the burning of freeduff presbyterian church, 1743

University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)

The Burning of Freeduff Presbyterian Church, 1743Author(s): Sean FarrellSource: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 72-85Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20558013 .

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Sean Farrell

The Burning of Freeduff

Presbyterian Church, 1743

On October 13,1743, R?ndle Donaldson received news that the Freeduff Pres

byterian Church had been burned to the ground. Donaldson, a former high sheriff with considerable landholdings in South Armagh, had little doubt about

who had committed this outrage. His certainty was confirmed when he and

William Richardson, another member of the Armagh gentry, collected evidence

about the incident. The information, taken from members of the Freeduff con

gregation, was both consistent and wholly circumstantial; all understood the

crime to be sectarian in nature. The Reverend Alexander McCombes testimo

ny is an apt representative; McCombe stated that he was sure that "evil disposed

persons of the Papist religion" had destroyed his meeting house.1 Ellinor Mul

ligan's evidence is the most interesting and potentially insightful. Mulligan, who recently had traveled from Raffry townland near Strangford Lough to join McCombe's congregation and reside in the area, stated that a man, she pre

sumed a papist, had told her on the road that she had better not settle in the

region, where discounted rents were being used to attract Presbyterian colonists.

If she did so, it was intimated that her cattle would be houghed?that is, have

their hamstrings cut?and she would be burned off the land. According to

Mulligan, the man also mentioned Rev. McCombe, who was said to be acting

like a "little king" in the area and would soon be getting his reward.2 Whatever

the variant, no informant questioned the general consensus that local Catholics

were responsible.

Things did not stop there. With the considerable help of the Reverend Hugh

Hill, the Anglican rector of Creggan Parish and an important landlord himself,

the major landowners of the Fews region sent a petition on to the government

in Dublin. Signed by a fairly wide array of the central and south Armagh gen

i. Evidence of the Rev. Alexander McCombe, Fews Depositions, Public Record Office of North

ern Ireland [hereafter PRONI], T.1392/1/35-36), Groves Transcripts, PRONI, T.808/14925. 2. Evidence of Ellinor Mulligan, Groves Transcripts, PRONI, T.808/14925.

NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW / IRIS ?IREANNACH NUA, 9:3 (FALL / F?MHAR, 2005), 72~85



The Burning of FreeduffPresbyterian Church, 1743

try, the petition itself is an interesting document. After surveying the improve

ments that Protestant settlement had brought to this previously "wild and

uncultivated district," the petitioners expressed their fear that the church burn

ing "has intimidated any more Protestants to come and settle there and we

greatly apprehend will drive the present Inhabitants away."3 With this in mind,

the petitioners asked the government to offer a reward to aid in the capture of

the arsonists. Acting quickly on this request, officials issued a proclamation

offering a hundred pounds to "anyone who within three months would inform

as to who set fire to the Meeting House at Freduffe, County Armagh on 13

October 1743 ."4 Despite these efforts, no individual was ever charged or con

victed for the crime. There was, however, a collective punishment to be doled

out. At the Spring Assizes of 1744, a special fine was levied on the Catholics of

Creggan Parish to aid in the reconstruction of Freeduff Presbyterian Church.5

Clearly, the burning of this meeting house was widely viewed as a sectarian

atrocity and elites anxious to maintain and increase Protestant settlement in the

area could not allow such assaults on their nascent Presbyterian community to

go unpunished. For all intents and purposes, the matter ended there.

In their landmark studies of the evolution of communal identities in Ulster,

Sean Connolly and Marianne Elliott provide brief descriptions of the 1743 Free

duff church burning, with each citing the important roles played by such con

troversial settlement communities in keeping sectarian enmities alive.6 Yet no

one has examined these events in any depth. On one level, of course, it is easy

enough to understand why historians have failed to devote much attention to

this church burning. After all, no one died and the destruction of a thatched

roofed meeting house was not even much of a burning by Armagh's increasingly

lofty standards of violence. If these colonization projects played such key roles

in the construction of communal identities in the north of Ireland, however,

then surely more detailed consideration and study is warranted.7 What follows

here is a preliminary analysis of one such frontier community in South Armagh.

3. Proprietors of the Barony of the Fews to the Duke of Devonshire, Groves Transcripts, PRONI,

T.808/14925.

