Forcibly Without Her Consent: Abductions in Ireland, 1700-1850

By Thomas P. Power

Why do men abduct women? Are their motives sexual, economic, or social? How crucial is the use of violence? How important is the participation of others? What are the societal consequences of abduction?

Answers to these questions can usefully be found in a historical case study of abductions as they occurred in Ireland between 1700 and 1850.

Forcibly Without Her Consent describes in detail how abduction was a largely communally-sanctioned exercise in male violence against women, how it depended for success on a well established ritual, how it eluded suppression by the forces of law and order, and how it impacted class structure, marriage, and patterns of rural unrest.

In fascinating detail, Thomas Power uncovers the causes and implications of abduction. Reading this book will give you a deep insight into the social origins of abduction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450234559

Thomas P. Power

Thomas P. Power is sessional lecturer in the history of Christianity, Wycliffe College, University of Toronto. He is the author of The Apocalypse in Ireland: Prophecy and Politics in the 1820s (2022). He is general editor of the series Wycliffe Studies in History, Church, and Society.

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Preface

My interest in the topic of abductions dates back over thirty years to a senior undergraduate seminar conducted by Prof. L.M. Cullen at Trinity College Dublin. It was pursued as a sideline to my thesis on eighteenth-century Tipperary and some of my early thoughts on the subject were encapsulated in a paper, Abductions in Eighteenth-Century Tipperary, delivered at the Economic and Social History Society of Ireland annual conference held at the NIHE, Limerick (now the University of Limerick) in September 1984. Subsequent versions were given in papers at the Early Modern Seminar, Huron College, University of Western Ontario (1993), Early Modern British History Seminar, McMaster University, Hamilton (1993), History of the Family Conference, Carleton University, Ottawa (1994), and the Canadian Association for Irish Studies conference, University of Prince Edward Island (1996).

The documentation utilized and the conclusions reached are substantially reflective of the 1990s. The contributions of James Kelly, The abduction of women of fortune in eighteenth-century Ireland Eighteenth-Century Ireland 9 (1994) 7-43, and T. Barnard, The abduction of a Limerick heiress: social and political relations in mid-eighteenth century Ireland (Dublin, 1998) have prompted me to publish my own research on the topic. My approach differs from Dr. Kelly’s in a number of key respects: primarily I deal with the subject thematically rather than chronologically; I do not confine my treatment to women of fortune alone; I extend the coverage up to the Famine period; and I employ a range of additional sources notably Gaelic poetry, folkloric evidence, material from the Registry of Deeds, and private family papers, all of which contribute to a broader understanding of the topic and its dynamics over an extended period of time.

Thomas P. Power

Trinity and Wycliffe Colleges

University of Toronto

March 2010.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for comments rendered on different occasions over the years (see Preface) and to those who supplied references to material that I would otherwise have overlooked, notably Dr. Enrico Carlson-Cumbo, Professor Roger Emerson, Professor Gary Owens, and C. O. R. (Ormonde) Phillips.

I am grateful to the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for the grant of a fellowship at the Mills Memorial Library, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada, in the summer of 2009 which allowed me to consult some critical newspaper sources and which provided the impetus for me to finalize my writing. My thanks to Dr. Carl Spadoni, director, and the staff of the Archives and Special Collections at McMaster for according me excellent study facilities and a hospitable environment. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Marlene Power, for reviewing the text, for making helpful comments and suggestions, and for urging me to understand the broader significance of abductions.

1

Introduction

I am a bold undaunted youth,

My name is John McCann

I’m a native of sweet Donegal

Convenient to Strabane;

For the stealing of an heiress

I lie in Lifford jail,

And her father says he’ll hang me

for his daughter, Mary Neill.1

As a social practice, the abduction of women or marriage by capture was a distinct feature of primitive societies. It was a function of inter-tribal warfare, though not the principal means of gaining a wife. The practice is evident among the Hebrews.2 Among the Teutons and Scandinavians the practice is also recorded with war often being waged among them for the purpose of securing wives. It is also found in the early stages of Greek and Roman society, and survived among the Slavs into the nineteenth century.3 The importance of women in the pastoral economies of the circum-Mediterranean into modern times often entailed their frequent capture.4

The practice of abduction became more common in England in the later middle ages because, Bellamy suggests, the incomes of the nobility and gentry declined. Competition for land and partners increased, with those more desperate resorting to abduction to gain access to wealth and lands through marriage.5 However, the general outrage expressed at the abduction in 1827 by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the noted colonial statesman, his brother William and others, of Ellen Turner, spinster and heiress apparent to William Turner, esq., a wealthy man of Shrigley, Cheshire, reflects a changing attitude in the interim.6 The practice was also common in Scotland especially in the Highlands.7 In Ireland the practice is evident at least as early as Celtic times.8 Perhaps the most important abduction in Irish history was that by Diarmaid McMurrough of Dervorgilla, wife of O’Rourke, king of Breifne in 1166, which contributed in due course to the Norman conquest of Ireland.

Within the last decade or so, the topic of abductions has been highlighted as a significant aspect of Irish social history in the pre-famine period.9 It has also been the subject of a historical novel based on the abduction of the Kennedy sisters in 1779.10 In the folk poetry of the period abduction forms a distinct theme, and in the folklore of the country many recollections of abduction were still current in the popular memory as late as the 1930s.11 While the fascination with, and the occurrence of, the practice is unquestioned, more searching questions need to be asked of its nature and incidence if its full significance is to be understood in the context of pre-famine Ireland.

