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Gentlemen regulators: landlord/tenant conflict and the making of moral economy in early nineteenth-century Ireland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2020
Abstract
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.
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References
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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