Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824

8. Patterns of Rockite Violence

246 Eight Patterns of Rockite Violence Investigating the Wave of Murders By the early 1820s agrarian murders were already a frightening commonplace of the deeply troubled Irish rural scene. What was so striking during the years of the Rockite movement was the scale on which the crime of murder, to say nothing of attempted murder, was committed . Detailed analysis of this important subject, however, is fraught with a variety of di∞culties. One major problem is the lack of comprehensive contemporary statistical data. Not until the 1830s did the constabulary begin to collect, collate, and present crime statistics systematically , and specifically agrarian offenses were not separately distinguished from general crime in the o∞cial compilations until the 1840s.1 The historian is therefore forced to rely for information about agrarian murder on the incomplete and unsystematic documentation that survives in national and local newspapers as well as in the State of the Country Papers (SOCP). For the discussion that follows, the Dublin Evening Post for 1821–24 (complete files), the Leinster Journal for 1822–24 (incomplete files), and SOCP 1, 1821–24, have been carefully examined. The counties covered are Clare, Cork, Kerry, Kilkenny, Limerick, and Tipperary. Additional sources might have been inspected , but probably without any substantial gain in the fullness or reliability of the picture that can be presented. 247 patterns of rockite violence It is obviously a matter of considerable importance to know how reliably murders in general and agrarian murders in particular were reported in the sources that have been consulted. Understandably and happily from our perspective, the press and the authorities heavily focused their attention on murders that arose (or were believed to arise) out of the ongoing agrarian rebellion rather than on homicides that stemmed from intrafamily violence, private feuds, or other causes unconnected with the Rockite movement. Yet the line between homicides arising from private feuds and murders related to or inspired by the Rockite rebellion was not always clear-cut, a fact realized by the authorities. They also recognized that private feuds terminating in murder increased in number during periods of intense agrarian turmoil .2 Deaths in faction fights, however, decreased in such periods because faction fighting itself greatly declined.3 Given the lamentable state of the surviving evidence, the question of what proportion agrarian murder bore to homicide in general cannot be answered at all satisfactorily for this period. But it does appear that the proportion was extremely high in County Limerick during late 1821 and early 1822. According to a newspaper report in early March 1822, the county coroner had conducted twenty-five inquests for murder in Limerick since the assizes closed in late September 1821.4 Of this number , Rockite violence was definitely responsible for sixteen of the killings and perhaps for another four as well.5 On the other hand, the proportional relationship in County Kilkenny somewhat later was quite different. There the county coroner conducted nineteen inquests for murder between the assizes in August 1822 and late March 1823.6 But only a single agrarian murder, according to newspaper and other reports , occurred in Kilkenny during that span.7 This sharply different pattern for Kilkenny seems to have prevailed throughout most of the Rockite years. In May 1824 an o∞cial bemoaned the fact that no one had been brought to justice for any of the twenty-two murders committed in three Kilkenny baronies during the previous two years.8 But the sources consulted for this analysis indicate that there were only six agrarian killings in all of Kilkenny from the beginning of April 1822 to the end of May 1824.9 Although some doubt must remain as to whether agrarian murders were less o◊en reported for Kilkenny than for Limerick , it seems unlikely that the sources fail to record the sheer occurrence of such crimes to any substantial degree. Yet in other respects the surviving evidence is o◊en deficient. In a substantial number of cases murders were stated to have taken place in districts highly disturbed by Rockite violence without the assignment of any motive for the killing, or without the adducing of any facts, such as those relating to the occupational status of the victim, from which a motive might reasonably be inferred. In all such cases— nine in number—it has been decided to exclude the victims from the group whose deaths are here taken to have...