4. Proclamation re: Freeduff Outrage, Groves Transcripts, PRONI, T.808/14925.

5. Creggan or Freeduff Presbyterian Church Records, PRONI, MIC/1P/444/9.

6. For the best discussion available, see SJ. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of

Protestant Ireland, 1660-1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1992), p. 290. The Freeduff incident is also

mentioned in Marianne Elliott, The Catholics of Ulster (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 178.

7. The research presented here is part of a broader study of Scottish and English settlement and

the construction of communal identities in Ulster between 1660 and 1750.

73



The Burning of Freeduff Presbyterian Church, 1743

The late Cardinal Tom?s ? Fiaich, an important Armagh historian in his own

right, once claimed that the great Fews Road was "the most dangerous road in

contemporary Ireland."8 Whatever the accuracy of O'Fiach's ranking, early

eighteenth-century commentators clearly saw South Armagh as a dangerous

and inhospitable place desperately in need of military pacification. Much of this stemmed from the area's reputation as a lawless center of tory and rapparee

activity. The most famous of these "bandits" was Redmond O'Hanlon, a larger

than-life figure whose exploits dominated the South Ulster borderlands until

1681, when he was murdered by a foster-brother in the pay of the authorities.9

But O'Hanlon's demise hardly affected the regions dangerous reputation;

alongside wide areas of Connacht and the southwest, South Armagh remained

outside of the firm control of the British state in Ireland well into the eighteenth century. In fact, widespread colonization in the region occurred only after the

construction of the Fews Barracks near Creggan in 1730, a key component in

elite efforts to subjugate and "civilize" the area. Of course, this aspect of the

South Armagh experience was hardly unique; as David Dickson has noted, the

construction of barracks in places like the Fews was part of a broader scheme to

pacify several borderland regions across Ireland. Barracks and thirty-six redoubts were built in South Ulster, North Connacht, and Northeast Munster.

While most of the forts were abandoned when the bandit threat subsided after

1720, barrack construction remained an integral part of the state plan to forge a new order in the region.10

What is noteworthy about military "pacification" in this part of South

Armagh is both its late date and the sheer scale of state violence employed

against the local population. The central figure here was John Johnston, the

infamous Johnston of the Fews (Sean ad Fheadha), who directed a brutal cam

paign against "tories" and "Jacobites" in the region. The enmity that "King" Johnston created is certainly reflected in the following oft-quoted passage from

the service book of a British foot regiment in 1716: "Struck fear into the natives

who call for the popish Pretender ... we razed their cabins to the ground and

whipped the curs who cursed us in their Irish tongue."11 These curses clearly

8. Tom?s ? Fiaich, "Political and Social Background of the Ulster Poets," Leachtai Cholmcille, I

(1970), 23-34.

9. For O'Hanlon, see Elliott, Catholics of Ulster, pp. 119-20. For an overview of earlier instances of

social banditry in turn-of-the-century Armagh, see ?amonn ? Ciardha, "Toryism and Rappa reeism in County Armagh in the late Seventeenth Century," in Armagh: History and Society\ ed. A.

J. Hughes and William Nolan (Dublin: Geography Publications, 2001), pp. 381-412. 10. David Dickson, New Foundations: Ireland, 1660-1800 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000),

p. 53

11. Quoted in ?amonn ? Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685-1766 (Dublin: Four Courts

Press, 2001), p. 134.

74




reverberated in settler fears of "tory depredations," a trope found in most of the

contemporary documentation. This suggests that the settlers well understood

the key roles that state violence had played in the formation of frontier com

munities like Freeduff. At the very least, Johnston's brutal pacification campaign

sharpened and updated sectarian tensions already fed by rich tales of the com

munal violence that occurred in Creggan in 1641.

Along with state pacification efforts, it was the growth of the Ulster linen

economy that helped end South Armagh's relative isolation, forging a con

tentious landscape that featured more flashpoints for communal conflict. While

hardly the "wild and uncultivated" district of the settler imagination, South

Armagh's socioeconomic landscape was transformed by the advent of the new

textile economy. In need of cheap linens and having a weak domestic linen

industry, the English government encouraged linen manufacture in Ireland, giv

ing linen manufacturers duty-free access to the English market after 1696. With

its ultimate success rooted in the availability of widespread cheap female labor,

the successful foundation of the northern linen economy occurred with

remarkable speed; by the 1720s linen accounted for more than half of the value

of Irish exports to England.12 It was really the expansion of the linen economy,

along with the spread of tillage farming and the improvement of transportation

networks (construction on the Newry to Lough Neagh canal project began in

1731)? that transformed the South Armagh economy between 1700 and 1750.13 By

the 1730s the "age of improvement" had come to South Armagh, bringing a

series of new challenges for communal relations.

