Did Captain Rock spring from the Hedge Schools? – Popular education and militant politics in 1820s Ireland

Maeve Casserly looks at the links between the ‘hedge schools’ and the rebellion of ‘Captain Rock’ in the 1820s.

 

Between 1821 and 1824, much of rural southern Ireland was rocked by a rebellion of a movement known as the ‘Rockites’ after their anonymous local leaders, each named ‘Captain Rock’, an anti-hero figure comparable to Robin Hood. There was an attempt at full-scale insurrection in North Cork and thereafter, many months of attacks by Rockites on the persons and property of landlords, agents, ‘land-grabbers’ and troops, with occasional burning also of Protestant Churches. The Rockites killed over 100 people during these three years. The authorities responded with over 100 executions and exiled 600 Rockites to penal servitude in Australia.

The period of the 1820s was a tumultuous time for the Irish nation as it struggled to search for an identity within the Union and, with difficulty, sought to adapt to change in an age of radical thought and religious fervour. The notion of the overarching power of the hedge schoolmaster on Irish Catholic agrarian society is one example, found in both contemporary works and recent scholarship, of an attempt to understand the complex political, religious and economic effects on the mentality of Irish society which culminated in the Rockite movement of 1821 to 1824.

 

Éire, an Island of Saints and Scholars

 

Education and the pursuit of knowledge has always been part of Ireland’s history.The writer Thomas Crofton Croker, in his 1824 study, Researches in the South of Ireland, highlighted; ‘the literary superiority of Ireland over the rest of Europe’ had long been the subject of ‘national exultation.’[1]Correspondingly, Thomas Moore, (Irish poet, singer, songwriter and entertainer, now best remembered for the lyrics to ‘The Minstrel Boy’),highlights the significance of the education system in his most influential political work Memoirs of Captain Rock.

In Moore’s best-selling biographical personification of Catholic rebellion, also published in 1824,he emphasised the tradition of a classical education among the ranks of the ‘Captain’. In his own words Moore’s Captain Rock explains to his English readers that they should not be ‘surprised’ by the ‘civilized and correct’ manner of the Captain’s language and use of classical quotations which was ‘once very common’ among men of his (lower) class.’[2]

In William Carleton’s sketch ‘The Hedge School’ taken from his 1830 novel Traits and Stories of Irish Peasantry, the author outlined the Irish people as being ‘grateful, affectionate, honourable, faithful, generous and even magnanimous.’[3]How then, in such a ‘civilized’ society could an exceptionally violent agrarian rebellion like the Rockite movement take place? Who was behind this movement? Some pointed to the informal education provided to the Catholic lower classes in the so-called ‘hedge schools’.

The hedge-schools had emerged throughout the countryside as a result of the harsh Penal Laws which had forbidden Catholic schools. One clear theme which emerges from the afore-mentioned three contemporary sources is that: the hedge schoolmaster played a pivotal role, as both an educator and prominent member in agrarian society, in encouraging the militant political and social sentiments which led to outbreak of the Rockiteviolence, and continued to fuel this violent mentality throughout the movement’s most intense period.

These sources illustrate that the hedge schoolmaster influenced Irish agrarian society through his social standing in local villages, his control of the curriculum and the books that were taught within the hedge schools, the spread of millenarian beliefs and the prophecies of Pastorini (in fact an English Roman Catholic Bishop named Charles Walmesly who prophesied that 1822 would see the final victory of Catholicism over ‘heresy’), and the revival of the revolutionary nationalist language of the United Irishmen of the 1790s.

 

Context: ‘Improving literature’ and the ‘Memoir of Captain Rock’

 

During the first decades following the Union, a new literary movement emerged in both England and Ireland, known as ‘improvement literature.’ This was to have a profound effect on contemporary portrayals of the Irish education system, in particular the hedge schools and schoolmasters and their power over Irish politics and culture. The first examples of such texts are Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent(1800)and Lady Morgan’s, The Wild Irish Girl, (1806).

 

Both texts did much to create the image of ‘romantic Ireland’, and promote the belief that there was a ‘fair Hibernia’ that might be rescued from ‘irresponsible leaders.’ The idea of this ‘irresponsible’ management of the rural Irish hedge schools under the idiosyncratic leadership of the schoolmaster exercised a particular fascination over the minds of many English people. In their characterisations of the hedge schools and the schoolmasters, Moore, Croker and Carleton tailored their own work to fit into their readerships need to understand the Irish mindset of the 1820s.

