Says the Shan Van Vocht,
Young Lion of the Fold,
Says the Shan Van Vocht;
Young Lion of the Fold,
Bade us the harvest hold--
We'll do as he has told,
Says the Shan Van Vocht.
We'll pay no more Rackrents,
Says the Shan Van Vocht,
We'll pay no more Rackrents,
Says the Shan Van Vocht;
We'll pay no more Rackrents,
To upstart shoneen gents,
Whose hearts are hard as flints,
Says the Shan Van Vocht.
Then glory to Parnell,
Says the Shan Van Vocht,
Then glory to Parnell,
Says the Shan Van Vocht,
Oh, all glory to Parnell,
Whom the people love so well,
And his foes may go to ----,
Says the Shan Van Vocht.
There is an American humourist who once said that "if the lion ever
did lie down with the lamb it would be with the lamb inside of him."
Mayhap this is what the indigenous "pôte" dimly shadows forth from the
mistland of verse. Or has he mixed up the lion with the eagle in a
dovecot?
IV.
MISS GARDINER AND HER TENANTS.
WESTPORT, CO. MAYO, _Nov. 1st._
A trip into the northern part of this county, which has occupied me
for the last three days, has hardly reassured me as to the condition
of the country around Ballina and Killala. The last-named place is
famous for its round tower and that invasion of the French in '98,
which led to "Castlebar Races." Ballina is a town of about six
thousand inhabitants, situate on the river Moy--an excellent salmon
stream which debouches into Killala Bay, the most important inlet of
the sea between Westport and Sligo. Perhaps Ballina is the principal
town in county Mayo; certainly it seems to be the most improving one.
It is, however, a considerable distance from the sea. Just now it is
the seat of a species of internecine war between landlord and tenant,
waged under conditions which lend it extraordinary interest. Exacting
"landlordism" and recalcitrant "tenantism" seem here to have said
their last word. Between a considerable landholder and her tenants a
fight is being fought out which throws a lurid light on the present
land agitation in Ireland.
The landholder referred to is the Miss Gardiner whose name is familiar
in connection with more or less successful attempts at eviction. This
lady, who many years ago inherited a large property from her father,
the late Captain Gardiner, has become a by no means _persona grata_ to
"the Castle," the sub-sheriff, the Royal Irish Constabulary, and her
tenants. She is doubtless a resolute and determined woman, and
possessed by a vigorous idea of the rights of property. If not
descended from the celebrated Grace O'Malley, Queen of Connaught, she
has at least equally autocratic ideas with that celebrated ruler of
the West. For years past Miss Gardiner has been famous as a raiser of
stock, equine and bovine, but unfortunately she has been most
frequently before the public as the strong assertor of territorial
rights. She dwells far beyond Killala, near the village of Kilcun, at
a house called Farmhill. From Westport to Farmhill the country is as
picturesque as any in the West of Ireland. The snow-clad hills of
Nephin and Nephin Beg are in sight all the way from Manulla
Junction--the chief railway centre hereabouts, and the line past
Loughs Cullen and Conn to Ballina, and the car-drive beyond Ballina,
reveal a series of magnificent views. There is, however, something
very "uncanny" to the Saxon eye about Farmhill. The first object
which comes in sight is a police barrack, with a high wall surrounding
a sort of "compound," the whole being obviously constructed with a
view to resisting a possible attack. This stiff staring assertion of
the power of the law stands out gaunt and grim in the midst of a
landscape of great beauty. Autumn hues gild the trees, the wide
pastures are of brilliant green, and on the rough land the reddening
bent-grass glows richly in the declining sun, which throws its glory
alike over snowy hills and rosy clouds. The only blot, if a white
edifice can be thus designated, is the stern, angular police barrack.
In the front inclosure the sergeant is drilling his men; and those not
under drill are watching the domain immediately opposite, to the end
that no unauthorised person may approach it. Like most of the
dwellings in a country otherwise sparsely supplied with trees,
Farmhill is nestled in a grove. But the surroundings of the house are
not those associated in the ordinary mind with a home. The outer gate
is locked hard and fast, and the little sulky-looking porter's lodge
is untenanted. Its windows are barred, and all communication with the
house itself is cut off, except to adventurous persons prepared to
climb a stone wall. From the lodge onward the private road passes
through a poor kind of park, and subsides every now and then into a
quagmire. It is vile walking in this park of Farmhill, and as the
house is approached there is a barking of dogs. Oxen are seen grazing,
and peacocks as well as turkeys heave in sight. The house itself is
barred and barricaded in a remarkable manner. The front door is so
strongly fastened that it is said not to have been opened for years.
