In 1761, a peasant movement calling itself the Bougheleen Bawn, or Whiteboys, suddenly appeared in County Tipperary in Ireland. Bands of men dressed in white smocks, some on horseback, roamed the countryside blowing horns. They levelled fences around land recently enclosed as sheep runs, raided homes for arms and enforced oaths on anyone taking over the rental of a farm from which a family had been evicted. Before long the movement had spread over a large part of the country. The first of a series of ‘Whiteboy acts’ was passed in 1765, imposing the death penalty on those tendering illegal oaths or seeking to rescue prisoners. This was only the beginning. The Whiteboys would have numerous successors under a bewildering array of names: Rightboys, Hearts of Steel, Defenders, Threshers, Rockites, Whitefeet, Molly Maguires and many others. The Irish peasantry knew them simply as ‘the Boys’. 

Between 1761 and the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852, there was no peasantry in Europe so persistently rebellious as that of Ireland. They formed the backbone of the republican separatist United Irishmen revolutionary movement of the 1790s, and of the great campaigns of the 1820s and 1830s led by the Catholic Emancipationist Daniel O’Connell. At all times, the Boys were available as community enforcers of the ‘unwritten law’ of the peasantry.

Antagonistic relations between peasants and landlords are perhaps to be expected, but circumstances in Ireland did much to sharpen hostilities. The landlords looked upon Ireland as a possession their ancestors had conquered and saved from barbarism and Catholic obscurantism. They nurtured contempt for the peasants, whom they regarded as slothful