A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

Merchants bought wool at the great fairs of Ballinasloe in Co. Galway and Mullingar in Co. Westmeath and employed people in their cabins and cottages to comb it and spin it into yarn. Some homes were big enough to accommodate a loom, but most of the spun yarn was taken to weavers in the larger towns such as Clonmel and Carrick-on-Suir in Co. Tipperary; Carlow town; Doneraile, Bandon, Mitchelstown and Mallow in Co. Cork; and Mountmellick and Maryborough in Queen’s County. In 1769 Arthur Young found 400 weavers in Carrick-on-Suir making broadcloths and ratteens, and by the end of the century there were some 3,000 employed in the town; the industry had been helped, no doubt, by the removal of the export prohibition in 1780.

  Kilkenny, then regarded as the largest inland town in Ireland, made frieze, flannels, druggets, worsteds and blankets for the British army. John Holroyd, the Earl of Sheffield, wrote in 1785:

  The amount of the consumption of woollens in Ireland ... is very great; and perhaps no country whatever, in proportion to the number of inhabitants, consumes so much. The lower ranks are covered in the clumsiest woollen drapery, and although the material may not be fine, there is an abundance of it. Besides coat and waistcoat, the lower classes wear a great coat, both summer and winter, if it can possibly be got. Not only their clothing but their stockings seem to contain a double quantity of wool, and the women among the peasantry seem to depend on other charms than elegance and ornament: they also wear the clumsiest woollens. There is no intention of insinuating that they always wear stockings, but that which covers their persons, and their petticoats, and also their cloke, if they have one, contain much wool, and all of the gloomiest colours; linen or cotton gowns are seldom to be seen among the common peasantry in Ireland.

  A colony of French Protestants in Portarlington in Queen’s County manufactured gloves, silk and lace. These Huguenots were particularly numerous in Dublin, where they made the city famous for ‘tabinet’ or poplin, a fine cloth of mixed wool and silk.

  In the capital, full-time weavers, then called ‘manufacturers’, worked in districts known as Pimlico, the Spitalfields, and the Coombe in the Earl of Meath’s Liberty, where they erected a Weavers’ Hall in 1750. An anonymous author, writing in 1759, described the wide variety of cloth produced, with a bewildering range of names:

  We have in Dublin, superfine, fine, and middling Cloathes, Serges, Druggets, Drabs, Ratteens ... Callimincoes, Everlastings, German-Serges, Stuffs, Camlets, Poplins, etc., all very well finished, and some to the utmost Nicety; as are also Velvets, plain and flowered; Hair and Worsted Shags; Silks of different Kinds and Patterns; Silk Handkerchiefs and Ribbands. It was with real Satisfaction that I have seen some pieces of superfine Cloth, of Home-manufacture, equal to any imported.... We shall, in a few Years, have scarce any Occasion of deriving these costly Commodities from other Countries.... Gold, and Silver Lace and Fringe, fine Hats, millinery Articles, Saddlers’ Goods, Cloaks, Watches, Cutlery-Wares, Fire-Arms, Coaches, Post-Chaises, Chariots, etc., are extremely well and neatly finished in Dublin.

  Much of the raw material for Dublin’s flourishing hat manufacture came from a flat sandy headland in north Co. Londonderry. At Magilligan the salt spray from the sea damaged crops, and in order to prosper the people had to supplement their income in other ways. Here the sand dunes and marram grass were home to the most extensive rabbit warren in Ulster. The local people, trapping the animals with ferrets and nets, sold the carcasses for about fourpence each and found buyers eager to take the skins for the capital’s felt and hatting trade. In the 1750s the Gage family, leasing Magilligan from the Church of Ireland, tripled the rent to 120 dozen rabbit skins and restricted the killing season to the months from November to February. By the end of the century the annual take was around 30,000 animals, selling at thirteen shillings a dozen.

  Most of Ireland’s manufactures were bought by Irish people themselves. But Ulster’s largest industry, linen, was also directed at the export market.

