Donald E. Jordan
(Cambridge University Press, £45 hb, £19.95)
The Land League started in Mayo. Its first meeting was held in Irishtown. As Jordan emphasises the geographical location was important. It lay in the southeast of the county, ‘where the rich central corridor and the infertile eastern periphery meet’. Even the circumstances of the first meeting, on 20 April 1879, were open to subsequent narrative disagreement between the leading participants. The catalyst for action was rent increase on the estate of one of the Bourkes; it was supported by the rich tenant graziers of the centre of the county and the poor small-farmers of the periphery; it was organised by substantial property-owners, like the newspaper proprietor James Daly who straddled an urban and rural world, and by the residual Fenians of the area who had been diverted from their usual path by the intervention of Michael Davitt.
None of this is new. It is covered in Paul Bew’s Land and the National Question, in the work of Samuel Clark, in the detailed account of the early years of Davitt’s career by T.W. Moody, in Lyons’s accounts of the period, and in a whole range of extensive economic and social analyses that have become a new orthodoxy over the last twenty years. This is, however, a very important book because it takes all of the new perspectives now accepted on the Land War and by applying them to one county, and particularly a county as crucial as Mayo, refocuses the lens.
It is centred on a core study of the Land League in Mayo, and draws on a meticulously detailed analysis of the economic transformation of the county after the Famine. It is prefaced by a survey which firmly weds the tenurial history to geography. Ironically, the device of an historico-geographical perspective serves partly to reinstate notions of continuous historical memory in relation to land ownership that is somewhat at variance with the more moderniste conclusions of the book’s core. For part of the new orthodoxy about land has been to emphasise the contemporaraneity of the construction of mentalities in the Land League years, in opposition to the older view of enduring atavisms of recollection. But Jordan above all shows the complexities and changes in a society frequently seen as static and uncontoured.
According to Jordan, Norman de Burgos displaced the O’Connors and their native allies in the thirteenth century by pushing them out to lands that are now Roscommon and Leitrim. Nativised as MacWilliam, some of these Burkes controlled the territory of what is now Mayo until the Tudor period. Connacht was shired in the early 1570s under the direction of Sir Edward Fitton, President of Connacht, in a general drive to administrative order. An English sheriff was then appointed to the newly created county. Revenue was collected to make the province of Connacht self-supporting, dealing a final blow to the old Gaelic-Norman exactions on their own people. The sept system was finished, and primogeniture ended internal sept allocations. The MacWilliam followed O’Neill and O’Donnell into exile after Kinsale and his arch-rival was rewarded by Elizabeth with the title Viscount Bourke of Mayo. During the transplantations to Connacht of the Cromwellian period Mayo was reserved for Ulster Catholic Irish, but most of them could not stick it, and gradually filtered back to the highlands closer to home. The Catholic Irish were originally banned from living within three miles of the coast lest they scheme with foreign powers, but this was soon dropped to a one-mile barrier. The largest group of immigrants to Mayo in this period were the displaced Catholic small-merchants of Galway city. After the Restoration in 1660 Royalists petitioned to have their lands restored. Among them were Viscount Dillon, the Earl of Clanricarde and John Browne of the Neale. In 1710 there was an outbreak of cattle-houghing attributed to rent-raises, evictions and the conversion of tillage land to grazing. The eighteenth century, according to Jordan, and endorsing Joel Mokyr, was characterised by an advanced and a subsistence economy, not divided between east and west as Lynch and Vaizey stimulatingly proposed in 1960, but living cheek by jowl everywhere, including in Mayo.
By the mid-eighteenth century, Jordan believes, even the remotest parts of Mayo were essentially drawn, at however low a level, into a cash economy. But by the early 1800s large tracts of land were still leased under a primitive rundale system dominated by intermediary headsmen. According to the Devon Commission fifty-eight per cent of the land of Mayo was held in this communal way in the 1840s, long after the system had died out elsewhere. Local protests were principally against the clergy of both the established and Roman Catholic churches. The shipping of grain from Benmullet was forcibly prevented by Steel Boys in the near-famines of the 1830s. Merchants were ‘bigoted, black and bloodthirsty’ foes of the people, according to a threatening notice posted in Ballina in 1830. Political agitation in the years immediately before the Famine was committed to abolishing tithes, calling for a repeal of the Union and breaking the parliamentary monopoly of the Browne family. Despite Jordan’s commitment to the argument for internal class divisions within the tenantry he makes it plain that he can see little evidence for this in pre-Famine Mayo where ninety to ninety-five per cent of the population were very small farmers.
Jordan is sketchy about the Famine, despite the availability of material on Mayo, particularly in the Bradshaw Collection in the Cambridge University Library. He quotes The Telegraph or Connaught Ranger from 1849:
From the four quarters of the county we hear of nothing but ruined landlords, levelled cabins, emaciated human beings crawling about, and deaths without end, the inanimate bodies, nine out of ten consigned to their kindred earth without coffins.
Land and Popular Politics in Ireland is a work of prodigious research that summarises a position that is an orthodoxy. It is an impressive and dedicated piece of scholarship, a tribute to deep knowledge and interest. It explains a good deal about the internal politics of Mayo after 1879. But in the 1880s, the author’s chosen decade, the seduction of models of anthropological and peasant studies blunt the intellectual credibility of his research. The denial of contingency, memory and place, on the one hand, and aspiration for lumpen-geographical determinism, on the other, betray Jordan’s revealed capacity to read secondary sources intelligently. It is perhaps unwise for a historian of Ireland to add three hundred years onto a text in order to please a publisher, though, as this text reveals, it can clarify and radicalise our vision.
Margaret O’Callaghan