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‘Craven subserviency had vanished. Bitter hostility had arrived’: agrarian violence and the Tenant League on the Ulster borderlands, 1849–52

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2019

Kerron Ó Luain
Kerron Ó Luain*
Affiliation:
Villanova University
*
*Center for Irish Studies, Villanova University, kerron.oluain@gmail.com
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Abstract

On the Ulster borderlands, the years 1849 to 1852 represented a crucial period in the development of a correlation between agrarian violence and constitutional political agitation. The emergence of the Tenant League in the region from 1848, along with a parallel clandestine violence from 1849, foreshadowed the better-known Land War of the latter part of the nineteenth century. This article analyses the hitherto unacknowledged interplay between agrarian violence and constitutional politics in south Armagh and surrounding districts. In so doing, it emphasises the years in the immediate wake of the Great Famine as being critical in the long-term development of more politicised forms of collective action. Such methods, in turn, would ultimately be deployed to the detriment of the landed ascendancy in subsequent decades.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 163 , May 2019 , pp. 27 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 2019 

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