The expansion of linen manufactures was tightly connected to demographic

movement. From the 1690s forward, waves of Scottish immigrants moved into

East Ulster, driven from the Scottish lowlands by desperate economic conditions

and attracted by the prospect of cheap lands in the north of Ireland. As many

as 50,000 Scots settled in Ulster society between 1690 and 1715, putting pressure

on heretofore marginal lands. Many of these emigrants were families from

linen districts in the Scottish lowlands and had at least a measure of familiari

ty with the production techniques essential for the emerging linen economy.

They were very attractive targets for landlords looking to increase the value of

their rentals, and it is no accident that interest in establishing colonies of north

12. lane Gray, "The Irish and Scottish Linen Industries in the Eighteenth Century: An Incorporated

Comparison," in The Warp of Ulster's Past, ed. Marilyn Cohen (New York: St Martin's, 1996)? P- 56.

for an effective local study, see Cohen, Linen, Family and Community in Tullylish, County Down,

1690-1914 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997)

13. Excellent introductions to the advent of the linen economy in Ireland can be found in L.M.

Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland (London: Batsford, 1972), pp. 50-64, and W. H. Crawford,

"Economy and Society in South Ulster in the Eighteenth Century" Clogher Record, 8:3 ?975).

241-58.

75




ern artisans was widespread in the 1720s and 1730s. Linen transformed the value

of land in Ulster, for, by increasing the value of marginal land, the expansion of linen production led to greatly increased settlement on previous infertile (and, thus, Catholic) territory. While Louis Cullen is right to stress that landowner

motivations behind the creation of these colonies were not necessarily sectari

an?these settlers had spinning and weaving skills that made them more of an

economic asset than their new Catholic neighbors?the effect was much the

same as the settlers moved onto land that was understood to be Catholic.14 In

short, the expansion of the linen economy and the resultant population move

ment forged

a new series of frontiers in Ulster, seismic zones that posed a series

of challenges to conceptions of communal territory.

Of course, South Armagh's standing as the "wild Other" did not stem sim

ply from its lawless reputation; its bare and imposing mountains long remained islands of strength for traditional Irish culture. But even South Armagh would

not long remain outside the Pale, and we get a glimpse of the impact of the

transformative changes coming to the area in the verse of Art Mac Cumhaigh.

The most famous of Armagh's eighteenth-century poets, Mac Cumhaigh came

from a small farming family near Creggan. Although it is difficult to categorize his work because of its range and complexity, the dominant political theme of

his poetry centers on the overthrow of native rule (locally manifested in the

downfall of the O'Neills of the Fews), and there is no mistaking the resentment at the onslaught of Protestant settlement, commercialization, and cultural

change dripping from the following lines from the "Aisling Airt Mhic

Cumhaigh" ("Art MacCooey's Dream"):

... T? mo chro?-se r?abtha 'na mh?le c?ad chuid,

'S gan balsam f?in ann a d'rnoirfeadh dorn phian;

Nuair a chluinim an Ghaelig uilig d? tr?igbhe?il(t) Agus caismirt Bh?arla I mb?al gach aoin,

Bhullai is Jane ag glacadh l?aghsai Ar dhuichi ?ireann na n-orbhall caoin;

'S nuair a fhiafra?m sc?ala 'se an freagra 'gh?ibhim:

'You're a Papist, I know not thee.'

My heart is torn in ten thousand pieces,

And no healing balsam to sooth my grief;

When I hear Irish all foresaken

And a clamour of English in every mouth;

Wully and Jane are taking leases,

14. L. M. Cullen, The Emergence of Modem Ireland (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), p. 193

76




In the lands of Ireland's fair golden fields,

And when I seek news, the answer I'm given:

"You're a Papist, I know not thee."15

Although Mac Cumhaigh was equally critical of those Catholic families who

successfully adapted to the new commercial environment (his "Churl of the

Barley" was aimed firmly at the O'Callaghans of Culloville16), there is no doubt

that his poems reflect anger and loss at the ongoing political, economic and cul

tural transformation of the north of Ireland?a world turned upside down by

conquest, confiscation, and settlement to the disadvantage of most Irish-speak

ing Catholics. It was a volatile mix and would soon prove explosive across sev

eral of the widening sectarian frontiers in eighteenth-century Ulster. One of

these was at Freeduff.