The Rockite movement was one of many secret societies, such as the Whiteboys or the Ribbonmen, organised by those at the bottom of the social spectrum in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, to defend the rights of labourers and poor tenants. The Rockite movement was at its most intense during the period 1821 to 1824, and began with the murder of the son of Alexander Hoskins, the agent of Viscount Courtenay’s estates around Newcastle West in Co. Limerick, by a party of seven men on 27 July 1821, headed by the original Captain Rock, Paddy Dillane.

 

This incident was however, just the catalyst for a violent agrarian rebellion, which had been fuelled by a complex combination of political and social polarisation within the context of the emerging Irish identity under the Union. The characterisations of the hedge school and the hedge schoolmasters in Moore, Carleton and Croker’s works were part of a wider movement in Irish literary culture which sought to rationalise this new forceful Irish mentality within the Union.

The most influential contemporary source which deals specifically with the Rockite movement is Moore’s Memoirs of Captain Rock. The aim of Moore’s Memoirs was to highlight to his British readership that Catholic militancy was a response to Protestant aggression and rarely for any religiously proactive reasons of their own.

However, a contemporary critic wrote on 1 April 1824 in the Westminster Review that Moore’s Memoirs did not explain how ‘individual Irishmen are worked up into that state of excitement and ferocity’ but instead strengthened the ‘absurd prejudices which exist’ against these men.[4] From this source in the Westminster Review, historianEmer Nolan concluded that Moore failed to depict Captain Rock as a ‘typical’ Irishman because of the language he used in Rock’s everyday speech.[5] Similarly, Robert Portsmouth is also critical of Moore’s portrayal of the Captain, as those familiar with the vernacular of the chap-book histories of rebels, will see that Rock’s language has clearly been adapted by Moore for romantic drawing-room sensibilities.

 

The Hedge schools

 

This distorted and often romantic portrayal of the hedge schoolmaster and his role in Irish agrarian society can be seen in Thomas Crofton Croker’s Researches in the South of Ireland. Croker asked, ‘What can be the object of a classical education to the children of Irish peasants?’[6] Croker reasoned that the restrictions and severe penalties surrounding the practice of Roman Catholicism under the Penal codes left the clerical profession ‘nothing to tempt the ambition’ of wealthy Catholic families and so ‘fell into the hands of peasants.’[7]

It was a surprise to many English readers that in an age which promoted the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and emphasised ‘useful learning’ that subjects like Greek, Latin and Hebrew, which formed an intrinsic part of the hedge school curriculum, were wastefully taught instead of necessary vocation skills.Despite the attempts of missionary groups such as the Kildare Place Society to use ‘improvement literature’ by authors such as Hannah Moore and Maria Edgeworth to influence the hedge school curriculum, the ‘chapbooks’ were far more popular because of their low cost and easy availability.

‘Chapbooks’ were crudely produced works, printed on coarse durable paper, containing between eight to thirty pages, and covered an eclectic range of topics from religious tracts to chivalric expeditions. Such examples include, Paddy’s Resource, which was a popular ballad collection of the United Irishmen, or Irish rogues and rapparree, one of many criminal biographies.

Both of these books are referred to by Moore’s Captain Rock as being in the ‘library’ of his own hedge school.[8] The ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ was evident in Captain Rock’s hedge school, where Ovid’s Art of Love was specifically paired with the popular insurgency of Paddy’s Resource, and Pastorini’sThe General History of the Christian Church (1771)on the curriculum.[9] It was this intermingling of classical texts with popular celebrations of heroic criminality and Catholic superstition that made the hedge schools so suspect in their involvement in forging the violent mentality of the Rockite movement. This along with the fact that many hedge schoolmasters such as Lawrence O’Conner had been hanged in 1795 because of their pivotal role in the foundation of the sectarian revolutionary movement,‘the Defenders’in the 1790s.

In ‘The Hedge School’ William Carleton also refers to the use of the classics in the curriculum, but in a much more negative tone than either Croker or Moore. Carleton proposed that the Irish people’s ‘barbarous’ education was solely as a result of the manipulation of the hedge schoolmaster: ‘they were trained and habituated to cruelty, revenge, and personal hatred, in their schools.’[10] In Carleton’s opinion, epic poems like The Iliad and The Aeneidwere twisted by the hedge schoolmaster to instil a love for violence, disloyalty and rebellion in its readers at a young age.