Most fundamentally, how widespread were abductions, numerically and spatially? What was the significance of the ritualistic components of the practice? What motivated its occurrence? Did it derive primarily out of romantic, sexual, economic, or familial motives and did these factors vary between different social classes over time? Finally, how and why did the legal and ecclesiastical systems allow the practice to be so pervasive for so long?

Before such questions can be explored more fully, two preliminary areas must be considered: first, the historiographical inheritance of the nineteenth century which first brought the topic to general attention in a specifically Irish context and which until recently has moulded the popular view of the subject; and secondly, the nature and problems associated with the source materials for such a study.

1.1. Historiography

Popular interest in the topic of abductions was initially aroused by John E. Walsh, the Waterford-born attorney-general, who in 1847 published anonymously a volume entitled Ireland sixty years ago. Walsh set out to illustrate his contention that Ireland sixty or seventy years ago [i.e. 1770s, 1780s] was an anomaly in the moral world,12 by emphasising areas of Irish social life which diverged from civilized practice, especially English codes of behaviour. Included in this category were archaic practices such as duelling, gambling, Dublin gang-rivalry, drunkenness, and abduction. On the subject of abduction Walsh’s view was that:

Abduction, or forcibly carrying off of heiresses, was another of those crying evils which formerly afflicted Ireland; but it was an outrage so agreeable to the spirit of the times, and so congenial to the ardent and romantic spirit of the natives, that it was considered an achievement creditable to the man, and a matter of boast and exultation to the woman.13

Clearly he judged the practice as a social evil but one which was condoned by society generally and which resulted from the mutually self-indulgent whims of the participants. The popularity of Walsh’s subject matter and his treatment of it are indicated by the fact that a third revised edition of his work had appeared by 1851 and there continued to be regular editions thereafter.

The theme of abduction as an aspect of lawlessness and deviance was reiterated by J.A. Froude as part of his multi-volume history of Ireland in the eighteenth century published in 1872–3.14 In an elaborate exposition of the practice, outlined in his chapter entitled Irish Ideas, Froude viewed abductions as a conspiracy by dispossessed Catholic gentlemen whereby, by carrying off Protestant heiresses, they would recover the equivalents for the lands which they considered themselves entitled to have been robbed.15 Apart from this material advantage, the act would also result in the recovery [of] souls at the same time to Holy Church.16 Thirdly, according to Froude, the practice enjoyed wide tolerance because of the inability of the law to eradicate it. Although parliament enacted legislation making abduction a felony, such measures remained a dead letter because local law enforcement agents (high sheriffs, grand jurors, and magistrates) hesitated to provoke a potentially hostile, majority Catholic population. In addition, he claimed, families of the abductees commonly did not prosecute because of their sense of disgrace; the abductors were able to use political influence to obtain a reprieve; and the Church regarded the marriage between the couple, however irregularly celebrated, as valid, thus making civil proceedings difficult.17 For these reasons the law was ineffective in stemming the practice which, when added to the material and religious benefits obtained by the Catholic abductors, contributed to a situation where anarchy not tyranny was Ireland’s scourge and the medicine which she needed was not concession, but the forgotten hand of Cromwell.18 Thus, though Froude laid stress on the lawlessness inherent in abductions as Walsh had done, he elevated discussion of the topic to a new level by depicting it in economic and sectarian terms within the general framework of futile English attempts to pacify and civilize Ireland.

Froude’s partisan view that abduction was essentially a reflection of a deep racial and religious conflict in Ireland was challenged by W.E.H. Lecky in his monumental history of Ireland in the eighteenth century.19 In his chapter on Irish Crime, Lecky concurred with Froude that abduction was widespread, claiming that it was frequent, widely diffused, and regarded by public opinion with a very scandalous toleration.20 As with Froude, Lecky also reasoned that much of this toleration was due to inadequate law enforcement saying that in Ireland at that period, the formation of habits of order and of respect for law was unnaturally retarded.21 On two major points, however, Lecky diverged from the interpretation advanced by Froude. Firstly, he viewed the motives for abduction as more diverse. Thus it might result from an unfortunate courtship with the woman being taken away by the rejected suitor. Alternatively, the local community might decide that a woman had remained too long unmarried, choose a husband for her, attack her dwelling, and force her to marry him. In other cases, abductions were carried out by robbers inspired by a desire for ransom, or by simple lust.22

Secondly, less speculatively, Lecky strongly refuted Froude’s sectarian interpretation of the phenomenon which claimed that abductions were a means whereby Catholics reclaimed property lost to Protestant planters in the seventeenth century and (in the process) by marriage to such Protestant heiresses, won converts to Catholicism. For Lecky the fact that Catholics constituted a majority of the population of the country inevitably meant that most of the crimes, including abduction, would have been committed by them. Additionally he argued that since the Protestant farmers were usually much richer than the Catholic ones it is not surprising that in abduction cases the criminal was sometimes a Catholic and the heiress a Protestant.23

In supporting his contention that a sectarian motive was not always explicitly present, Lecky cited information from depositions which indicate that of the 28 cases of abduction or attempted abduction which he identified for the first sixty years of the eighteenth century, in only four cases is it clear that the abductor was Catholic and the abductee Protestant. In three other cases she may have been Protestant; in three or four other cases the assailants may have been Catholic; but in the majority of cases there is no obvious indication of