  Episode 133

  ULSTER’S DOMESTIC LINEN INDUSTRY

  From very early times the Irish had grown their own flax and made their own linen; it gets scant attention in Gaelic records, however, since it was produced by people who were low-born. This type of linen was still being made for local sale in the eighteenth century; however, its width was too narrow for the export market.

  Some of the leading Ulster planters, such as the Clotworthys of south Antrim, encouraged their tenants to grow and spin flax to help tide them over hard times. The government too was keen to foster an industry that did not conflict with English commercial interests; in 1696 it removed duties on ‘brown’, or unbleached, Irish linen bound for the English market. The Irish parliament paid a large grant to the French Huguenot Louis Crommelin to establish a colony of skilled weavers in Lisburn in 1698. Although these foreign weavers were scattered by a terrible fire which destroyed Lisburn in 1707, they had already taught others about the latest continental techniques.

  The Irish parliament set up the Linen Board in 1710: it awarded grants to inventors; gave subsidies to bleachers; paid tuition fees at spinning schools; and gave out—free—thousands of spinning-wheels to the poor. The board put up a Linen Hall in Dublin city in 1728, and the Ulster origin of most of the cloth is underlined by the names of the streets adjoining it: Coleraine Street, Lurgan Street, Lisburn Street. Here linen brought from the north in solid-wheeled carts was sold to English drapers, and it was not until the 1780s that Dublin ceased to be the main point of export for Ulster cloth.

  The making of linen in Ulster was a domestic industry, carried on in the home by people who divided their time between farming and the production of yarn and cloth. Planted in the spring in heavily manured soil and producing a delicate blue flower in early summer, flax was ready for harvesting about the middle of August. It was pulled, not cut, and then tied in sheaves, or ‘beets’, and allowed to dry in stooks for a few days. Then the beets were weighed down in a pond or a dammed stream, known as a ‘lint-hole’, and allowed to rot or ‘ret’ for about a fortnight.

  Now for the worst job of all: strong men plunged up to their oxters in the stinking lint-hole and, with special forks, heaved the wet flax out, ready to be spread out over the fields to dry. And after the flax had dried there was still more back-breaking work before it was ready for the spinning-wheel. For it was only after the flax was ‘broken’, ‘scutched’ and ‘hackled’—each process in itself intensely laborious—that the fibres could be made into yarn. Long fibres produced fine linen yarn, while short fibres, or ‘tow’, were suitable only for sacking and coarse cloth.

  The native Irish had spun yarn from a distaff with a weighted stone, or whorl, but this was being rapidly replaced by a treadle-operated spinning-wheel of Dutch design—the spinning-wheel most of us think of as being distinctively Irish. There can have few homes in the whole of the northern half of Ireland where the hum of the spinning-wheel did not blend almost every night with the soft song of the ‘spinster’.

  The yarn, wound on what was known as a ‘clock reel’, was ready then for the weaver—usually a man, for weaving was heavy work. Preparing the loom was a tricky job, as one account from Co. Armagh explains:

  There is considerable skill and knowledge required for putting up a loom properly, mounting her, and giving her a complete rig. Sometimes a weaver can do this for himself, but often he possesses not the necessary knowledge, nor the way to carry it into practice. And hence, in almost every country district, there are some of clearer heads and readier hands who become a sort of professors in this line.

  When the loom was tackled, the warp threads had to be dressed with flour and water, fanned dry with a goose wing, and then rubbed with tallow. Only then was the weft ready to be placed in the shuttle. Linen cloth was woven into a ‘web’, a roll of cloth one yard wide and twenty-five yards in length.

  It goes without saying that the completed web was not yet ready for the dressmaker. It had to be thoroughly cleaned of its tallow and flour, and then bleached white. Cleaning and bleaching w
ere almost as labour-intensive as the making of the cloth itself.

  It was to speed up this finishing of the linen cloth that drapers began to build massive water-powered machines across the Ulster countryside.