While it is true that the pupil’s education and the extent of the curriculum depended entirely on the qualifications of the master, Carleton’s damning analysis is contradicted by a number of other contemporary sources. One such example was the opinion of Thomas Wyse [historian of the Catholic Association, 1829, and architect of the national education and provincial schools scheme], in a letter, dated from 1830, in which he expressed the belief that, ‘the lower class proportionally to their position, are better educated that the middle and upper classes.’[11] From this account it can be deduced that the curriculum was more extensive in the hedge schools than in any other school of equal social status, as was the standard of education.

 

The hedge schoolmaster and Captain Rock

 

The role of the hedge schoolmaster in Irish agricultural society during the period of the Rockite Movement is another issue that presents contradictory contemporary accounts. In his characterisation of the hedge schoolmaster Croker wrote that, particularly in Munster, the village schoolmaster ‘next to the lord of the manor, the parson and the priest, is the most important personage in the parish.’[12] Because he was educated and therefore literate the schoolmaster was not only the frequent ‘promoter of insurrectional tumults’ but he also wrote ‘their threatening proclamations.’[13]

The ‘bombastic or pedantic tone’ of many of the threatening letters and notices, as well as their graceful style, can be traced back to the ‘practiced hand’ of the local schoolmaster.[14] An example can be found in the conviction of Thomas Heffernan, a schoolmaster, accused of having been absent from his house after nightfall, an illegal offense under the Insurrection Act. Heffernan was described as ‘a great writer of Rockite notices and of bad character.’[15]

However, Stephen Gibbons concluded from his collection of letters from the Rockite movement, that most of the letters appear to lack the ‘refinement of schooling’ characteristic of the prose of a schoolmaster, and instead come ‘straight from the soul . . . of the aggrieved party.’[16] Contrary to this argument, Croker claimed that the schoolmaster in writing these notices for the Rockitespurposefully used poor grammar and mis-spelled words. According to Croker, the schoolmaster would pompously sign his work with heroic pseudonyms such as ‘Captain Moonlight’ or ‘General Rock.’[17]

William Carleton was of a similar opinion that many of the letters, oaths and catechisms of the Rockite insurrectionists, were the work of village schoolmasters. Drawing on his own experiences, Carleton’s work documents in detail the numerous alleged abuses and dangers of the hedge school. One schoolmaster, he stated, was hanged for burning the house of an ‘Aagint. [Agent]’[18]

The influence of the hedge schoolmaster was not confined to their own local village as with the improvement in infrastructure during this period the schoolmaster acted as messenger for Rockite agrarian agitation.  Many rural schoolmasters carried oaths and regulations, as well as ‘catechisms’ which contained the questions and answers that Rockites used to tell friend from foe. Croker romanticised the image of the wandering schoolmaster in his contemporary account by emphasising his noble quest ‘in search of learning.’[19]

 The ‘wandering scholar’

However, Carleton contended that the ‘wandering scholar’ often played a more sinister role in fuelling the violence of the Rockite movement. He proposed that the schoolmaster was a ‘notorious character’ and the ‘organiser of secret political societies’ between different communities and contributed greatly to the circulation of the millenarian ideas in oral form. This important role reprised their part in earlier popular political and agrarian agitation, particularly during the period of peasant politicisation of the 1790s.

One such an example was that of Edward Connors, ‘an aged itinerant schoolmaster and land surveyor,’ who died suddenly in a cabin in Kanturk, Co. Cork in January 1824, with millenarian documents found on his person. One of the documents included the lines ‘I am commissioned to unfold unto thee . . . O Catholics, that the present captivity . . . [is] a preparatory measure towards the future exaltation and aggrandizement . . . Yet before that comes to pass, many strange occurrences shall take place.’[20]

Another similar example of the role of the itinerant schoolmaster in promoting unrest was the conviction of a man named Kelly, a travelling land surveyor and schoolmaster in north Tipperary, as being an ‘active agent of treason and outrage.’[21] The Old Bailey solicitor, anonymous pamphlet, in 1824,described a local schoolmaster named Hall, as a man who had “set himself up as a prophet” and his use of the writings of militant Catholic writer ‘Pastorini’ to trade on the “credulity and ignorance of the poor peasantry.”[22]

The role of the schoolmaster in promoting the primitive millenarisim of the period, in the light of which some Catholics, in the years 1823-5, anticipated an imminent wholesale extermination of Protestants, can thus be seen in both contemporary literature and real-life incidents during the period of the Rockite movement.