In 1733? R?ndle Donaldson, Thomas Tipping and several other Creggan Parish

landlords invited a number of Presbyterian families to settle on their estates.

Donaldson's plan was hardly novel for Creggan; in fact, the Reverend Hugh Hill

was the central colonizing figure in the region, resulting in the largely Anglican settler population in the parish. The motivations behind the creation of settler

communities seem clear enough; weaver households added value to landed

estates and brought increased security and improvement to a region the land

lords viewed as thinly populated, understocked, and dominated by wasteland.

Knowing the central role that a minister played in the Scottish-Ulster Presby

terian community, Donaldson and his fellow landlords invited Alexander

McCombe, a licentiate from Killyleagh, to attract and minister to what they

hoped what be a sizeable congregation. The importance of recruiting congre

gants and tenants can be seen clearly in McCombe's contract:

First?That he shall be accommodated with a good farm of land, for what num

ber of years he thinks fit, at a reasonable rent.

Secondly?That he shall have a yearly stipend of thirty pounds per annum, to be

payed by two gales, at November and May, for a term of seven years, in which

time 'tis hoped that a sufficient colony of persons of the same persuasion will

settle in the said parish; the respective landlords thereof being inclined to give

them particularly every fitting encouragement.

]5. This poem was most likely written between 1763 and 1767, Both the Irish verse and English

translation can be found in P?draig?n Ni Uallach?in, A Hidden Ulster: People, Songs and Traditions

?f Oriel (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), pp. 273-75. l6- Tom?s ? Fiaich, "Art MacCooey and His Times

" Seanchas Ardhmacha, 6 (1972), 234

77




Thirdly?That the undermentioned subscribers do oblige themselves, and their

heirs, Exors., and admors., to the true payment of their respective subscriptions

for the aforesaid term of years.17

By any measure, McCombe proved to be an inspired choice. A charismatic fig ure and a tireless recruiter, he would be the minister of Freeduff Presbyterian Church until June, 1795; he died two years later at the age of 92.18

McCombe was a fascinating figure. Growing up near Downpatrick, he was

one of seven brothers, most of whom went on to make their living at sea.

Determined to be a minister, McCombe went to the nearby school at Kil

lyleagh. Throughout the eighteenth century, Killyleagh Academy had a some

what controversial reputation among Anglican religious elites, some of whom

saw it as a training ground for heresy and advanced politics.19 Killyleagh was

later associated with New Lights, non-subscribing Presbyterians, and the Soci

ety of United Irishmen. The school ultimately closed in the 1790s for such rea

sons.20 On the surface, McCombe's theological views seem to have been any

thing but controversial: his thesis centered on the idea that the Roman Pope was the Antichrist and when asked whether he would subscribe to the West

minister Confession of Faith, he answered in the affirmative.21 Clearly, Killy

leagh's radicalism had its limits. Accepting R?ndle Donaldson's invitation to

visit Creggan, McCombe was ordained in the Fews Barracks in 1734, a location

that symbolized the union of religiosity and security that lay behind the cre

ation of this controversial community in South Armagh. A modest thatched

roof meeting house was built later that year to allow for the spiritual needs of

the future congregation. With a minister in place, the landlords moved to recruit Presbyterian tenants

for their estates. They proved to be remarkably successful. An examination of

17. Session Book containing the records of the Presbyterian Congregation of Creggan, General

Synod of Ulster, 12 May 1733-1835, PRONI, MIC.1P/444/A/1. The document is also quoted in John

Donaldson, A Historical and Statistical Account of the Barony of the Upper Fews in the County of

Armagh, 1838 (Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1923), p. 12.

18. The early history of the colonization effort can be found in Donaldson, pp. 11-15; J- S. Reid, His

tory of Congregations in the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 1610-1982 (Belfast: Presbyterian Histor

ical Society of Ireland, 1982); and Creggan or Freeduff Presbyterian Church Records, PRONI,

MIC.1P/444/1-10.

19. See John Stevenson, Two Centuries of Life in Down (Belfast: White Row Press, 1920), pp. 205-06.

For a more recent view, see S. J. Connolly, "Ulster Presbyterians: Religion, Culture and Politics,

1660-1850," in Ulster and North America: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Scotch Irish, ed. Curtis

Blethen and Tyler Wood (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), p. 33.

