My 19th and early 20th
Century Ancestors
The story of one ordinary rural Irish
family of the period, a tale characterised by Poverty, Resistance, Evictions, Famine,
Workhouse tenure, Imprisonment, Emigration, and Murder during the Land
Struggles, the War of Independence and the Civil War.
A few months ago I was asked to be a guest
of honour at the unveiling of a commemorative plaque in a rural area of county
Monaghan (Irish = Muineachán = little hill) to celebrate one small almost insignificant and largely forgotten tale
that was just one of many thousands of similar incidents that happened in the
land struggles between the Anglo Irish landlords and the rural native tenancy which
dominated the politics of nineteenth century Ireland.
The following text was inscribed on the plaque
, “In 1843 the tenants on the estate of Lord Shirley, of which the parish of
Magheracloone was a part, refused to pay their rents until their complaints had
been addressed by the landlord. Attempts by the bailiffs to seize cattle or
goods from the tenants who would not pay were stopped by the activities of the famed
‘Molly Maguires’. These bands of young men dressed up in women’s clothing with
their faces blackened, would ambush and beat up the agents of landlords who
attempted to confiscate the goods of the poverty stricken tenants.
The centre of British rule in Ireland,
Dublin Castle, was asked to provide troops to protect the agents who were
serving notices of eviction to tenants. On June 5th 1843, a bailiff
from the Shirley Estate along with a company of troops marched towards the Church
of Peter and Paul (this very church) in Magheracloone. The intention was to
post a notice of eviction to several tenants in the area on the door of the
church. They were met by a large howling and hooting crowd who blocked their
path. The troops fixed bayonets and moved forward, only to be met with a shower
of stones.
Several of the troops were hit with stones
and at the same instant the entire company discharged one round each from their
guns into the crowd. The crowd backed off.
The company commander, fearful of a great
slaughter, called his troops back to their carriages and they beat a hasty retreat
followed all the way by angry remnants of the crowd.
However back on the road in front of the
church (amongst the wounded people on the ground) a young servant boy lay dead.
Twelve year old Peter Agnew from Lisnaguiveragh Carrickmacross was at service
with Owen Smith of Corrybracken.
Peter Agnew was my great granduncle and it
was why the reason that I was invited to speak at the unveiling of the sign.
However this request from the Magheracloone
(Irish Machaire na Cluain = Plain of the Pasture) Heritage group and recent ongoing correspondence with Ed Eccles, a newly
discovered distant cousin in New Jersey USA, made me research further into the
history and origins of what became known as the Land Wars, the subsequent
struggle for national independence from British imperial rule, and to ascertain
the fortunes of my family and my home district of Carrickmacross (Irish = Carraig Mhachaire Rois, meaning "rock of the wooded plain) during this
period.
So who was Peter Agnew and why was he
working away from home at the tender young age of twelve? Why were there were
so many violent evictions of tenants in 19th century Ireland? Who
were the landlords and how did such a small elite come to own the lands of
Ireland? Why was Ireland at the time the poorest country in Europe?
Two years after Peter’s murder by the
British military, Ireland experienced a famine that led to the deaths of at
least one million people and the mass emigration of another million, mainly to
the North American continent. But it is worth noting that many smaller famines
had occurred in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The Gaelic version
of the Great Famine – An Gorta Mór (The Big Hunger) sums up best the reality of
the time, as the period 1845-50 witnessed the most extensive (but not the only)
period of starvation in the first half of the nineteenth century. Furthermore,
it was characterised by hunger amongst the general population rather than a
failure of a food harvest as wheat and other tillage crops as well as livestock
were still being exported from Ireland to Britain and its colonies whilst the
Irish peasantry starved to death.
To get answers to many of these questions,
we need to view the economic, social and political life of nineteenth century
Ireland as the legacy of the proceeding centuries.
By the 1840s, Ireland was not only the
poorest country in Europe but it was also the most densely populated.
Conquest and Colonizations
The
country had been occupied and colonised by invaders from the neighbouring
island of Britain since the 12th century. But beginning in the reign
of the Tudor dynasty during the 16th century, the native Celtic
peoples of England’s oldest colony increasingly suffered from what we now call ‘ethic
cleansing’ as local populations were forcibly removed from their ancestral
lands, massacred or sent in large numbers as slaves, indentured servants and
prisoners to English colonies in the Caribbean, North America and later to Australia.
