Poetry Sunday

In 1798 Europe was awash with rebellion.  The French peasantry, sick of eating cake, went in pursuit of bread.  The poor aristocracy, God help them, had a shocking time of it altogether.  The poor, the downtrodden, the halt, the sick and the lame, knocked seventeen different types of pooh out of them and La Belle France was never quite the same afterwards.  Like the White Russians who streamed out of Russia over a century later, huge amounts of rebellion afflicted French aristocrats escaped to England, ably assisted by David Niven and Richard E. Grant as the Scarlet Pimpernel.

England was scared witless by the possibility of home-grown mayhem, so, to begin with at least, any suggestion of insurrection was harshly dealt with.

Ireland, convinced that the French were about to join them (which they were, if it hadn’t been for storms at sea and other setbacks) took to the streets in open rebellion.  Taken a little aback by Irish presumption, The English rallied their occupying forces and at Vinegar Hill, in the south east corner of Ireland, systematically cornered, then slaughtered thousands of ‘rebels’ armed with pitchforks and shovels.

In the same way that the French wore a red cap, the Irish cropped their hair unfashionably short to demonstrate their rebel status.  They hid out in the countryside, ambushing coaches and military convoys, laying seige to buildings, taking over military outposts and all of the other stuff that’s calculated to get you in big trouble with the authorities.  To sustain themselves they filled their pockets with barley, oats or wheat, whatever they could get.  These individuals were known as either ‘Croppies’, or ‘Croppie Boys’.

Gradually the rebels were pushed back and defeated.  A line or two from a still popular song might suggest something of the flavour…

“…But the gold sun of freedom grew darkened at Ross,[New Ross, Co. Wexford]

And was drowned in the Slaney’s red waves,

And poor Wexford, stripped naked, hung high on the cross,

With her heart pierced by traitors and slaves…’

(We Irish have a long and hallowed tradition of informers…we also have a tradition of taking the bastards out and shooting them…)

Heaney evokes the time, the period, the harshness of those years much more graphically than all the spongey, over sentimentalized tosh available elsewhere.

Requiem for the Croppies, Seamus Heaney

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley…
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp…
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching… on the hike…
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until… on Vinegar Hill… the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August… the barley grew up out of our grave.