In the latter half of the eighteenth century, whether Catholics should be free to enlist in the British Army was warmly debated by the ruling caste in Ireland. It was, of course, the Penal Laws that stood in the way: according to these, no Catholic could do so, for it was not thought wise that Catholics should learn the use of firearms. However, Townshend became Viceroy, and took a new view of the matter. ‘He argued that “as the trade and manufactures of Ireland are almost totally carried on by Protestants, the number of whom is very small in proportion to the number of Papists,” it was of the utmost importance that Protestants should not be taken away for foreign service, and he proposed that Papists, and Papists alone, should be enlisted. “A considerable number of able men might be raised from amongst them in a short space of time in the provinces of Leinster, Munster, and Connaught.” Rochford answered that the arguments of Townshend had convinced the King of the impropriety of drawing off a number of Protestants from those parts of the country where the chief manufactures were carried on; that he could not without a special Act of Parliament order the recruiting agents to restrict themselves to Roman Catholics, but that in the present very pressing exigency he authorised them to make Leinster, Munster, and Connaught their recruiting grounds.’1 In this manner, adds Lecky, the Catholics were silently admitted into the British Army. (1771.)
A few years later, among the Catholics who look advantage of this hoodwinking at the Law was a poor Munster peasant, a labourer, a wild rake of a man, named Eoghan Ó Súilleabháin. He had misbehaved himself whilst in the service of the Nagle family, whose place was not far from Fermoy, and enlisting in the Army was his way of escaping the consequences. From Fermoy he was sent to Cork, transferred to the Navy, and straightway flung into England’s battle-line, thousands of miles away.
If one dwell on the incident, a great deal of Irish history, Irish history in any century, may be realised. Townshend, the Viceroy, the representative of Law, rough-rides over it when it suits him. The penalised Catholic, living from day to day, is callous whether his act is thought lawful or unlawful, if only it helps him here and now. In between English Viceroy and Gaelic peasant, strongly contrasted types as they are, we have the Nagle family, not greatly surprised, it is likely, at all this, they having seen what they had seen.
If one could, with imaginative assurance, enter first the life of the Townshend circle, and explore it; enter then the life of the Nagle family — a house where Irish was spoken to their Kerry labourers and English to their visitors from Dublin — and absorb it; and from this circle pass on and make one’s own of the world of the labourer — that hidden, teeming and ragged world that threw him up, a genius! — then one should be qualified to tell the story of Ireland in the eighteenth century. As yet, unfortunately, no historian of it has been so qualified.
The story of the Townshend circle has been shredded out patiently enough by the historians, to be again woven into something like coherency and shapeliness. Novelists have dealt with such houses as that of the Nagles, chiefly Maria Edgeworth; and writers of history have discovered interesting matter in the memoirs such families have, in rare instances, left behind them. But neither novelist nor historian has dealt with that underworld which threw up the silver-voiced labourer, Eoghan an Bheóil Bhínn — Owen of the Sweet Mouth — as his own people named him then, as they name him still, affection warming the soft Gaelic syllables — for with that hidden land neither historian nor novelist has ever thought it worth his while to deal.
Lecky imagined he had dealt with it! Not without pity for them, he wrote of the people of that darkened land as an almost countless mob — plague-stricken, poverty-stricken, shiftless, thriftless, desperate. He numbered them, as best he might, and traced their sufferings to the causes — and what else remained to be told? Of a mob, what else is there to tell?
This book, too, must touch on their sufferings, their degradation; but afterwards will move on to hint, at least, that all the time much else remained to be told. If only one could do it with as much patience, with as much learning, as Lecky did his share of the work! But even to dream of that, much less to attempt it, is not the task for the day. The immediate task is to show that Lecky presents us, for all his industry and learning, with only a body that is dead and ripe for burial; to show that this is far from being the truth; that all the time there was a soul under the ribs of this death; that the music which was the life of that soul had strength and beauty in it; and that to remain a clod to that music is for us not only to misunderstand the period, but unnaturally to forego our happiness and our privilege.
To that Hidden Ireland of the Gaels, then, we turn our faces.
To reach it one must, leaving the cities and towns behind, venture among the bogs and hills, far into the mountains even, where the native Irish, as the pamphleteers and politicians loved to call them, still lurked. ‘The savage old Irish,’ Swift named them; and Berkeley wrote of them as growing up ‘in a cynical content in dirt and beggary to a degree beyond any other people in Christendom.’ So far down in the depths were they that to the law of the land, though three times more numerous than all the others, they had no existence at all! In times of peace even, they were referred to as ‘Domestic enemies.’ ‘The phrase “common enemy” was, in the early part of the eighteenth century, the habitual term by which the Irish Parliament described the great majority of the Irish people.’2 And elsewhere Swift wrote (1720): ‘Whoever travels through this country and observes the face of nature, or the faces and habits and dwellings of the natives, would hardly think himself in a land where either law, religion, or common humanity was professed.’3 ‘Torpid and degraded pariahs,’ is the epithet of the balanced Lecky, speaking for himself; and Chesterfield, a mind still more balanced, said: ‘The poor people in Ireland are used worse than negroes by their lords and masters, and their deputies of deputies of deputies,’ while Madden spoke of all Ireland as ‘a paralytic body where one half of it is dead or just dragged about by the other,’ which, perhaps, is the unforgettable phrase.