Between 1652-1656, after the victory of Oliver Cromwell and his English Puritan
army over the Irish rebels, over 50,000 mainly women and children were sent as
slaves to work in the brothels and sugar plantations of Barbados and other
British islands in the Caribbean. In the following century, in the period 1700
and 1776, it is estimated that, of the approximately 400,000 who arrived in the
British North American colonies from the British Isles, approximately 50% were
un-free men and women. Negro slaves often referred to the Irish in verse and
song as having less status than the Afro-American. The most famous was Ann Glover the last person to be hung as a witch in Boston in 1688. Sent as a slave to Barbados in the 1650s where her husband was killed when he refused to renounce his Catholic faith, she later was transported to Boston. Falsely accused of being a witch by a group of young girls, she refused to speak English at her trail and spoke only in Irish.
Destruction of the Irish Forests
The conquered lands of the native Irish were
handed over by the British crown to Protestant settlers from England and
Scotland. The great forests that covered huge swathes of the Irish countryside
and formed an integral part of the Celtic way of life, were extensively cut
down in the 17th and 18th centuries by get-rich -quick merchants and
gangsters who flooded into the country from Britain. The timber extracted was
used to build ships for the British navy, for stave pipe production and as fuel
for the iron furnace industry. Ireland became after Iceland and Malta the least
forested country in Europe.
Under the Penal Laws, that were enacted in
the early 1690s after the victory of King William over the Irish Catholic
forces and which remained in force until the last legal remnants were abolished
in 1829, Catholics were not allowed to vote, purchase land, openly practice
their religion, receive an education or enter professions such as legal
practice or commerce.
The result was that in 1870, 97% of the
land of Ireland was divided into huge estates owned by a tiny largely Protestant
imperial aristocracy with 33.7% in the hands of 302 individuals and
approximately 50% owned by 705 families. The population then was 6.5 millions.
Slaves in their own country
The native Irish became strangers in their
own land forced to rent small holdings from their colonial masters at
exorbitant prices which could be increased at any time. The relationship
between landlord and tenant was one of conqueror and conquered.
The Anglo-Irish Aristocracy
The majority of the ruling Anglo-Irish
landowning elite were absentees living the good life in their country estates
in England or in palatial mansions in London, a lifestyle built on the rents
extracted from the poor downtrodden Irish peasantry.
Many were members of the Houses of
Parliament at Westminster elected by a corrupt system of patronage and wealth.
Thus the landed gentry had political as well as economic and social control of
Ireland. They cared little about
the conditions of the peasantry, having no paternal loyalty to tenants or to a
locality that they rarely saw. Their primary interest was to extract maximum
financial returns from their Irish estates.
This they achieved by hiring local agents
who had no scruples using gangs of thugs to evict tenants when rents were not
paid or to clear people off lands to make way for the conversion to pasture for
the less troublesome raising of
cattle. Many of the brutal
bailiffs and hired hands involved in the evictions were themselves Irish
Catholics.
The tenants had no fixture of tenancy.
Failure to pay meant immediate ejection from their miserable little holdings
with no entitlement under law to compensation or appeal. "Rack Renting" (the raising of
rents) was a common occurrence and was practised in order to get rid of
unwanted tenants for non-payment. There
were no appeals and no mercy shown. No incentive existed for tenants to improve
the lands that they lived on. In fact the opposite was the case; a higher
commercial return from their rented lands due to an a bumper crop growth or extra
livestock would mean an increase in rents.
Likewise, the rent would be higher if the
tenant had windows on his dwelling, if his door was over a certain height or if
he made any type of improvements or enlargements. Thus any enhancements by
tenants to their dwellings designed to make life easier for their families were
deliberately discouraged and penalised.
The majority of the population were a
landless poor who worked for tenant farmers in return for the rent of a small
piece of land to grow food and to build a mud cabin for their family. Known as
cottiers, the only nutritious crop that could grow in the poor soils of their small
holdings was the potato.
In
the 1830s, over half of the rural Irish lived in single room hovels made of mud
with no chimneys or light. These primitive buildings could be erected in a
matter of hours.
Their main source of food was the potato, a
highly nutritious plant that could be grown in large quantities on the poor
tiny strips of land that was all the cottiers and small tenant farmers
possessed to grown their own food.
Its availability led to a surge in
population. But a sole reliance on one crop would soon have tragic consequences
for the inhabitants.