  Episode 134

  WASH-MILLS, BLEACH-GREENS AND BEETLING ENGINES

  In 1776 the English agricultural improver Arthur Young watched the linen market at Lurgan, Co. Armagh:

  When the clock strikes eleven the drapers jump upon stone standings, and the weavers instantly flock about them with their pieces.... The draper’s clerk stands by him, and writes his master’s name on the pieces he buys, with the price.... At twelve it ends; then there is an hour for measuring the pieces, and paying the money; for nothing but ready money is taken; and this is the way the business is carried on at all the markets. Three thousand pieces a week are sold here, at 35s each on an average ... and per annum £273,000 and this is all made in a circumference of not many miles.

  Early in the eighteenth century weavers bleached their own ‘pieces’ or ‘webs’, each one yard wide and twenty-five yards long. The linen had to be boiled and rinsed between seven and twelve times, and then laid out on the grass to be whitened by the sun and the rain. Each weaver had his own secret recipe for aiding the bleaching process, usually incorporating sour milk, urine and manure. Even then, linen was not ready for sale until the weave had been closed and given a sheen by being hammered on a flat stone with a wooden club known as a ‘beetle’.

  Not only was this exhausting, but it long delayed the time when a family could get hard cash for its webs. Not surprisingly, these finishing processes were the first to become mechanised as drapers began damming the streams to drive engines by water power.

  In the seventeenth century corn mills turned by horizontal wheels transferred to more efficient vertical wheels. The power transmitted from the wheel down the axle could be harnessed to an impressive array of labour-saving machines by the linen drapers. These drapers, in short, ensured that Ulster had an important and early role to play in Europe’s first industrial revolution.

  The heart of the industry was the ‘linen triangle’, extending from Dungannon, east to Lisburn, and south to Armagh; then, as output increased, Newry was drawn in. Within this area, and later beyond it, drapers dammed every available river and stream and constructed mill-races for their great water-wheels. On the River Callan in Co. Armagh there were no bleach-works until 1743, and yet by 1771 there were thirty-six bleach-yards along its banks finishing nearly three million yards of cloth. By 1795 it was reckoned that there were in Co. Armagh fifty-one bleach-yards, each covering around three acres and operating two or three wheels and finishing 162,500 pieces of linen.

  After being boiled in an alkaline solution for twelve hours, ten times over, the linen was then steeped in a sulphuric acid solution and then washed again. Rub-boards—corrugated wooden boards which were pushed backwards and forwards by water power while wet soaped cloth was drawn between them—were a local invention. The wash-mills, first introduced in the 1720s, dwarfed the very largest machines to be found in a modern launderette. Two massive feet, each weighing around a quarter of a ton, were suspended from a great wooden frame and swung to swirl and squeeze the cloth.

  In between these repeated operations the linen webs were laid out in fields to bleach in the sun, wind and rain. In the middle of many Ulster fields curious round stone huts with conical roofs can still be seen. These were watch-houses to keep an eye on the bleaching linen webs to prevent them being stolen. These were necessary, as a report from the Belfast News-Letter of 11 April 1783 makes clear:

  At the assizes for the county of Down ... the following persons were capitally convicted ... Stephen Gordon, otherwise McGurnaghan (to be executed at Castlewellan on Monday next the 14th inst.) for stealing linen out of the bleachgreen of George and Walter Crawford of Balleivy; George Brown (to be executed at Downpatrick 1st June next) for stealing linen out of the bleachgreen of Samuel McAlester of Lisnamore; John Wright (to be executed at Banbridge on Monday 21st inst.).

  The beetling engine was a striking improvement on hand-beating with a wooden club. A row of heavy beams dropped in regular succession on the cloth, the stamping process bringing out the natural lustre of the fibres, and giving the necessary sheen to high-quality ducks, hollands, hucks, buckrams, interlinings, and umbrella and book-binding cloth. As pounding one piece could last up to a fortnight and beat out a thunderous tattoo reminiscent of a huge Lambeg drum, the beetling mill had to be placed some distance from the main works.

  The success of rural linen industry provided a good living for the rapidly rising population in central and southern Ulster. Many, however, were restless and sought a better life across the Atlantic Ocean.