The Hidden Ireland, then, the land that lies before us, is the dead half of that stricken body; it is the terrain of the common enemy, ruled by deputies of deputies of deputies, and sunk so deep in filth and beggary that its people have been thrust, as torpid and degraded pariahs should, beyond the household of the law.
This Hidden Ireland we will first look at and see as the travellers who dared to open it up beheld it; that is, we shall see its face rather than its heart; its body, but not its soul. It will be only a glance; for the historians, Lecky especially, have made their own of this aspect of it, and their books are there for the reading. But that glance given, we shall make on for thresholds that they never crossed, in hope that what we shall further discover will not only complete the picture they have given, but frankly alter it, as a dead thing is altered when the spirit breathes upon it and it speaks.
The Hidden Ireland was in a sense coterminous with Ireland itself, bounded only by the same four seas. Even the children of the Cromwellians who themselves, hardly fifty years before, had come to live in it, could not now speak English.4 Into the very heart of the Pale, into Dublin itself, this Gaelic-speaking Ireland flowed in many streams. The nobility, coming from their big houses in the provinces, spoke Irish to their servants. Those society people were not Gaels either in blood or feeling, and many of their descendants have become bitterly anti-Irish, yet it is certain that the Colthursts of Blarney and the Lord Kenmare family in Kerry, were at this time speakers of Irish; it was necessary for them to be so, for otherwise they could not direct their workmen, who often knew no English; and those two families may be taken as typical of the county class. Among such people the new-born child was put out to nurse with a neighbouring peasant woman, and the intimacy thus established was frequently maintained in after years. It may also be taken as certain that the hangers-on about these large houses — the land stewards, agents, bailiffs, were frequently ignorant of English. We hear of a ‘well-bred boy’ in the County Down as speaking no language but Irish in 1744;5 while in the lives of the Gaelic poets we may note that many of them went into the cities and settled down in them, still singing their songs. Donnchadh Ruadh Mac Conmara (MacNamara) completed his education in the city of Limerick; there in Mungret Street Seán Ó Tuama (O’Twomey) lived for a good many years; while Brian Merriman died there, in Old Clare Street, in 1805. Domhnall Caoch Ó Mathghamhna (Daniel O’Mahony the Blind, died 1720), lived in Cork city, as also did Father William English, a witty poet, whose songs are still favourites among Gaelic speakers. And Father English had scarcely died there, in 1778, when another Gaelic poet, Micheál Ó Longáin, settled in it for some time. These poets, unlike the Colthursts and the Browns (the Kenmare family), were of the Hidden Ireland; but we do not need such evidence to show that its Gaelic waters reached everywhere, either in occasional streams or concealed floodings. Into all these cities, as into all the towns, there was a never-ceasing flowing of the country people, an intercourse that was then far more human and intimate than it is to-day. The roads were always alive with traffic, for country produce was brought in on horse-back or, though not so frequently, in wagons and carts; and arriving at all hours of day and night, and stopping at a hundred different warehouses and inns, the trafficking kept up a chatter and bustle and give and take of mind and wit that similar commerce in our own day knows but little of. Even in Dublin those traffickers were Irish speakers, if necessary; while in places like Cork and Limerick and Waterford their business was very often carried on in that language, as it is in Galway to this very day.
Young, who made his tour in 1776–78, says he found the English language spoken without any mixture of the Irish language only in two places, in Dublin and in the baronies of Bargie and Forth in County Wexford6 — a statement easily credible when one thinks of the children of the Cromwellians themselves having had to make it their mother tongue.
For all this widespread use of their language, however, the Gaels never made their own of the cities and towns: many of them trafficked in them, lived in them, yet were nevertheless little else than exiles among the citizens. Gaelic Ireland, self-contained and vital, lay not only beyond the walls of the larger cities, if we except Galway, but beyond the walls of the towns, if we except Dingle, Youghal, and a few others in Connacht and Donegal. For Irish Ireland had, by the eighteenth century, become purely a peasant nation. Indeed not only did it lie beyond the walls of cities and towns, but its strongholds lay far away beyond all the fat lands, beyond the mountain ranges that hemmed them in. History had seen to that: the rich lands had been grabbed from the Gaels centuries before by successive swarms of land pirates who, in a phrase written by one of themselves (an Elizabethan Brown of Killarney) ‘measured law by lust, and conscience by commodity.’ In the softer valleys those land pirates had built their houses, and Irish Ireland withered in the alien spirit that breathed from them. Even to-day we come on the remains of this Gaelic Ireland only in places where there have been no such alien houses for some hundreds of years.