Carrickmacross and south Monaghan in the mid-19th
century
This was the situation in Ireland when my ancestor
Peter Agnew was a young boy, the son of a farm labourer with a small holding of
a eight acres. His destiny and that of the majority of the eight million inhabitants of the island
was it seemed a lifetime of poverty, servitude disease, humiliation and
injustice.
The Agnews’ British absentee landlord
however enjoyed a life of wealth, privilege and political power.
Evelyn Philip Shirley (1812-1841) was the largest
landowner in county Monaghan with an estate of 26,386 acres in the barony of Farney.
His neighbour, the Marquis of Bath,
owned 22,761 acres. The origins of the Bath and Shirley estates go back to 1575
when English Queen Elizabeth granted lands in Monaghan to Walter Devereux, 1st
Earl of Essex in recognition for his wars against the ‘rebel’ Irish. In Celtic society, these lands were not
owned by one person or family, but were held in shared ownership by the members
of the local clans. As a
conqueror, the earl did not recognise the rights of the natives and planned to
‘plant’ his new lands with settlers brought in from England
Lord Shirley, as with his predecessors,
were absentee landlords spending most of his time at the family’s English
residency of Ettington Park at Stratford on Avon in the county of Warwickshire.
His father Evelyn John Shirley commissioned in 1826 the construction of a
magnificent mansion at Lough Fea county Monaghan to serve as a home for his twice
yearly visits. Built in the manner of a college, it contained a Great Hall, a
chapel and gardens.
Though based primarily in England, Evelyn
Philip nevertheless was elected in 1841 a Member of Parliament (MP) to
represent county Monaghan at the imperial parliament in Westminster. In these
elections, there was no secret ballot and only men of property could vote. As
with his father Evelyn John (1788-1856) he alternated his time as a Monaghan
MP, with being an MP for Warwickshire South in England. Likewise, both father
and son served as High Sheriffs of Monaghan and Warwickshire. The Shirleys were
thus classic examples of how the economic, political and judicial powers in
colonial Ireland and in Britain up until the early 20th century were
concentrated in the hands of a small self-perpetuating landowning elite.
Shirley had little interest in the
welfare of his Irish tenants. With some notable exceptions, the primary concern
of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy was to ensure the extraction of the highest
rents possible in order to maintain their lavish lifestyles. To ensure that this objective was
realised, the gentry hired men whose profession as landlord agents has become a
byword for brutality and tyranny. None more so than Sandy Mitchell, Shirley’s
agent from 1829 until 1843.
According
to Father Smollen, parish priest of Donaghmoyne, Mitchell had the rents “…raised fully one-third and in some
instances to more, and the bogs (for the extraction of turf as fuel for
domestic fires) which from time immemorial were free to the tenants were now
rented at from £4 to £8 per acre...and doled out to the tenants in very small
lots of from 25 to 40 perches each, with an obligation of taking out at the
office each season a ticket for which they paid a certain tariff. If any poor
tenant had the misfortune of displeasing Sandy during the year, he was doomed
to sit with his family during the long winter nights at a fireless hearth. ...
He [Mitchell] insisted on the Authorised Version of the Bible, without note or
comment, being read by Catholic children in those schools, a system of instruction
which neither the [Roman Catholic] bishop nor clergy could tolerate. The
consequence was that the bishop insisted on the children being withdrawn from
the schools, while the agent used all manner of persecution against the parents
for obeying their bishop...” Forced evictions became commonplace.
Mitchell
died whilst sitting on the landowners-only Monaghan Grand Jury in the spring of
1843. When news of his death reached south Monaghan, “bonfires were lit on
every hill-top, expressive of the rejoicement of all Farney at having got rid of
so unscrupulous a monster”.
Shirley’s
tenants were hopeful that his replacement as agent, William Stuart Trench, would
be fairer in his dealings on land and bog rents. Sadly this was not to be.
In response to a petition asking for a
reduction in rents due to a substantial drop in the prices received for farm
produce that was used by tenants to pay their rents, Lord Shirley agreed to a
meeting on April 3rd 1843 at his office in Carrickmacross where he
would personally listen to their complaints. Thousands turned up. However Evelyn
Philip, probably frightened by the size of the crowd, decided to back down and
hide inside his town house (Shirley House) residency. Hi agent William Trench informed the crowd that not only
would there not be any relief, but that “He would collect the rents at the
point of the bayonet if necessary.”