20. J. S. Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, vol. 3 (London: Whitaker, 1853), p. 351.

21. Minutes of the Killyleagh Presbytery, 1725-32, PRONI, MIC.637/4/79-93.

78




the 1766 religious census for Creggan Parish reveals that of the 226 Protestant

families listed as still residing in the County Armagh portion of Creggan Parish,

115 lived in Altnamoighan townland, where McCombe himself settled.22 This

concentration reflected much more than the settler's attraction to their charis

matic new minister. The early settlers seem to have had a bit of a rough transi

tion. Night watches were set up to protect cattle from thieves, and many com

plained about the difficulties in getting products to the market in Newry.23 It is

worth noting that McCombe himself did not fare badly; he took a lease out on

nearly five hundred acres in the region, holdings that made him a member of

the barony's landholding gentry. In short, the reasons why some Catholics

might have viewed McCombe as a "little king" seem clear. In this, of course, he

was hardly alone; in this era of fluid land transactions, ministers on the Ulster

frontier ministered to much more than the spiritual needs of their fledgling

congregations. For example, McCombe's Anglican counterpart in the area, the

Reverend Hugh Hill, was landlord to fourteen townlands in the Creggan

region.24

Who were these settlers? McCombe's central role in recruiting is borne out

by the fact that nearly all of the settlers were of Scottish origin from County Down and particularly from the countryside surrounding Downpatrick.25 One

of the first settlers was Alex Donaldson, an ancestor of John Donaldson, who

compiled an interesting history of the Upper Fews in the early nineteenth cen

tury. Alex Donaldson's life seems to have been one of nearly constant move

ment, reflecting a transient generation in which many Scots moved from low

land Scotland to Ulster to the American colonies within a span of fifty years.26 Unlike so many of his compatriots, however, Donaldson did not cross the

Atlantic. Starting his family in the Lecale district south of Downpatrick, he

moved to Monaghan and Louth before taking a lease for three lives or thirty-one

years on 140 Irish acres at Clohog, County Armagh. Such long leases were a sure

sign of improving landlords in this era, but their use became less and less wide

22. Groves Transcripts, 1766 Religious Census, Creggan Parish, PRONI, T.3709/8. Only one

undoubtedly very lonely Catholic family is listed in the same townland.

23. Donaldson, p. 18.

24. ? Fiaich,"MacCooey and His Times," 224. McCombes role as local landlord can be partially

tracked by looking at the Valentine Wilson documents at PRONI, which include a small run of leas

es from 1753-1774. See Valentine Wilson Documents, PRONI, D.462/1-21.

?5- ? Fiaich, 15. 26. For Ulster Scots emigration, see: Kerby Miller, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters

and Memoirs from Revolution and Colonial America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003}; Patrick

Griffin, The People With No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of the

British Atlantic World, 1689-1764 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001 J, pp. 9-98.

79



The Burning of Freeduff Presbyterian Churchy 1743

spread as the century progressed.27 In this case, each of Donaldson's moves seem

to have been occasioned by his desire to leave his sons with a solid farm to inher

it and his ability to obtain land at discounted rates. The Freeduff colonization

scheme thus perfectly suited Donaldson's family and personal goals. When the

Creggan Presbyterian congregation put together a list of seatholders in 1765) Alex Donaldson's name appears close to the top of the list?a classic reflection

of his successful quest for respectability.28 The colony itself was by no means static, as many of the original settlers left

for America or other, more local, destinations within Ulster or Ireland within a

generation. In fact, movement seems to be one of the defining characteristics of

the original settlers; Donaldson himself relates that several families quickly moved on to Monaghan, Meath, and other destinations.29 This transience con

firms the growing scholarly consensus about early eighteenth-century Ulster

emigration, which has focused on two broad motivating factors: first, the belief

that America could better provide for Presbyterian independence than an Angli can-dominated Ireland where economic stability (let alone prosperity) proved to be fragile and precarious at the best of times; and second, fear of the Catholic

majority. This latter variable was certainly in play in the Creggan area, where,

despite a very successful settlement effort, Catholics still outnumbered Protes

tants in the Armagh portion of Creggan Parish by a ratio of roughly three to

one.30 Even within the parish, denominational frontiers proved to be quite

dynamic. The region was continually being reshaped by Catholic immigration and the unstable forces of eighteenth-century commercialization. By the i75os>

Presbyterian households were concentrated in the northern half of the original settlement zone, reportedly pressed there by Catholics from County Louth

eager to participate in the rapidly expanding linen economy.31 The demo

graphic results can be seen most obviously by the growth of the town of New

27. Cullen, Economic History, p. 78; Crawford, "History and Society," 242. For landlord-tenant

relations in Ulster, see Martin Dowling, Tenant Right and Agrarian Society in Ulster, 1600-1870

(Dublin: Irish Academic Press 1999).