Irish Ireland, then, while in a sense coterminous with Ireland itself, had its stronghold in sterile tracts that were not worth tilling. The hard mountain lands of West Cork and Kerry, the barren Comeraghs in Waterford, hidden glens in the Galtee and other mountains, the wild seaboard of the South and West, the wind-swept uplands of Clare, the back places of Connemara, much of Donegal — in such places only was the Gael at liberty to live in his own way. In them he was not put upon. Big houses were few or none. Travellers were rare; officials stopped short at the very aspect of the landscape; coaches found no fares, the natives being home-keeping to a fault: ‘They seem not only tied to the country but almost to the parish in which their ancestors lived,’ Arthur Young wrote of the Catholics, who had not yet learned to emigrate. Among themselves they had a proverb: ‘Is maith an t-ancoire an t-iarta’ (‘The hearth is a good anchor’).
The eighteenth century was everywhere a time of violence and hard-drinking for the rich, and for the poor a time of starvation and brutality. If that period was hard on the poor who tilled the plains of France, the rich lands of England, the golden soils of central Ireland, we may conceive how it must have been with the Gaels, whose only portion was rock and bog and wind-swept seashore!
It is only weakness to sentimentalise away the filth, the degradation, the recklessness that go with hardship, starvation and tyranny, when these are continued from generation to generation. If we would realise both the staunchness of the martyr and the blossom-white beauty of his faith, we must understand the rigour of the trial that tested him. In that dreadful century our forefathers were tested as never previously; and one cannot but think that Dr Sigerson is justified in writing: ‘For a time, Anti-Christ ruled in Ireland. Cromwellian cruelty looks mild, and the pagan persecution of the early Christians almost human when compared with the Penal Code.’7 The test that they underwent we will realise, as we learn of the ways of their daily lives, only if we keep in mind that the insult that went, and will always go, with poverty was the bitterest thong in the manifold lash. Illiterate peasants still keep in mind, as if they thought the lines worth remembering, a certain quatrain, which they attribute to that Eoghan of the Sweet Mouth, that wild rake of a man we have already come upon:
Ní h-í an bhoichtineacht is measa liom,
Ná bheith síos go deó,
Ach an tarcuisne a leanann í,
Ná leighisfeadh na leóin.’
Tis not the poverty I most detest,
Nor being down for ever,
But the insult that follows it,
Which no leeches can cure.
All that has been written about rural Ireland in that century, whether by contemporaries like Young, Miss Edgeworth and Barrington, or later writers like Carleton, O’Neill Daunt or Lecky, leave us with the impression of a land of extraordinary slatternliness — slatternliness and recklessness: while sorrowing, one could not help laughing. There were brighter spots, but these were due to chance or to individual effort. A landlord happened to be a philanthropist, or some tract or other fell out of the memories of the officials and began to fruit of itself. That these very infrequent cases were due to personal efforts speaks plainly enough for the slatternliness of the rest of the country. And it was a striking slatternliness, as common to the rich as to the poor: the typical Big House was as ill-cared for as the cabin — as untidy in its half-cut woods, its trampled avenues, its moss-grown parks, its fallen piers, its shattered chimney stacks, as the cabin with its dung-pit steaming at the door, its few sorry beasts gathered within doors for the night, its swarm of scarce-clad children running wild on the earthen floor. The slatternliness of the Big House was barbaric: there was wealth without refinement and power without responsibility. The slatternliness of the cabin was unredeemed, unless one looks into the soul of things. And between high and low there was, all authorities agree, no middle class; and consequently a dearth of the virtues for which that class stands. Domesticity must have seemed disparate to the very genius of the time. Anti-Christ governed the Catholic poor, not without difficulty; but the Lord of Misrule governed everything; and did so with merely a reckless and daring gesture: at his behest it was that everyone lived well beyond his means.
It is with the state of things after the Union that Miss Edgeworth’s book, The Absentee, deals: the appearance of the countryside, however, changed but little in all the years of misery between 1690 and 1881 — indeed much later than 1881 one could discover whole landscapes — in the Congested Districts of Connacht and Kerry, for instance, where little or nothing had changed: in Miss Edgeworth’s book, then, when we find this description of what was called a town, ‘Nugentstown,’ we may take it as equally true of the Nugentstown of the eighteenth century:
This town consisted of one row of miserable huts, sunk beneath the side of the road, the mud walls crooked in every direction; some of them opening in wide cracks or zig-zag fissures, from top to bottom, as if there had just been an earthquake — all the roofs sunk in various places — thatch off, or overgrown with grass — no chimneys, the smoke making its way through a hole in the roof, or rising in clouds from the top of the open door — dung-hills before the doors, and green standing puddles …
This I take for a quite true description of the small towns and villages of that period. Considering everything, they could not have been otherwise. Who was there to keep order, to set a model? If one reap and reap and never restore to the ground what it loses in each harvest, one should be as careful and as wise as were the rulers of the soil of Ireland in those days.
The larger towns were tidier, for their Protestant inhabitants enjoyed those rights of property that were denied to the Catholics of places like Nugentstown.
But of Irish Ireland it is, perhaps, better to realise the cabin as a thing in itself, than any hamlet, however small; for being then a peasant nation, the cabins, as might have been expected, were the custodians of its mind.
