Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders

In the late 18th century Co Armagh was certainly the most densely-populated rural area in Ireland. Here the linen industry flourished and competition to rent land became fierce near the market towns, bleach greens and the water-powered wash mills, dye works and beetling mills.

Few Catholics were drapers but many were handloom weavers competing with their Protestant neighbours. Trade rivalry easily became sectarian rivalry. Rents for the tiny farms here were the highest in Ireland and Protestants, living on oatmeal and perhaps bacon once a week, often felt that Catholics, able to survive on potatoes and buttermilk, could unfairly outbid them by paying higher rents.

Here in mid Ulster the ideas of the Enlightenment had made little headway. Memories of 17th-century dispossession and massacre remained stubbornly alive.

Drunken affrays in the vicinity of Markethill, between gangs of weavers calling themselves the Nappach Fleet, the Bawn Fleet and the Bunkerhill Defenders, had become openly sectarian by 1786.

The combatants regrouped, Protestants becoming ‘Peep o’ Day Boys’ and Catholics ‘Defenders’. For the next 10 years and more sectarian warfare raged in Co Armagh. Better armed, the Peep o’ Day Boys at first swept all before them.

These were described by a local landlord, the Earl of Gosford, as

'a low set of fellows…who with Guns and Bayonets, and Other weapons Break Open the Houses of the Roman Catholics, and as I am informed treat many of them with Cruelty.'

According to John Byrne, a Catholic dyer from Armagh city, some Protestant gentlemen lent arms to Catholics

'to protect themselves from depredations of these fanatick madmen; and many poor creatures were obliged to abandon their houses at night, and sleep in turf-bogs, in little huts made of sods; so great was the zeal of our holy crusados this year.'

In November 1788, when a Catholic mob near Blackwatertown taunted the Benburb Volunteers for marching to ‘The Protestant Boys’ and ‘The Boyne Water’, it was fired on. Five were killed. The following July more lives were lost when Volunteers made a successful assault on Defenders assembled on Lisnaglade Fort near Tandragee.

'For heaven’s sake dont forget the Powder & Ball with all Expedition,' the Drumbanagher magistrate John Moore wrote to Lord Charlemont in July 1789. He had no hesitation in giving out arms to ‘the Protestant Boys that have none’ because Defenders 'are now beginning their Night Depredations and Lye in Wait behind Ditches, to murder and Destroy Every protestant that appears.'

The sectarian violence fanned out to the uplands of south Armagh. Here the Catholics – still speaking Gaelic and wearing mantles – had the advantage of numbers and turned on the Protestants with a ferocity not seen for more than a century.

A horrific climax was reached when Defenders attacked a schoolmaster and his family in Forkhill on 28th January 1791, described by the Reverend Edward Hudson, Presbyterian minister of Jonesborough:

'In rushed a Body of Hellhounds – not content with cutting & stabbing him in several places, they drew a cord round his neck until his Tongue was forced out – It they cut off and three fingers of his right hand – Then they cut out his wife’s tongue and … with a case knife cut off her Thumb and four of her fingers one after another…she I fear cannot recover – there was in the house a Brother of hers about fourteen years old…his Tongue those merciless Villains cut out and cut the calf of his leg with a sword.'

John Moore wrote:

'The whole country for Ten Mile Round is in absolute Rebellion & Confusion. Where it will end God only knows.'

In September 1795, Defenders assembled near Loughgall at a crossroads known as The Diamond to face the Peep o’ Day Boys in battle. When the Protestants were reinforced by a Co Down contingent called the Bleary Boys, the Defenders took their priest’s advice and agreed to a truce.

Both sides withdrew but on 21st September a fresh body of Defenders arrived from Co Tyrone, determined to fight. The Peep o’ Day Boys, on home ground, quickly reassembled and took position on the brow of a hill overlooking The Diamond. William Blacker, a Trinity College student home on vacation, spent his time melting lead from the roof of Castle Blacker, making bullets for the Peep o’ Day Boys.

Then, he tells us, the Protestants opened fire 'with cool and steady aim at the swarms of Defenders, who were in a manner cooped up in the valley and presented an excellent mark for their shots. The affair was of brief duration…from the bodies found afterwards by the reapers in the cornfields, I am inclined to think that not less than thirty lost their lives.'

The victorious Protestants then marched into Loughgall and there, in the house of James Sloan, the Orange Order was founded.