The angry tenants grabbed Trench and forcibly carried him off to Lough Fea
mansion where they expected Shirley was present. With no landlord coming out to
talk to them at the country demesne, only the intervention of a Catholic priest
Father Keelaghan saved Trench from being seriously hurt and secured his
release.
Shirley continued though to increase the
land rents, refused to abolish the charge on extracting turf from the bogs or
on lime (used as a fertiliser). Both of these local resources had up until now being free commodities to the natives.
From time immemorial the bogs were commonage, the turf being the fuel that feed
the fires of the Irish homesteads.
But Shirley privatised the bogs and imprisoned those who
‘trespassed’.
Troops were stationed in Carrickmacross to
quell any disturbances and an array of infamous law enforcers and thugs were organised
by Trench to seize tenants’ livestock and crops, to evict them from their
holdings, to have them arrested and to destroy their homes. The infamous
Shirley’s Crow Bar Brigade broke down the hovels of the evicted tenants so that
they could not be re-occupied at some later stage. With no home and no source
of income, many of these destitute families, estimated at three million people
in the early 1840s, starved or were forced to apply for residency in the
dreaded Workhouses, one hundred and thirty of which were built in Ireland from 1841 to 1843.
The people fought back as best they could.
On
April 25th 1843, Daniel O'Connell, the Irish
political leader and campaigner for Catholic Emancipation, came to Carrickmacross
to support the tenants campaign.
Over 20,000 people turned up to welcome him.
Groups of young male tenants with blackened
faces and dressed up in female clothing would issue warning letters to the agents
of Lord Shirley threatening violence if they attempted to evict tenants for
non-payment of rents. If they failed to heed these threats, many a bailiff and
their lackeys were ambushed as they went about their cruel duties. Affectionately
known as Molly Maguires, these
direct action defenders of the poor have been immortalised in song and verse as
courageous folk heroes.
To counter the new guerrilla tactics of the
tenantry, Shirley brought in military reinforcements and successfully applied
to the law courts in Dublin for new ejectment bills that did not have to be
served personally on the tenant but could be posted in certain public places
such as places of worship with a list of the names of the tenants to be evicted.
On June 5th armed with these new
bills, bailiffs and troops left Carrickmacross to nail the eviction notices on
the doors of Catholic churches in the surrounding countryside.
However the local population mobilised en
masse to protect their families, friends and neighbours.
Huge crowds of all ages and of both sexes
stood together in front of the chapels at Corduff, Corgreegagh and Rockchapel
to block entry to the armed men on horseback and in carriages. After securing
additional men from the town of Kingscourt, the armed force led by a Captain
Barry proceeded to the church at Magheracloone. There they were met by even
bigger crowd. With fixed bayonets, the military moved towards the church. When
stones were thrown, a volley of shots were fired into the crowd, injuring many
and killing outright Peter Agnew. When the unarmed country folk who initially
dispersed re-grouped in front of the church, Captain Barry ordered a retreat of
his unit
Though the victim was only a young lad of
twelve years of age, he was already working as a farmhand away from home trying to earn money for his poverty
stricken family.
According to the documents sent to me by
the Carrickmacross Workshouse committee, that same evening Peter’s body was
removed from Magheracloone church “…via the chapel road, past the farm of his
employer on the left, as it made its way up Corrybracken Hill, past the fort,
across the coal-pit road, up the Lurgans Hill to Mullinarry, left across the
Shercock Road to the Aghalile Road, to at family home in the townland of
Lisnaguiveragh (Irish Lios na gCuibhreach = Fort of the Bond).
(Note: It is surreal that the cortege
passed my own parent’s present home on Lurgan’s Hill, a house that we only moved into three years ago)
An inquest jury of twelve men examined the
body there. “…The funeral took place immediately after the inspection of the
body, and was one of the largest (if not the largest) ever seen in this part of
the country, notwithstanding the tempestuous state of the weather…”
Peter was buried in an unmarked family plot
beside the ancient church ruins in Magheross.
On June 8ththe coroner’s inquest
jury, after listening to first hand accounts from witnesses or a reading of
their statements, made the following observation in their verdict, “…it has
not been sufficiently proved to us, that at the time of firing, the party of
constabulary were in imminent risk of their lives…”
The death of his son brought only more
distress to Patrick Agnew and his family. Already poverty stricken, he had to
borrow and to use up whatever savings he had to pay for Peter’s funeral. The subsequent loss of his farm animals
(pigs) to disease and unable to plant a crop meant he had no means to pay the
rent to Lord Shirley. With his
family soon overcome with illness and hunger, a series of letters (written
possibly by a sympathetic lawyer) appealing to the landlord’s agent for
clemency fell on deaf ears.