When Michael Doheny was an outlaw in 1848 on the mountains near Glengariff a rainstorm forced him to shelter in a hut which he thus describes in his book, The Felon’s Track:
The cabin was ten feet square, with no window and no chimney. The floor, except where the bed was propped in a corner, was composed of a sloping mountain rock, somewhat polished by human feet and the constant tread of sheep, which were always shut up with the inmates at night. The fire, which could be said to burn and smoke, but not to light, consisted of heath sods dug fresh from the mountain. A splinter of bog-wood, lurid through the smoke, supplied us with light for our nightly meal. The tea was drawn in a broken pot, and drunk from wooden vessels, while the sheep chewed the cud in calm and happy indifference. They were about twelve in number, and occupied the whole space of the cabin between the bed and the fireplace.
Elsewhere in the same book he describes a ‘cabin in the hills’ near Kenmare:
In the house where I slept — as indeed in every house of the same character in the country — the whole stock of the family, consisting chiefly of cows and sheep, were locked in at night. Such was the extreme poverty of the people that they would not be otherwise safe … There was a slight partition between the room where my bed was and the kitchen, where there were three cows, a man, his wife and four children. It is impossible to convey any idea of the sensations which crowd upon one in such a scene. I fell asleep at last, lulled by the heavy breathing and monotonous ruminating of the cows. Never was deeper sleep.
Catholic Munster certainly was no poorer, if indeed not richer, in 1848 than in 1748, and from these passages we learn how things then were. Doheny himself was sprung from the poorest class of Irish farmers, and followed the plough in his youth, yet it is clear that these cottage interiors surprised him: they would certainly not have surprised the son of any Catholic farmer in 1748, a hundred years before, for, as we know from Young’s pages, such cabins might have been met with right up to the gates of Dublin. In 1915, near Ventry, in West Kerry, I found a windowless, one-roomed cabin which could be described in lines taken from Brian Merriman’s poem, Cúirt an Mheadhon Oidhche (The Midnight Court), written in 1780:
Bothán gan áit chun suidhe ann,
Ach súgh sileáin is fáscadh aníos ann,
Fiadhaile ag teacht go fras gan choímse
Is rian na gcearc air treasna scríobtha,
Lag ina dhrom ’s na gabhla ag lúbadh
Is clagarnach dhonn go trom ag túirlint.
A cabin with no place to sit down.
But dripping soot from above and oozings from below,
No end of weeds growing riotously,
And the scrapings of hens across it,
Its roof-tree sagging, its couples bending
And brown rain falling heavily.
Brown rain, because it had come through the soot-impregnated thatch.
These cabins were thrown up anyhow and almost in any place. In the time of the Land League, when evictions were frequent, exactly the same kind of huts were often thrown up in a few hours in the shelter of a ditch, to house the suddenly dispossessed family: though not meant for permanent abodes, some of them were still being lived in forty years after — which should teach us how slowly a landscape wins back to comeliness after a period of disturbance, and enable us further to realise something of the slatternliness of that period in which there had been not even the beginning of recovery.
The cabins of the eighteenth century were sometimes built of stone, mortared or unmortared, but far more frequently of sods and mud. They were thatched with bracken, furze, fern or heath; and must have been often indistinguishable from the bogland, perhaps with advantage. Usually there was but one room, sometimes divided by a rough partition; and often a sort of unlighted loft lay beneath the roof. Chimney there was none, but a hole in the roof allowed portion of the smoke to emerge when the interior had become filled with it. The smoke was often seen to rise up like a cloud from almost every inch of the roof, percolating through as the thatch grew old and thin. The soot that in time came to encrust the walls and thatch within was occasionally scraped off and used as manure.
Between the absence of windows and the ever-present clouds of smoke, the people dwelt in darkness: it did not make for health, nor for quick convalescence when sickness broke out; quite commonly it led to blindness; though one must not forget to add the many prevalent fevers and plagues if one would understand why in any list of the poets of these days one comes so frequently on the word ‘Dall’ (blind) — Tadhg Dall Ua h-Uigín, Liam Dall Ua h-Ifearnáin, Seumas Dall Ua Cuarta, Donnachadh Dall Ua Laoghaire; Carolan might also have been called ‘Dall,’ while Donnchadh Ruadh Mac Conmara (MacNamara) became blind in his old age. Blind poets, blind fiddlers, blind beggars of all kinds were to be seen tapping their way on every road in the country, from fair to fair, from house to house.
Without as within, the hut had a haphazard appearance. Seldom was there a lease, either of house or land; and to improve either led to an increase of rent, perhaps to eviction. No attempt was, therefore, made at tidiness. A hundred years later, in 1838, Lady Chatterton, a lady with a taste for sketching, wrote in charming simplicity of mind: ‘The only thing I miss in Ireland is my favourite rural scenery; I mean by rural, the neat honey-suckled cottages with their trim little gardens and bee-hives.’ She would have missed them still more had she come sooner. Every hut had its dung-pit in front of the door, with a causeway of boulders giving passage through it; not far away stood a rick of turf; and practically nothing else: no barns, no sheltering plantations, no market garden, no orchard — and yet it might be a farmer’s house.
