At the Rising of the Moon

The re-conquest of Ireland in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries smashed the old social order of lordship and tribal property and erected on its ruins a social structure of peasants and landlords. From the 1760s, the Irish peasantry developed a uniquely vigorous and continuous tradition of resistance and rebellion against landlord power. Following the language of the peasantry itself, I call this tradition 'Boyism' and its militants the buachaillí (lads). I demonstrate that peasant activis