Below is one of these letters:
To William Steuart
Trench Esq. (Shirley Estate Land Agent)
The Petition of Patrick Agnew of Lisnaguiveragh,
Humbly
Sheweth,
That your petitioner most Respectfully begs leave to advert to a
Petition which he handed to your Honour in February last in which he stated
part of the many grievances which have rendered him a monument of misery since.
He stated also that he was the father of the unfortunate Peter Agnew who was
shot by the police at Magheracloone on the 5th of June last, whose death has
filled the measure of his calamities, accompanied by Poverty, nakedness and all
species of destitution.
Besides the above, a malignant distemper carried off his pigs and a
lingering painful illnefs seized all his family, who had not a pound of woolen
day or night covering, a drop of milk or the smallest comfort in human life,
till the whole family are so overwhelmed with Distrefs and poverty that they
should rather prefer death than life -------Together with all his misery he is
in arrears of Rent, without hopes of being able to retrieve as he could not
Crop his ground this season. lie therefore submits all his Distrefs to your
humanity, and throws himself entirely on your clemency, beseeching you for love
of God to visit his place and ascertain the above
facts, and afterwards
dispose of himself, his family and place as your own Humanity shall dictate.
And he will ever pray
Patrick Agnew
May, 23rd. 1844.
I am sure that these supplicant words broke
the heart and pride of Patrick as he had them read out to him by his learned legal
friend. He more than likely could not read or write. But he was agreeing to put his name to a letter begging for mercy and help from the powerful
man ultimately responsible for the death of his son. But he felt that he had no
choice if he was to save the rest of his family.
Revenge could come later.
However William Trench did not forget or ever
forgive those who participated in the land campaigns against landlords. For
years afterwards, those who had campaigned for reductions in rents suffered
evictions.
Patrick Agnew was evicted by Shirley in
1849. Between 1845 and 1849, according to historian PJ Callen, the
Agnew families living in Lisnaguiveragagh disappeared, victims of the
Great Famine.
With nowhere else to go it seems probable
that Patrick and those of his
children that were still alive ended
up in the dreaded Workhouse
in Carrickmacross.
Written records on the inmates of the Irish
workhouses during this period are very sketchy as these ‘jails’ were
overwhelmed with a deluge of starving people seeking salvation from certain
death. Built in 1843 to accommodate 500, by 1851 approximately 2,000 were
crammed inside. To gain admittance, applicants had to forfeit whatever lands
they owned. In return, they were treated like prisoners; families were
separated, with men, women, boys and girls forced to live in separate Spartan
dormitories. The food was basic and unvaried, the work hard, the buildings cold
and bland. The Irish referred to the workhouse as ‘Teach na mBocht’ (Poor
House).
But at least one of the Agnews survived
this terrible period in Irish history.
Thomas, son of Patrick and a younger
brother of Peter, married Eliza Eccles in 1876 or 1877. They lived in the
townland of Beagh which borders the Agnew’s former townland of
Lisnaguiveragagh. Thomas was a
farm labourer. Eliza came from a family of milliners that lived beside the
nearby Creevy Lough.
Mill owners and operators would of course
be higher up the social scale that hired farmhands. The Eccles were probably
also of the Protestant faith and possibly moved into the district during the
1820s from county Armagh or north Monaghan at the behest of the Shirleys to
establish a water based mill for the grinding of locally produced corn to make flour
for bread .
According to family lore, Eliza fell in
love with the penniless Thomas. They had six children.
However they too were to suffer hardship,
evictions and even imprisonment as the land wars gathered momentum in the
1880s.
But that is another story for another chapter which will follow soon.
Agnews
The Agnews are an ancient Gaelic family
originally known during the Medieval
period as O'Gnimh, hereditary poets or bards of the ‘O’Neills of
Clanaboy.
The name was later anglicised to Agnew.
It is accepted by local historians that our
branch of the Agnews moved from the neighbouring county of Armagh to settle in
the townland of Lisnaguiveragagh in county Monaghan. They may have been
wandered south looking for work opportunities as farm labourers on the huge landed
estates , part of the great mass of rural poor.