In appearance the inmates were one with their cabin. Both man and woman usually went barefoot, were scantily clad, and what they had of clothing was some other person’s cast-off, patched and re-patched.
The life about the hearth was one with the cabin and its people: it could not be further simplified. House and dress were so miserable that food was almost the only expense; and it was computed that £10 was more than sufficient for the whole annual expense of the family: yet even one bad year brought starvation.
The food consisted almost entirely of buttermilk and potatoes. Morning, noon and night, their dish was the self-same:
Prátai istoidhche,
Prátai um ló,
Agus dá n-eireóchainn i meadhon oidhche,
Prátai gheóbhainn!
Potatoes by night,
Potatoes by day,
And should I rise at midnight
Potatoes still I’d get.
Towards the end of summer their stock of potatoes ran out; and then they went hungry. Conditions improved again in the autumn, and if at this time a person showed any sign of giddy vigour in him, the others said mockingly: ‘There’s flour in the potatoes’ — it was breaking out in him as in the tubers. In the winter when the milk was scarce they ate the potatoes with a kitchen made of salt and water, or with a herring, or even a pinch of a herring: ‘From time to time each one of the family nipped with finger and thumb a little bit of the herring; to give a flavour to his potato.’8 An old peasant, living beyond Dingle, told me that the fishermen, unlike the landsmen, were not so badly off in 1847 — the time of the Great Famine — they had the periwinkles! Scraps of food, like periwinkles, all through the eighteenth century were reckoned essential foodstuffs along the coasts.
In some places, Donegal and Kerry, to name two, when everything else had failed, they had the habit of bleeding the cattle, ‘which they had not the courage to steal,’ says a contemporary account: mixing sorrel through it, they boiled the blood into a broth, and ‘Kerry cows know Sunday’ became a proverb, for it was to provide the Sunday dinner that they had to suffer.
In the winter months, when the work of the farm could be done in a few hours, the whole family, by rising late and going to bed early, managed to survive on two and sometimes on one meal in the day.
Some corn, some vegetables, a little poultry, were also raised on the farms, which were always small, but these were sold to pay the rent, as also were the live stock, if any, the family knowing the taste of meat only at Christmas and Easter, if even then.
Archbishop King tells us that ‘one half of the people of Ireland eat neither bread nor flesh for one half of the year, nor wear shoes or stockings.’9
When life struggled along thus, on its hands and knees, so to speak, there could have been no reserves of goods, foodstuffs or gold. Nor were there any, for whenever, after a prolonged season of rain, famine swooped on them out of a black mist, the poor souls went down like flies. The world rang with the havoc of 1847, but no one hearkened to the periodic famine cries in the eighteenth century. In the famine of 1740 — that famine which set Berkeley ruminating on the virtues of tar-water — 400,000 are said to have perished. One writer says that the dogs were seen to eat the dead bodies that remained unburied in the fields. Another contemporary wrote: ‘Want and misery are in every face, the rich unable to relieve the poor, the roads spread with dead and dying bodies, mankind the colour of the dock and nettles they feed on, two or three sometimes on a car going to the grave for want of bearers to carry them, and many buried only in the fields and ditches where they perished.’10
‘I have seen,’ wrote still another contemporary, ‘the labourer endeavouring to work at his spade, but fainting for want of food, and forced to quit it. I have seen the aged father eating grass like a beast, and in the anguish of his soul wishing for dissolution. I have seen the helpless orphan exposed on the dung-hill, and none to take him in for fear of infection; and I have seen the hungry infant sucking at the breast of the already expired parent.’11
And if we move either backward or forward from this midmost period of 1740, things are found to be no better. In 1720 Archbishop King writes: ‘The cry of the whole people is loud for bread; God knows what will be the consequence; many are starved, and I am afraid many more will.’
Bishop Nicholson, an Englishman, tells how one of his carriage horses, having been accidentally killed, it was at once surrounded by fifty or sixty famished cottagers struggling desperately to obtain a m0rsel of flesh for themselves and their children. In Swift’s terrible pages — his Modest Proposal was published in 1729 — the temper of the time looks out at us: we shudder at Swift’s self, we imagine, but the only thing then wrong with Swift was that he had a large heart and a seeing mind … And if instead of backwards we go forward twenty years from 1740 we are entering the period of Whiteboyism — evidence enough that the sufferings had come to a head and broken out.
A new harvest might delay the distress of hunger, but the consequences remained in fevers, fluxes, blindness, insanity, demoralisation. Even in a love lyric one comes on lines like these:
’S gurab í do phóigín thabharfadh sólás
Dá mbeinn i lár an fhiabhrais.
And ’tis your little kiss would comfort me
Were I in the midst of fever.
while the crowds were thinned at Art O’Leary’s funeral (1773) by the small-pox, the black death, the spotted fever:
Mura mbéadh an bolgach
Agus an bás dorcha
’S an fiabhras spotuighthe
Bhéadh an marc-shluagh borb san
’S a srianta d’á gcrothadh acu,
Ag déanamh fothraim,
Ag teacht dod shochraid
A Airt an bhrollaigh ghil.