 Evangelisation and assimilation

 

Together with the radical millenarianism of Pastorini, the new wave of Protestant evangelicalism of the early 1800s influenced the contemporary perception of the role of the hedge school and its teachers on the Rockite movement. Similar to Moore’s romantic portrayal of Captain Rock, Croker’s image of the Irish peasant is equally idealistic, ‘a tattered Ovid or Virgil may be found in the hands of common labourers.’[23] Croker’s insinuation of the need to rescue this idealistic society is comparable to the attitude of Moore’s missionary’s perception of a nation in ‘a state of profound ignorance’ whose former glory days of her schools and colleges has disappeared.[24]

Moore’s emphasis on conversion draws attention to the English policy of using proselytization as a tool of assimilation. This refusal to incorporate themselves into a new Irish identity within the Unions is seen in Captain Rock’s senior enrolment of his children in the hedge school because of his fear to ‘risk the orthodoxy of the young ROCKS within the proselytizing vortex’ of a Charter School.[25] In his analysis of Croker’ seminal work, Researches in the South of Ireland, Kevin Danaher importantly noted that Croker ‘knew his countrymen’ and recognised that the Irish peasant ‘possess and lived by a tradition of his own which the learned world might study with profit.’[26] Moore’s missionary comes to a similar conclusion after reading the manuscript of the Captain’s ‘memoirs.’

 ‘Revival of the Irish nation’

It is important to acknowledge that while the Rockite movement may not have been predominantly political in its motivations and aims; there were numerous important factors in this movement beyond the stereotypical agrarian issues of economic grievances, and millenarian aspects. The cult of 1798 and the revival of the language of the United Irishmen can be seen in both the accounts of the hedge schoolmasters and in the rhetoric of the threatening letters and notices of the Rockite rebels, written by many of the schoolmasters.

The idea of the Irish ‘nation’ was one which featured regularly in the Rockite rhetoric. One such example can be found in a threatening notice which in December 1821 complained: ‘We are oppressed by the tyrannical laws of the English government, which we can endure no longer . . We [will] have the Irish parliament and king crowned in Ireland, as these formerly was.’[27] Books on ‘rapparee literature’ such as the History of Feeney the Robber,  had been read in hedge schools for over twenty years prior to the 1798 rebellion, and the fact that they were still popular might well suggest the prevalence of attitudes favourable to United Irishmen.

Carleton wrote that in the hedge schools ‘Eulogiums on murder, robbery, and theft were read with delight’, he mentioned in particular the popular chapbook, the Irish Rogues and Rapparees. Through these books Carlton argued that ‘their knowledge was directed to evil purposes—disloyal principles were industriously insinuated into their minds by their teachers, most of whom were leaders of illegal associations.’[28]Similarly in Moore’s Memoirs of Captain Rock,the Captain’s rebellious nature seems to be ingrained in him from an early age.

Learning off by rote was a widespread practice in the hedge schools, where school books would not have been easily available, and the Captain is still able to recall important quotes that have stayed with him from childhood. In the endof the first chapter of the Memoirs, the Captain Rock ties the history of his own family, the ‘Rock Dynasty’, with a line from Virgil.The message of ‘translation’ which Rock was taught as a boy is obvious, ‘Through Leinster, Ulster, Connaught and Munster/ROCK’s the boy to make the fun stir.’[29]

Emer Nolan’s points out that in these lines Moore first cites the voice of the Rockites and offers a literary equivalent of the threatening letters and oaths of the secret agrarian societies. This revival was the product of the structure and tradition of the local society as the divisions created in the 1790s were not extinct and at times resurfaced.

 Reforming the Rockite image

 The 1820s saw religious differences in Ireland become sharper and more intense. One factor was the simultaneous rise in the evangelical movement within Irish Protestantism, in conjunction with the spread of the millenarian religious prophecies of Pastorini and others, which predicted the annihilation of Protestantism on earth in the year 1825. A second factor was the revival of agitation over Catholic emancipation

Alongside the Rockite movement there was the non-violent lobbying of Daniel O’Connell and the Catholic Association with which the hedge schoolmaster was also connected. James Nash, a Waterford hedge schoolmaster was a ‘confirmed pacifist’ and O’Connellite, but he understood why the Young Irelander’s were frustrated with the Liberator’s peaceful policy. He spoke of the Young Irelander’s newspaper, The Nation, as being, ‘the greatest paper published . . . the prose left the dream of Plato in the background, and the poetry eclipsed the Iliad!’[30]