28. Donaldson, pp. 13-14. The list of the original seatholders can be found in the Creggan Session

Book, PRONI, MIC.1P/444/A/1.

29. Creggan Session Book, PRONI, MIC.1P/444/A/1.

30. The 1766 census lists 226 Protestant households and 614 Catholic households in the Armagh

portion of Creggan Parish. Using the eighteenth-century household-to-persons multiplier devised

for Ulster by Dickson, O'Grada, and Daultrey, in 1766, the Armagh portion of Creggan Parish

probably contained 1130 Protestants and 3070 Catholics. 1766 Religious Census for Creggan Parish,

PRONI, T.3709/8. Also see David Dickson, Cormac O'Grada, and Stephen Daultrey, "Hearth Tax,

Household Size and Irish Population Change, 1672-1821," Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy,

82C: 6 (1982), 125-50.

31. Donaldson, pp. 14-16.

8o




townhamilton, where Presbyterian settlement grew so heavy between 1750 and

1770 that McCombe had to minister regularly to the growing congregation there.32 This wave of Catholic in-migration to the Creggan region doubtless

helped to shape the congregants' sectarian interpretation of the church burning. It was not only the linen-driven commercialization and resultant demo

graphic movement that forged tension-laden communal frontiers in South

Armagh. In 1737, a charter school was opened two miles south of Freeduff Pres

byterian Meeting House. The brainchild of the Reverend Hugh Hill, this edu

cational initiative added another divisive element to the mix in this already

deeply divided region.33 Although charter schools had existed in Ireland since

1721, the main force behind the charter school movement in Ireland emerged in

the early 1730s, when a coterie of Irish Protestant elites created the Incorporat

ed Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland. The chief moti

vating factor behind the organization was provided by the 1731 Report on the

State of Popery, which revealed a Church of Ireland in decline, a Presbyterian

community rapidly diminishing through emigration, and a Roman Catholic

Church that was flourishing and rebuilding. With the backing of much of the

Dublin establishment, the Incorporated Society and the charter schools would

not lack for resources or support from high places.34 In terms of vision and curriculum, the charter schools were rooted in the

twin forces of Anglicization and improvement. Kenneth Milne, the charter

schools' primary historian, has argued that the schools provided a remedial

academic education and subordinated even that to the needs of industry and

religion. In many ways, they were an obvious attempt to make up for the fail

ure of the Penal Laws, for it was clear that negative legal restrictions were not

undermining Irish Catholicism. Irish-speaking teachers were recruited to pro

vide proper religious instruction for their charges, and literally two hours a day were spent reading to improve the students' knowledge of "our holy religion."

Just as important to the improving mission was the development of technical

skills; male students were taught rudimentary lessons in agriculture and tex

tiles, while female students learned spinning and domestic skills. While late

eighteenth-century reformers were appalled by conditions in the charter

schools and managed to eliminate them by the early nineteenth century, the

Incorporated Society did have some early success. By 1748 there were some thir

32. Creggan or Freeduff Presbyterian Church Records, PRONI, MIC.iP/444/10; Cullen, Economic

History of Ireland. For the growth of Newtownhamilton, see Crawford, "Economy and Society," 247.

33- Hill was also active in efforts to convert Catholics to Anglicanism. For one such effort, see Cer

tificates of Conformity, Bernard Murphy, Clogher Diocesan Papers, PRON?, DIO/4/32/C/16/3/1-2.

34- Kenneth Milne, "Irish Charter Schools," The Irish Journal of Education 8, 1-2 (1974), 3~29- For

a fuller treatment of the issue, see his The Irish Charter Schools, 1730-1830 (Dublin: Four Courts

Press, 1997).