Only for the small-pox,
And the black death,
And the spotted fever,
That mounted spirited troop,
With their bridles clattering
And making a noise,
Would be coming to your funeral,
O Art of the white breast.
And to the Gall, Seán Clárach Mac Domhnaill (MacDonnell) wished
Piannaid is fiabhras dian i dteas na dteinteadh.
Torment and gripping fever in the heat of hell fire.
But indeed from any one of the poets of that time a collection of such phrases as these — phrases that touch the life of the folk s0 intimately — might easily be gathered.
As hinted, the conditions of life were such as worsened every plague striking a countryside: the very huts themselves seemed to grip the wandering disease, to hug it, to keep it, until indeed its venom had entirely outworn itself. The cabins were crowded with life, yet, as a rule, contained only two beds, the father and mother sleeping in one, the children in the other, lying heads and points, the boys at one end, the girls at the other. There were no candles nor lamps: at night the family sat and talked around the turf fire, and if anything had to be searched for they lit a rush-light (the pith of rushes, dried and drawn through melted grease or oil), or else a splinter of bog-fir.
Such, then, was the life that went on in and around each of these cabins, if anything so poverty-stricken, so fever-plagued, so uncomely, could be called life.
Let us now give a swift glance at the country — the fields, the roads, the woods, the landscape in general. Agriculture was in a poor state, as might be expected when the cottiers were mostly tenants at will. Ploughs were scarce — often only a half-dozen of them in a parish; and these were hired out, as is done today in the case of a huge threshing engine. A meitheal, a gathering of the neighbours, assisted in the ploughing; and two, three, or even four horses, all abreast, were attached to the plough: the process had not become the lonesome task it is to-day. In the early part of the century, the plough was sometimes hitched to the horses’ tails — a custom not peculiar to Ireland alone. But the bulk of the crops were raised by spade labour, and not by ploughing. These labourers earned from twopence to fivepence a day; Eoghan Ruadh Ó Súilleabháin, one of them, threatens in one of his poems to go down to Galway, a fat land where the daily wage was sixpence; and there were always complaints and bickerings over the accounts as between middlemen and tenants; the tenant by all sorts of dodges being defrauded of the cash, if not indeed of his earnings: the chronic shortage of small coin, by leading to elaborate systems of barter, conduced towards this everlasting pilfering. ‘A great number of the peasantry in Ireland,’ we read, ‘know perfectly well that for the same work they would receive in England two shillings, and in Ireland only sixpence. And further, they would be much more sure of getting their two shillings in the one country than their sixpence in the other.’12
All the farm gear was as primitive as the plough. Carts or any sort of wagons were rarely owned or used by the landsmen; and any rough contrivances employed as such had solid wheels beneath them.
The roads were better than might have been expected, and the bye-roads often superior to the highways, for there was a system of local contract labour which gave the Big House care of the bye-roads about it, and a chance of making money into the bargain.
The roads were, of course, the only highways; and vast crowds of beggars, many of them blind, swarmed upon them. In 1742, it is calculated, 30,000 of them were moving from place to place; they were for ever coming between the wind and the nobility — that nobility that Young spoke of as ‘vermin.’ Berkeley thought out a scheme by which these vagrants might be set to work, loaded with chains; between them, however, and the cottiers — who never knew when they themselves would also be out on the roads — a great spirit of camaraderie existed, and the footweary found it easier to obtain a lodging for the night than he would to-day along the same roadsides. But there were others as well as beggars upon the highways — pedlars, packmen, horses laden with goods, wagons, carriages, coaches — and occasionally highwaymen.
Everywhere the giant woods were being cut down — the woods that like a magic cloak had sheltered the Gael in every century. The undertakers, the land pirates, not ever quite sure of their standing in so strange a country, were selling the timber on the estates at sixpence a tree — they were rifling the ship they had boarded. ‘Trees to the value of £20,000 were cut down, soon after the Revolution, upon the single estate of Sir Valentine Brown in Kerry.’13
An English lawyer named Asgill, who had married the daughter of Sir Nicholas Brown, and bought the estates of the attainted family, was responsible for this. Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, who was born not far from Killarney, sorrowed with the Browns — ‘Is díth creach bhur gcoillte ar feóchadh’ (‘Woe, your woods withering away’). But indeed all the poets lamented the vanishing woods: the downfall of the Gaelic or even the Gall-Gaelic nobility, the downfall of the woods — these two went together in their verses. One of our most beautiful lyrics, mourning over the ruin that had come upon the Butlers of Kilcash, begins:
Cad a dhéanfaimíd feasta gan adhmad,
Tá deire no gcoillte ar lár.
What shall we henceforth do without timber,
The last of the woods is fallen.
And in a lyric of about the same time we have:
Anois tá’n choill dá gearradh
Triallfaimíd thar caladh.
Now the wood is being cut,
We will journey over the sea.
This destruction was taking place all over Ireland: it was as if the undertakers had suddenly recollected Spenser’s words: ‘goodly woods fit for building of houses and ships, so commodiously as that if some princes in the world had them, they would soon hope to be lords of all the seas, and ere long of all the world.’ It was just then that the English were indeed becoming lords of all the seas, for the industrial revolution had begun, and markets needed to be established all over the world. The English adventurers in Ireland, the Bishop of Derry, the Bishop of Kilmore, to name only two, were, as always, in want of ready money; and so between one thing and another the Isle of the Yellow Woods was stripped of its beauty.
