in the paucity of industrialisation in Ireland (apart from the lack of coal and other raw materials) was the blocking of the major export market of the time (England) by duties on manufactured goods - as England later imposed on other colonies that did have resources (India for ex.). As ever with ‘free’ trade - priority given to what suited the richest side of the balance most - unprocessed agricultural produce as you point out above.
haha! Hadn’t thought of that. They were milking dem royalties, weren’t they?
Never heard of Henry Green. Thanks for the up.
Thanks Michael. The stuff that they want to privatise is surplus to the needs of that comprador class - the financiers, estate agents and builders - but the hundreds of thousands who had to emigrate since 1922 were surplus to their needs as well. and now they are coming onto TV telling us that emigration is a rite of passage! They have killed our economy. We don’t need them. And really, at this stage, we should just tell them to fuck off.
Have to laugh at the Greens. They want an economy which runs in tandem with nature. The idea of having an economy which also runs in tandem with society, in tandem with ordinary people - well, that seems to have passed them by.
Yeah, I would echo Michael’s comments. Am really looking forward to the book.
Well this is what I’m planning
But I’ll probably end up with this
Funny the Smiths always remind me of cows and farmland. I first heard them when a friend gota a cassette of the kind of compilation that included the song above and ‘Hand in Glove’. We were country boys - not farmers but brought up in the midst of cow farming on the Cooley penninsula. One of us got a walkman at the time and I absolutely remember us venturing over fields - heading for ‘Collie the Robber’s Cave’ on one of the peaks in the area - listening to Morrissey. My friend and I’s other enthusiasm at the time was Bronski Beat. The gay references went WAYYY over our heads as we were 14-15 at the time with no BBC and nobody telling us about the world and its ways. I still remember him dressing up in head to toe bronski beat style for teenage discos at the time. We got a bit alternative in our tastes and it is strange to remember that this was quite directly as a result of three other kids around us in school in the town at the time.
One was a Pakistani guy who somehow had moved to dundalk with his family from the UK. He had an endless stream of Fall tapes. The two others had spent a significant part of their youths in the UK - one in Leeds - the other I don’t remember where - as the kids of working class irish emigrants. One - Mickey - was MAD into psychobilly music and had seen some of the bands on TV in England before moving to Dundalk and we got the Cramps from him. Fergal and his big brother were Punks. They had Conflict albums and stuff like that and made me tapes of the Sex Pistols. This music - particularly outside any knowledge of the BBC / music papers / what subcultures were was absolutely other-worldly.
Funnily enough my brother and me got our first real self-selected records at pretty much that time through money we got for doing a very dirty job for Larry Goodman just around then. One of our neighbours was the ‘Nobby’ who O’Toole writes about in the first chapter of ‘Meanwhile Back at the Ranch’. He hired us.
Did you learn that ‘hack and paste’ pastiche style chez Goodman too EC ??
You should’ve been able to pick up the BBC through your braces/fillings in the Cooley - from just across the Lough…
Ye wouldn’t even have needed a coat hanger.
Thanks sean for the crit. would love to know what u think I’m hacking/pasting/pastiching above. there is a big load of mountains between where i was brought up and carlingford lough. the cooley penninsula is a big place. and where i was tucked in under the mountains there was and is no bbc reception - tv or radio .
All I ever learned from goodman for what it’s worth was that port officials would turn a blind eye to crowds of kids putting new labels on boxes of beef destined for iraqi ships. The instructions we had were - ‘add 2kg to the weight and 2 years to the sell by date’.
Sorry EC - a passing bout of paranoia probably induced by eating Irish beef in the 80s - thought you were pastiching some of the recurrent themes of the last 6 months or so on this here blog…
No worries Sean. Well I wasn’t pastiching them - I’m interested in them all right and reading all that’s published so maybe some of the themes were on my mind - I really like the attempts on the blog to link sociology and irish linked tunes - so maybe I’m in that frame of mind too.
I’m a little music/personal history obsessed at present due to stuff I’m writing (forgive me if I started rambling) and I didn’t make any of that shit up. Just thought it was interesting, in the context of the discussion, that I got my taste for music from a mix of immigrants and returned emigrants. There were a whole lot of us in my peer group who that held for.
As for mad cow beef. This REALLY sounds like a tall tale but the Mad Cow scare broke out within a three minute walk of the house where I was brought up. At least I can look that up in newspaper archives to convince myself that it actually happened. I got a little paranoid myself visiting the folks round then as there were ET style checkpoints at every crossing in all directions and they were chasing every living thing up to the tops of the mountains and offing them.