81




ty charter schools operating with nearly nine hundred children in school and

five hundred in apprenticeships.35 The charter school that opened up near Creggan in 1737 was greeted with

great fanfare. Faulkner's Dublin Journal exulted in this step toward a more

peaceful and Protestant future for the area:

And to these the new weavers' houses filled with Northern Protestants carrying

on the Linnen Manufacture in all its branches, almost within sight of the char

ter foundation, give great life to the whole, and all together make a very pleas

ing sight in that Popish and once very wild country.36

Designed to house thirty-two students, the school's average enrollment ranged from twenty to thirty between 1737 and 1782, when the Incorporated Society's records cease. As one would expect, members of the local gentry and clergy pro vided the most consistent support for the school, with the Reverend Hugh Hill

and R?ndle Donaldson among the largest contributors.37 The school seems to

have provoked an understandable resentment from local leaders of the Catholic

community; there were, after all, two Catholic schools already in operation in

the area.38 As the partisan Faulkner's Dublin Journal put it, "Priests have been in

vain persuading the Popish inhabitants of Creggan from sending children to

school."39 Given the school's inability to fill all of its seats, the newspaper's exul

tation seems excessive; a 1773 report listed the Creggan school as one of many

charter schools in "ill circumstances," with only thirty students to its name.40

While the school's success was debatable, there can be little doubt that the

charter school project raised communal hackles among a local Catholic popu

lation whose societal position had been radically transformed over the previous

generation. These deepening communal antagonisms do not seem to have

resulted in further violent incidents. In 1789, as sectarian tension was escalating

across South Armagh in the midst of the Armagh Troubles, a resolution was

adopted in Creggan Parish celebrating the area as a model of order, a fact that

"[is] very much owing to the prudent conduct of the leading inhabitants of the

different religious persuasions...." [Reverend McCombe and the Rev. Mr. Mar

35- Milne, "Irish Charter Schools," 22-3.

36. Faulkner's Dublin Journal, 29 October-i November 1737.

37. Proceedings of the Incorporated Society, 1737-1782, Groves Transcripts, PRONI, T/8o8/i4973:

Parish of Creggan, Proceedings of the Incorporated Society (Armagh County Museum [hereafter

AM], T. G. F. Paterson Manuscript Collection, 112/1/7).

38. A. J. Hughes, "Gaelic Poets and Scribes of the South Armagh Hinterland in the Eighteenth and

Nineteenth Centuries "

in Armagh: History and Society, p. 516.

39. Faulkner's Dublin Journal, 29 October-i November 1737.

40. See the 1773 Report and a number of Society petitions for increased funding in Correspondence

About Charter Schools, PRONI, DIO.4/8/12/8-24.

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tin, P.P.].41 Although the value of such resolutions is dubious at the best of

times, it did reflect an era of more stabilized communal relations in the imme

diate Creggan area.

While McCombe and the local parish priest's efforts are not to be discount

ed, a more likely explanation for this newfound stability centers on demographic movement and the consequent redrawing of territorial frontiers. In other words,

as Presbyterians concentrated their settlement in Altnamoighan townland and

other northern parts of the original settlement zone, Catholic immigrants moved

into the southern half of the area. As Presbyterian and Catholic groups infor

mally and gradually reworked the nature of the settlement zone in the Creggan

Parish?a process no doubt accelerated by news of the Freeduff church burn

ing?new conceptions of religious territory and communal boundaries solidi

fied, gradually reducing friction in the area. By the 1770s, when sectarian tensions

seemed to be abating across much of Ireland, there was widespread hope that the

divisions that had dominated South Armagh over much of the previous centu

ry were part of a bygone age. It was not, of course, to be.

What can this preliminary examination tell us about the links between colo

nization, sectarian violence, and the construction of community in eighteenth

century Armagh? This first point must be a cautionary one. As John Donaldson

noted in his 1838 local history, the evidence provided in the Fews Depositions

(the informations about the Freeduff church burning given by several Presby

terian congregants) is wholly circumstantial, and, while the contextual forces at

work in the parish seem to argue for a sectarian interpretation of the outrage,

there is no proof that Freeduff Presbyterian Meeting House was burned for

communal considerations. A wide variety of factors could be at play here,

including the nineteenth-century view that the meeting house was burned by "a

poor blind idiot, instigated by the Romanists." While the veracity of this rather

predictable anecdote can be doubted, it would be wise to heed Sean Connolly's

cautionary note that historians too often hide the complexity of Ulster com

munal relations under simple binary explanations.42 The "whodunnit?" must,

at this point, remain unanswered.

Where sectarianism comes more clearly into the picture is in both the

response to, and the impact of, this incident. South Armagh Protestants of all

stripes?elite and plebeian, Anglican and Presbyterian, clerical and lay?inter

preted the church burning in sectarian terms, although exactly what this meant

varied across class and denominational lines. Elite interests focused on the

4L T. G. F. Paterson, Armachiana, AM, XX/87.