These half-felled woods were to be seen everywhere, even in the farthest places; there was, for instance, a great clearance made at Coolmountain in West Cork, a place where even to-day a stranger’s face is hardly ever seen. Some evil genius, it might seem, was labouring to harmonise all things into an equal slatternliness. The country, moreover, was speckled with ruins — broken abbeys, rootless churches, battered castles, burnt houses, deserted villages, from which the inhabitants were being cleared to make room for beasts; and these ruins were, for the most part, still raw, gaping, sun-bleached, not yet shrouded in ivy nor weathered to quiet tones.
Such, then, was in general the face of Ireland, such, more particularly, the face of Irish Ireland — that hidden land whose story has never been told. Poverty was its only wear — poverty in the town, the cabin, the person, the gear, the landscape. Civic life was not only broken, but wiped away. Institutions, and the public edifices, ceremonies, arts into which the institutional blossoms in home-centred countries, had ceased to exist. Life did no more than just crawl along, without enough to eat, unclothed, fever-stricken, slow: how could it have a thought for anything beyond mere existence from day to day!
The facts here gathered are the commonplaces of the social history of eighteenth century Ireland; and the political history of the period explains the causes of the whole frightful disorder: for the better understanding, however, of the remaining chapters of this book, as well as for the completion of this, it may be as well to touch upon the immediate causes here.
The rack-rents, that had so much to do with the poverty and the instability of the time, were, of course, themselves the result of the Middleman system, or, as Chesterfield stigmatised it, the deputy of deputy of deputy system of land-tenure. That system worked like a screw-press: the increase in the rent of any farm at the close of any half-year might be small, but the screw still went on revolving, the pressure increasing until, at last, human nature could no longer endure it: agrarian outrages burst out; and on these the man-hunt followed, the noble lords blooding their young dogs. That system one may simplify thus: The landed proprietor — the undertaker or the undertaker’s descendant — would let his estate or portion of it, ten thousand acres perhaps, to a middleman: having done this, the noble lord went away to the delights of London or Bath. The middleman, renting a large house in Dublin, then became one of the crowd of place-hunters who, in the phrase of the day, spent their time in Ploughing the Half Acre — that is, the Castle yard — keeping their eyes open, pushing their children forward, and periodically petitioning the King, through the subservient Parliament in Dublin, not to grant relief to the Catholics. The middleman usually acted as agent to a number of noble lords: impossible to oversee his far-flung and scattered acres, he in turn had recourse to men living in the various districts. These local agents, these under-agents, squireens, or stewards, usually kept an office in or near the local town. They in turn again employed bailiffs to collect the rents. These bailiffs were, in many cases, renegade Gaels and renegade Catholics; they were, indeed, the actual torturers, the actual headsmen under the horrible system. It was with them, and with the next nearest circle above them, the squireens, that the peasant came in contact; and the poets, who were, of course, peasants themselves, make us bitterly aware of what that contact meant for the harried people. But these poems will be glanced at later; here it may be better to see these squireens as Young saw them: ‘This is the class of little country gentlemen, tenants who drink their claret by means of profit rents, jobbers in farms, bucks, your fellows with round hats edged with gold, who hunt in the day, get drunk in the evening, and fight the next morning — these are the men among whom drinking, quarrelling, fighting, ravishing, etc., are found as in their native soil, once to a degree that made them the pest of society.’
There was no trick of squeezing money or value out of their tenants at will that these creatures did not know and make use of — from the canting of farms, without a day’s warning, to the cadging of poultry from the farmyards, or the juggling with figures at the end of the half-year.
The peasant had to wring from the soil the gold that supported this huge and artificial superstructure — the bailiff in the village, the steward in the town, the agent in Dublin, the lord in England. Living from hand to mouth, with no reserves, the cottier was at the mercy not only of winds and rains, but of every change, and even threat of change, in the body politic, the body economic. It happened that just as the Industrial Revolution had begun to open up new avenues of wealth to the big landowners in England, to woo them into the ways of commerce, disease on a large scale broke out among the herds of cattle in England; and the remedy shows the new direction that men’s thoughts had taken: Ireland began to be envisaged as England’s feeding ground of the future. A beginning was made by the raising of the embargo on Irish cattle, whereupon vast herds of Irish bullocks were set upon the roads towards the Irish ports. Then followed huge clearances: the landlords became suddenly aware that continuous cropping impoverishes the soil; moreover, no tithes needed to be paid on pasture: in what way they justified their grabbing of the commons is not very clear: the result of all was that herds of dispossessed human beings, as well as the herds of beasts, began to darken the roads. To know with any sufficiency what it meant one must take up some such book as MacKenzie’s Highland Clearances. Needless to say, ‘crime’ followed, the Whiteboys swooping headlong across the countryside in the dark nights.
