I took a chance [with] the movement (the Land League), but I was rather inclined to think that so far from assisting in bringing about the independence of Ireland, that it would have the opposite effect; that when farmers would be emancipated and get their lands, such men would look on the boundary of their farms as the boundary of their country, because as a rule, farmers are very selfish men.1Matt Harris, MP for East Galway, 1889
A well-armed siege train set out from Portumna early in the morning on 26 August 1886 to evict Thomas Saunders from his thirty-four-acre farm at Drumeen, near Woodford. Woodford was the citadel for the Plan of Campaign, and the miserly Marquess of Clanricarde was provoking his tenants as he tried to get his rents at any cost. Such was the tension surrounding this particular eviction that twenty redcoats and 314 heavily armed policemen were involved, as the government was determined not to be humiliated by the locals.2
A crowd of 8000 people turned out to support Thomas Saunders in resisting this eviction. They became very animated by the arrival of the siege train. A large group barricaded themselves into the Saunders house and they were informed as to the progress of the eviction party; they were prepared to battle it out to the end. As soon as the party arrived, the crowd engaged in a ferocious fight to prevent the ‘emergency men’ and other members from taking ‘Saunders Fort’. As they began to charge at the house to gain control, those inside threw rocks, boiling water and even beehives to repel the party. Following a ferocious battle, the house was surrounded by the authorities in the face of a hostile and angry crowd. Twenty-two inside the house were arrested and received harsh prison sentences for their actions in order to set an example. One, Thomas Larkin, subsequently died in Kilkenny prison and became a martyr for the people in the community, with 4000 people attending his funeral. Clanricarde’s demands meant that each eviction was a pyrrhic victory as the cost in carrying them out was so high. The ‘Battle of Saunders Fort’ became a propaganda victory for the nationalist movement. The community in Woodford tried and failed to resist evictions; they were not assisted by the nationalist leaders who convinced them to be martyrs for the wider movement. This resulted in hundreds being forced to reside in League huts for years, even decades, after and the divisions following the Parnellite split saw the more middle-class elements of the movement assert their ideology over its direction.3
The story of Thomas Saunders is a story that is repeated across rural Ireland, in areas where the land agitation reordered Irish society. His story is unique unto itself only in particular details. Rural Ireland was remade in the experiences of ordinary people who lived on the land in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. But what was this remaking? And how can we grapple with the complexities of local conditions? While the experience of ordinary people is privileged throughout this work, this is a challenge to the haphazard nature of the archival record for the lower classes—that is, small farmers, labourers and town tenants. While they lived ordinary lives, their collective contribution to the changes that took place in provincial Ireland during this formative period was extraordinary. The nature of political movements, such as the Ballinasloe Tenant Defence Association, Land League, Irish National League and United Irish League, as well as lectures and provincial newspapers that provided educational outlets for them, were also vehicles for political change and agitation. They challenged the grip, which was interpreted as being almost feudal, that landlords could hold on local politics as they expected ‘their inferiors to submit to their authority. Such an attitude ran counter to the democratic impulses of the time’ and the ‘continuing attachment to the importance of rank ran ill with the younger generation of countrymen in the 1880s and 1890s’.4 Like the Welsh rural poor explored by David Howell, the peasant of Eugen Weber’s rural France, James Hunter’s Highland Crofters or E.P. Thompson’s English working class, the lower classes in Ireland have generally been written out of history. Consigned to statistical fodder, the Irish rural poor have been quietly lost to posterity because they did not leave a paper trail, and what we know of them generally survives in testimony to various Special Commissions on poverty and the land question, and through speeches made on nationalist platforms and through the letters pages of local and national newspapers. Studies of them rely heavily on statistical data, inferences and generalisations. Social radicals like Michael Davitt and Matt Harris succeeded in creating an imagined community of small farmers which could only have been perpetuated if this sense of community was real. For people, the parish was their community; it was real, embedded in their social and economic reality and had strong emotional appeal. ‘A strong feeling of local and parochial belonging existed over a very long period, and it declined slowly, and late, along with the civil and ecclesiastical parochial organisation that fostered it’.5 While the language of local political leaders at meetings and in letters to newspapers was heavily nuanced, their audience did not necessarily appreciate that and responded with violence on occasion. In relation to the Welsh poor, Howell rightly highlighted the challenge of trying to understand what their sentiments were and what grievances they actually had.6 This study faced similar challenges.