42- S. J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, pp. 124-28.

83




potential impact the church burning would have on Protestant settlement in the

region, a largely Presbyterian colony that had brought security, increased prof its, and improvement to the Creggan area. Popular fears of the congregation

were even more tangible, as settlers fearful of attack reworked the original set

tlement zone to protect their interests, a process best seen in the growth of

Newtownhamilton and tightened Protestant concentration in Altnamoighan townland. Despite the differing emphases, however, it is the power of the com

munal mental grid in a time of crisis that stands out. When the church was

burned, it was understood as representing antagonisms between Protestant and

Catholic. The Anglican rector mobilized landlord and government support for

this isolated Presbyterian settlement. As Sean Connolly has argued, the tensions

that settlement colonies like the one near Creggan generated played important roles in keeping an "underlying conflict between Catholic and Protestant

alive."43

Of course, the power of communalism in South Armagh did not preclude the formation of other types of relationships that might cross and even con

tradict the sectarian divide. The great Armagh poet, Art Mac Cumhaigh, after

all, worked for and was married by a rather controversial Protestant minister,

the Reverend Hugh Hill. Moreover, Mac Cumhaigh regularly fought with the

local Catholic clergyman over the priest's financial exactions, and was in fact

exiled by his great enemy, Fr. Terence Quinn, P. P.44 It is never a simple and pre dictable tale. But these cross-community relationships, forged in the middle

ground of encounter, proved difficult to sustain in times of crisis, particularly in the tension-laden atmosphere of mid eighteenth-century South Armagh.

In recent years, a number of scholars have called for a renewed and more

sophisticated approach to the subject of sectarianism in Irish historiography. Much of this work has emphasized the complexity of eighteenth-century Ulster

society, stressing regional, denominational and class nuance over traditional

communal explanations. Kevin Whelan writes,

Specialists on the period are agreed that a simple Protestant/Catholic binary is

unable to accommodate the complexities of the Ulster situation or the subtle

interfaces between Anglican, Presbyterian and Catholic, and the resultant patch

work mosaic of religious affiliation throughout Ulster.45

An examination of South Armagh in the 1740s certainly confirms Whelan's

portrait of the complex interactions that characterized the eighteenth-century

43- Connolly, p. 126.

44. Ni Uallach?in, pp. 275-79.

45. Kevin Whelan, "Introduction to Section III," in 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective, ed. Thomas

Bartlett, David Dickson, D?ire Keogh ,and Kevin Whelan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), p. i9?

84




Ulster experience. But, while the acknowledgment and exploration of these

"subtle interfaces" and "patchwork mosaics" has been tremendously insightful and productive, there is some danger of, as it were, throwing the baby out with

the bathwater. Sectarian mentalities did exist and in times of crisis, held a power

unmatched by other more nuanced worldviews in the north of Ireland.

Clashes on the shifting frontiers of eighteenth-century Ulster clearly played an

important role in the evolution and maintenance of communal identities, as

landlords and their settler tenants interpreted events like the burning of the

Freeduff church as indicative of fundamental sectarian splits in Ulster society?

interpretations that would be revived at key moments by pan-Protestant activists later in the century. Does this mean that sectarian considerations were

always, or even often, foremost in the construction of identity? Of course not.

As Linda Colley has observed, "Identities are not like hats. Human beings can

and do put on several at a time."46 Much of recent scholarship has rightly

emphasized that eighteenth-century Ulster society was fluid and complex, and

simple sectarian explanations rarely reflect the dynamism of northern life.

Still, sectarian divisions did (and do) exist, and scholars must confront that

reality in order to understand how communal identities were constructed,

evolved, and maintained in modern Ulster. The weave of eighteenth-century Irish identities was a complex one indeed, with traditional binary constructions

of Catholic and Protestant coexisting with more complicated and seemingly

contradictory worldviews.47 These were in turn historically contingent, with

sectarian expressions particularly prevalent along frontier zones of settlement

and in times of political crises. The powerful emergence and reconstruction of

sectarian identities in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries speaks to the

importance of scholarly examination of the communal fault lines of Northern

society. In doing so, of course, we must avoid the teleological or essentialist

arguments that often pass for analysis in the treatment of sectarianism in Irish

historiography. As this brief examination of the Freeduff church-burning

reveals, there is a middle ground between reductionist essentialism and tactful

avoidance.

o^ NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY

46. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992),

p. 6.

47. Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic

World (Cambridge, 1999)) P-150*

85