Such economic-political storms were, it would seem, as frequent as the famines, which indeed were so often their aftermath. Every such storm stretched the peasant out longer on his rack of torture; and yet the whole tale is not yet told, for one cannot omit mention of the Penal Laws. Only for certain of them the Gael might, by becoming an owner of land, win beyond the rack-renting, and only for those others that forbade him the professions, he might occasionally win away from the land altogether; but no, there was to be no way out: those Penal Laws that denied him ownership, that forbade him education, that closed the professions to him — those laws were as so many nails that held him fast in the bondage where half a century of warfare had left him — a hewer of wood and a drawer of water — ‘to his conqueror,’ as Swift significantly added. And this, of course, was the purpose of those laws; and this the Gael knew and felt; so that in picturing to ourselves his condition in that wretched time — his town, his hut, his poor farm-gear, the dismal landscape — all one in misery — let us not forget to realise also that darkness which a mind in which hope is extinguished throws not only on the surrounding fields, but on the very heavens themselves — to picture the Gael’s way of life in those days is to feel that one has gone away from the human lands and wanders in a dream which must presently break. And as yet no word has been said about the laws against his religion, the one retreat where his heart might have eased itself of its stifling emotions. The Gael’s sufferings had not begun with the eighteenth century, nor was it then for the first time that his religion had been attacked; his cathedrals, his abbeys, his churches, had long since been stolen from him or destroyed. But there was a great difference between the old and the new assaults on his ancient faith. The old assault was open, and had indeed something of manliness in its hot-tempered violence. The new assault, on the other hand, was all lawyer-like with cunning — temptations, rewards and penalties. The children were to be bribed to barter faith for wealth and authority — over their own parents. They were to be wheedled into the luxurious service of God. ‘All this will I give thee if …’ There were no longer any cathedrals to be battered down or monasteries to be dispersed; what remained to be done was the crushing of private devotions, of even the smallest gatherings for religious practices. Not a relic, not a ceremony, not a memorial of the faith was to be allowed. The bells were silenced. The holy wells deserted. The priests banished, a certain number of them bought by gold. The dead must not be laid with their fathers in the abbey grounds. Mass could be said only in secret rock-clefts, with sentries posted on the hilltops; if said in some hidden garret in the town, then a curtain had better be hung between priest and people, so that the flock might afterwards truthfully swear, if put to it, that they knew not who the celebrant was. And this flock had better bring no prayer-books with them, and if they need a beads, let its appearance be disguised and its pendant any shape but a cross!
We have now glanced at the state of Catholic Ireland in the eighteenth century, viewing first the appearance of the land and then, very briefly, inquiring into the economy of life which had led to this dire aspect. ‘But this much,’ one hears whispered, ‘we knew before; and why do you speak of the Hidden Ireland?’ So much, and indeed much else, is known before, to all, it would seem: and were nothing further to be revealed of that unique people, one could not make the complaint that their story had never been told. Implicitly, if not explicitly, Lecky says that nothing else was to be revealed; and the novelists of that period bear him out. And yet this is not so, for a whole world, the world of mind and spirit, remains still to be unveiled. Yes, one might take the facts we have gathered and add life to them, vividly showing those peasants as grubbing their bit of rock-strewn land, ‘breaking the hill,’ as the Irish phrase has it, the mists and sea-winds about them, or as cloud-swarms of beggars wandering from fair to fair, or, maddened at last, as converging to a churl’s fields of a night-time and reaping and carrying off his harvest before the dawn, or as being dragged before the land-bailiff for daring to gather brosna in the woods, or as dying of starvation in their cabins, their mouths green with the munge of nettles; — and over against all this, one might, vividly again, evoke the wine-flushed revelry of the alien gentry, the hunting, the dancing, the drinking, the gambling, the duelling, with the Big House itself in the background, its half-felled woods hanging like dishevelled garments about it — one might do all this, as to the life, and still leave the secret of that land and people unrevealed. The truth is, the Gaelic people of that century were not a mob, as every picture given of them, whether by historian or novelist, would lead one to think. They were mob-like in externals; and one forgives the historians if those externals threw them out, but how forgive the novelists? If not a mob, what then were they? They were the residuary legatees of a civilisation that was more than a thousand years old. And this they knew; it was indeed the very pivot of all they did know, and the insult that followed on their poverty wounded them not only as human beings but as ‘Children of kings, sons of Milesius!’ (‘Clanna righthe, maca Mileadh’). With that civilisation they were still in living contact, acquainted with its history; and such of its forms as had not become quite impossible in their way of life, they still piously practised, gradually changing the old moulds into new shapes, and, whether new or old, filling them with a content that was all of the passing day and their own fields. What of art they did create in their cabins is poor and meagre if compared with what their fathers had created in the duns of kings and grianans of queens; yet the hem matches the garment and the clasp the book.
Here hinted, then, what the historians scanted; and scanting the soul and the spirit of a people, what of that people have they profitably to speak? But history has belied the historians, for that people, if they were but a mob, had died, and their nationality died with them: instead of which that nationality is vigorous to-day, not only at home, but in many lands abroad — ‘translated, passed from the grave.’