'Craven subserviency had vanished. Bitter hostility had arrived': agrarian violence and the Tenant League on the Ulster borderlands, 1849–52. Issue 163 (May 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Luain, Kerron Ó
• Is Part Of: Irish historical studies. Volume 43:Issue 163(2019)
• Page Start: 27
• Page End: 54
• Publication Date: 2019-05
• Subjects: Ireland -- History -- Bibliography -- Periodicals; Ireland -- History -- Periodicals; History; Bibliography; Ireland; 941.5
• DOI: 10.1017/ihs.2019.3
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0021-1214

Abstract

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.