At the Rising of the Moon: The Peasantry and Ireland from the Tudor Conquest to the fall of Landlordism

Modern Ireland is built on a foundation of farming and craft. Our ancestors were of the peasantry, the largest social class in the world until very recently, but without the docility often suggested by that term. They were ruthlessly exploited by wealthy landlords and policed by the mighty British state but maintained for well over a hundred years a determined struggle for rights and life, led by community militants known as na buachaillí, ‘the boys’. Ireland’s peasantry nearly made a revolution in the 1790s, endured appalling famine and orchestrated ‘extermination’—eviction and sweeping away—in the 1840s, and overthrew the entire landlord system in the greatest class struggle these islands have seen in the modern era.

Marc Mulholland’s study, building on decades of scholarship, proposes a new way of looking at our past that emphasises the human nature that we have in common. Novel arguments are made to explain agrarian agitation, the fall of Presbyterian radicalism, the outcome of the Tithe War, the causes of the Great Famine, the decline of the Irish language, and even the English revolution of the seventeenth century. At all times, Irish countrymen and countrywomen are presented as fully rounded human beings engaged in life, laughter and struggle. Like ourselves, they could be selfish and generous, vindictive and kind, petty and heroic. They suffered terrible trials and overthrew the wealthiest and most powerful aristocracy in the world to create a new Ireland.

What emerges is a magisterial history of a time in Ireland during which the old social order of lordship and tribal property was smashed and a new social structure erected on its ruins. More than this, this sweeping work illuminates the importance of our common human nature in an always-changing social and cultural landscape.