Through a re-examination of sources, along with a systematic interrogation and close reading of the local press, this book takes greater cognisance of the political engagement of this West of Ireland community in east Galway. By examining Ballinasloe—a large market town with a significant rural hinterland—it offers new insights into the shared experiences of class and identity formation. It explores the dynamics of rural proletarianisation in the West of Ireland through the prism of a community in flux in the town of Ballinasloe and its east Galway rural hinterland. It is true that historians cannot engage in participant observation of their subject matter, but ‘advocates of an anthropologically informed approach…warn…that the cultural distance separating the historian from his/her “acting subject” is an even greater problem than the limitations of the sources’.7 The rural/urban chasm in historical endeavour is often presented as a polar rather than a symbiotic relationship; this can be traced to high political attitudes seeking to deal with either urban or rural problems separately. Cultural formations associated with popular liberalism were formed as its language extended to Ireland. While the West of Ireland was seen to be impervious to modernisation, the seeds of the Irish National Land League were sown in Ballinasloe through the prism of the Ballinasloe Tenant Defence Association as the west became the citadel of the revolutionary change in rural Ireland in the late Victorian period.
The wide array of sources used gives a more textured picture to life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland. Extensive engagement with local newspapers is critical in assessing the provincial experience as they give a fairly representative account of life in provincial Ireland at this time. The fact that they also reported on affairs beyond the confines of the locality ensured that residents of local communities could be informed of events beyond their immediate world, which was an important process in the modernisation of Irish society. In this context, modernisation refers to the social variables that contributed to social progress. Therefore, developments in education, literacy, communications, transport and political awareness amongst the lower classes all helped in the modernisation of rural Ireland in the time frame being examined. This gave western nationalism a more cosmopolitan hue as speeches that were reported had inflections of Enlightenment and Chartist thought. This painful march into modernisation was not a post-Famine or even an Irish phenomenon. Michael Huggins has previously explored such challenges in pre-Famine Roscommon and found that pre-Famine popular protest had a more complex and sophisticated set of beliefs, influences and objectives than had been understood previously. Liana Vardi has made similar arguments in her work on a village in northern France and Eugen Weber does similar in his sophisticated work on rural France.8
This study relies upon a wide array of parliamentary papers, newspapers, estate papers and diocesan archives which have been utilised to give as authentic a voice as possible to the lower classes. Estate papers are a rich resource but limited in the story that they can tell. While the voice of tenants can come through, deference to the landlord is obvious; this makes them useful for assessing the deferential dialectic, but they need to be approached with caution (this is explained in further detail below). Religious archives are rarely interrogated effectively as there is a lack of understanding of how and why certain records were created. Historians tend not to see the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland beyond the political acts that it was involved in and they ignore the fact that the Irish Catholic Church is a subset of a global church. Religious archives offer an indication as to the cultural attitudes of a particular period as the pastoral initiative of the clergy transcended the spiritual and entered the political and social world. By engaging with other sources—such as parliamentary papers, the Chief Secretary’s Office Registered Papers and police reports—this book does offer a fresh perspective on the provincial experience that goes beyond socio-economic factors. While agriculture was the mainstay of the Irish economy, my interpretation of the sources presents the human stories behind the macro-economics. This work argues that the rural poor were not an inarticulate mass, but rather they were sophisticated and politically aware in their own right. With a few exceptions, their history has been largely neglected by scholars, and this book redresses this imbalance in historiography by deliberately focusing upon the rural poor’s experiences in order to further develop our understanding of the complex class relations in provincial Ireland.9 Martyn Lyons has argued that writing and literacy served a range of essential functions during this period. Writers expressed themselves in pamphlets, letters to newspapers, threatening letters and petitions to the government, landlords and employers. Even the illiterate ‘were writers with the help of intermediaries, and they were also part of the scribal culture of ordinary people’.10 They developed their own identity and interests which were expressed in a vigorous, democratic popular culture. This book provides a reconstruction of rural Irish social life and its complex class hierarchies, and contends that, in this formative era, the lower classes were self-aware and their respective identities as tenant farmer, labourer or grazier marked the limitations to their upward mobility.
The growth of local democracy expedited a shift in local power structures, and landlords were at a loss as to how this happened, resulting in an impotent response to the agitation. Landlords were often the centre of estate life and offered extensive employment to tenants, resulting in loyalty that fostered a sense of order which was interpreted as benevolence. In central New York, for example, the landholding system encouraged the persistence of paternalistic attitudes, and land was let as a reward for loyalty.11 While class structures remained rigid because of tenants’ sense of deference, they became more fluid as nationalists became increasingly confident, due to a m...