The hedge schoolmasters were not just concerned with insurrections and secret societies, as Dowling also gives an example of Tomás Ruadh O’Sullivan (respected poet and songwriter, as well as a schoolmaster) as another ‘great admirer’ of Daniel O’Connell. In analysing the legacy of Moore’s Memoirs Luke Gibbons, quoting Daniel O’Connell, states that the Memoirs were ‘to the struggle for Catholic Emancipation what Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to the abolition of slavery.’[31]

Moore, therefore, re-orientated the threatening ‘Captain Rock’ towards the new strident voice of Catholic middle-class politics of the mid-1820s. Thus the Memoirs, as part of the wider movement of ‘improvement literature’civilized the most fearful feature of Irish popular culture. It was, consequently, integral to the O’Connellite project of weaning the rural poor away from violent, local agrarian movements and leading them into non-violent, national politics.[32]

 Conclusion

In the works of Moore, Crofton and Carleton, the difficulty in representing an often violent Irish agrarian society to the ‘polite sensibilities’ of an English readership is apparent. The influence of the hedge schoolmaster in Irish agricultural society during this period, as seen in contemporary literary work, is evidence of the need to redefine Irish identity through a mentality of the pedagogy of the oppressed.

This attitude was stimulated by two closely linked notions prevalent in Irish society during this period; the idea of Ireland as the ‘holy nation’ and Ireland the ‘sorely oppressed nation.’ The characterisation of the hedge schoolmaster and his role in the Rockite movement found in the‘literature of improvement’ of the first decades following the Union was thus part of a wider re-adjustment of the formation and perception of Irish identity influenced by a combination of increased religious and political polarisation, sectarianism, and millenarian beliefs.

  

Bibliography

Primary

Carleton, William. The Traits and Stories of the Irish peasantry: second series, (Dublin 1830; latest edn London & New York , 1979).

 

Croker, Thomas Crofton. Researches in the south of Ireland : illustrative of the scenery, architectural remains and the manners and superstitions of the peasantry, with an appendix containing a private narrative of the rebellion of 1798, (London 1824; latest edn Shannon, 1964).

 

Moore, Thomas. The Memoirs of Captain Rock the celebrated Irish chieftain with some account of his ancestors written by himself, (London 1824; latest edn, Dublin 2008).

 

Secondary

Boyce, D. George.Nineteenth Century Ireland, The Search for Stability, (Dublin, 2005).

 

Danaher, Kevin. ‘Introduction’, Researches in the south of Ireland : illustrative of the scenery, architectural remains and the manners and superstitions of the peasantry, with an appendix containing a private narrative of the rebellion of 1798, (London 1824; latest edn Shannon, 1964) pp. vi-viii.

 

Donnelly, James S. Jr. Captain Rock, The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821-1824, (Cork, 2009).

 

Dowling, P. J. The Hedge Schools of Ireland, (Dublin 1968).

 

Gibbons, Luke. ‘Between Captain Rock and a Hard Place: Art and Agrarian Insurgency,’ in Tadhg Foley and Seán Ryder (eds.) Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, (Dublin, 1998), pp. 23-43.

 

Gibbons, Stephen. ‘Introduction’, Captain Rock, Night Errant : The Threatening Letters of pre-Famine Ireland, 1801-1845 (Dublin, 2004) pp. 9-44.

 

Katsuta, Shunsuka. ‘The Rockite Movement in County Cork in the early 1820s’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol 33.Issue 131.(May, 2003) pp. 278-296.

 

McManus, Antonia. The Irish Hedge School and its Books, 1695-1831. (Dublin 2004).

 

Nolan, Emer. ‘Irish Melodies and Discordant Politics: Thomas Moore’s “Memoirs of Captain Rock” (1824)’, Field Day Review, Vol 2. (2006) pp. 40-53.

 

Nolan, Emer. ‘Introduction’ The Memoirs of Captain Rock the celebrated Irish chieftain with some account of his ancestors written by himself, (London 1824; latest edn, Dublin 2008) pp. xi-li.

 

O’Connell, Helen. Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement, (Oxford & New York, 2006).

 

Portsmouth, Robert.‘Memoirs of Captain Rock, Review’, History Ireland ,Vol 17. Issue 1.(Jan/Feb 2009).

 

Wright, J.M. ‘“The Same Dull Round Over Again”: Colonial History in Moore’s Memoirs of Captain Rock’, European Romantic Review, Vol 14. Issue 2.(2003), pp. 239-249.