  Episode 135

  ‘A VAST NUMBER OF PEOPLE SHIPPING OFF FOR PENNSYLVANIA AND BOSTON’

  Ulster linen drapers could drive a hard bargain, but they acquired a reputation for straight-dealing. Not all were prosaic, hard-nosed businessmen. In 1795 Friend Thomas Stott of Dromore sent a pack of linen to his fellow-Quaker, Friend James Gilmour. Included was his bill, written in Ulster Scots verse:

  This morn’, Frien’ James, we sent a wheen

  Of good thick lawns and cambrics thin

  To Maister Mirries at Belfast

  (As we’ve been wont this sometime past).

  The hail are packed in ae stout kist

  That nothing hurtful might maelist.

  The lawns we fear ye’ll no think cheap

  Though we by them smal’ profit reap.

  The cambrics, tho’ they luk but lean,

  Will make a shift to haud their ain.

  On baith to this bit paper joined

  The bill o’ parcels ye will find.

  An’ we hae placed the fair amount

  Right cannily to your account,

  Which, if we cast the figures straight,

  Is just of pounds four score and eight,

  Five Irish siller shillins smug

  And six bawbees—to buy a mug.

  Weavers, too, composed verse during the long hours they spent at the loom. Not all were content, however. Ulster landlords were able to raise the rents year after year, and the county grand juries increased the local tax, known as the ‘cess’. Clergy of the Church of Ireland increased the burden of tithes, the compulsory payment farmers of every religion had to make to the Established Church. Rents quintupled in many areas between 1710 and 1770, and yet in the same period the average price of linen cloth rose only by twenty per cent. The sense of hopelessness created by these circumstances is encapsulated in the words of Ulster’s most famous ballad of emigration:

  For the rent is getting higher, and I can no longer stay,

  So fare well unto ye bonny, bonny Slieve Gallon Brae.…

  But these days are now all over, for I am far away,

  So fare well unto ye bonny, bonny Slieve Gallon Brae.

  The prospect of a better life in America undoubtedly had a very strong appeal for these industrious but poverty-stricken tenants.

  In the year 1718 eleven Ulster Presbyterian ministers and nearly three hundred members of their congregations petitioned Samuel Shute, the governor of New England, for a grant of land. Shute gave every encouragement, and that summer five ships left Derry quay for Boston. This was the start of a momentous migration across the Atlantic, and it got under way just at the time that the coming of Scots into Ulster had almost completely stopped.

  From the outset the authorities were alarmed because they believed the island would be drained of Protestants. William King, Archbishop of Dublin and a key member of the government, wrote in 1718: ‘No papists stir.... The papists being already five or six to one, you imagine in what condition we are like to be in.’ In the following year a Co. Monaghan land agent wrote a letter from the town of Clones to his employer:

  There is a hundred families gone through this towne this week past for New England.... I believe we shall have nothing left but Irish at last; but I hope
your honour’s estate will be safe enough, for they complayne most of the hardships of the tythes makes them all goe, which is true, for the Clergy is unreasonable.

  In July 1728 Thomas Whitney, a seaman waiting, wrote:

  Here are a vast number of people shipping off for Pennsylvania and Boston, here are three ships at Larne, 5 at Derry two at Coleraine 3 at Belfast and 4 at Sligo, I’m assured within these eight years there are gone above forty thousand people out of Ulster and the low part of Connacht.

  In November of the same year Primate Hugh Boulter, deputising for the viceroy, informed the British government: ‘The humour has spread like a contagious distemper.... The worst is that it affects only Protestants, and reigns chiefly in the north, which is the seat of our linen manufacture.’

  And why did Catholics not cross the Atlantic? The truth was that the mainly Puritan colonies of New England did not as yet welcome Catholic immigrants. In any case, most Catholics would have found it too difficult to raise the capital required. Presbyterians complained about taxes and rents, Penal Laws which excluded them from town councils, and being forced to contribute to a church to which they did not belong. Certainly the Presbyterian ministers played a leading role in organising emigration. Ezekiel Stewart of Portstewart observed in 1729:

  The Presbiteirin ministers have taken their shear of pains to seduce their poor Ignorant heerers, by Bellowing from their pulpits against Landlords and the Clargey, calling them Rackers of Rents and Scruers of Tythes.... Two of these Preachers caryed this affair to such a length that they went themselves to New England and caryed numbers with them.