Massive bars of iron protect the windows, and the solitary servant
visible is a species of shepherd or odd man, who comes slinking round
the corner. No stranger gentlewoman's dwelling could be found in the
three kingdoms. The spot reeks with a dungeon-like atmosphere. It is,
according to the present state of life in Mayo, simply a "strong
place," duly fortified and garrisoned against the enemy.
It must be confessed that the proprietress who has a police detachment
opposite to her gate, and lives in a house defended by iron bars and
chains, has some reason for her precautions against surprise. She was
shot at through the window of her own house not very long ago. Now
this experience of being shot at acts variously on different minds.
Mr. Smith, the Marquis of Sligo's agent, whose son returned fire and
killed the intending assassin, took the matter as an incident of
business in the West, and is not a whit less cheery and happy than
before the attack at Claggan Mountain. It is also true that Miss
Gardiner is not an atom less personally brave than Mr. Smith. It is
said that she carries a revolver in the pocket of her shooting-jacket,
and only asks for an escort of armed constabulary when she goes into
Ballina. But she, nevertheless, thinks it well to convert her home
into a fortress--perhaps the only one of the kind now extant in
Europe. Here she dwells with a lady-companion, Miss Pringle, far out
of range of such social life as remains in the county, occupied nearly
exclusively with the management of her estate; a matter which, far
from concerning herself alone, entails great vexation, embarrassment,
and expense upon others. The sending of bodies of constabulary half a
hundred strong to protect the officers of the law serving writs on
Miss Gardiner's tenantry is a troublesome and costly business, and has
the effect of stirring up strife and exciting public opinion to no
small degree. As her property is widely scattered over Northern Mayo,
there is generally something going on in her behalf. One day there is
an ejectment at Ballycastle; the next an abortive attempt to evict at
Cloontakilla. In the opinion of the poorer peasantry this eccentric
lady is a malevolent fiend, an "extherminathor," a tyrant striving to
make the lives of the poor so wretched as to drive them off her
estate. "A sthrange lady is she, Sorr," cried one of her tenants to
me. "Och, she's a divil of a woman, entoirely. All she wants is to
hunt the poor off the face of the wor-r-rold." There are, however, to
this question, as to every Irish question, two sides--if not more. If
Miss Gardiner "hunts" her tenants off her estate, Lord Erne's people
are just now trying their best to perform the same operation upon
Captain Boycott.
It is not all at once that Farmhill has become a sort of dreary
edition of Castle Rackrent, oppressing the mind with almost
inexpressible gloom. The owner's feud with her tenants began long
before the Land League was known. It is said in Northern Mayo that her
father was the first of the "exterminators," justly or unjustly so
called, and that the traditions of the family have been heartily
carried out by his heiress. There is perhaps very little doubt that
Miss Gardiner, like Lord Lucan and the Marquis of Sligo, prefers large
farmers as tenants to a crowd of miserable peasants striving to
extract a living for an entire family from a paltry patch of five
acres of poor land; but whatever her wish may be she has undoubtedly a
large number of small tenants on her estate at the present moment. It
is therefore probable that she is somewhat less of an exterminatrix
than the exasperated people represent her to be. In their eyes,
however, she is guilty of the unpardonable crime of insisting upon her
rent being paid. Her formula is simple, "Give me my rent, or give me
my land." In England and in some other countries such a demand would
be looked upon as perfectly reasonable; but "pay or go" is in this
part of Ireland looked upon as the option of an exterminator. Miss
Gardiner merely asks for her own, and judged by an English standard
would appear to be a strange kind of Lady Bountiful if she allowed
her tenants to go on quietly living on her property without making any
show of payment. But this is very much what landlords are expected to
do in county Mayo, except in very good seasons. The majority of the
people in the islands of Clew Bay have given up the idea of paying
rent as a bad job altogether, and these advanced spirits have many
imitators on the mainland. To the request, "Give me my rent, or give
me my land," is made one eternal answer, "And how can I pay the rent
when the corn is washed away and the pitaties rot in the ground? And
if I give ye the land, hwhere am I to go, and my wife and my eight
childher?" This answer, long used as an _argumentum ad misericordiam_,
is now defended by popular orators. No longer ago than yesterday I
heard it averred that the failure of the crop by the visitation of God
absolved the tenant from the payment of rent. The assumption of the
speaker was that landlord and tenant were in a manner partners, and
that if the joint business venture produced nothing the working
partner could pay over no share of profit to the sleeping partner.
Such doctrine is naturally acceptable to the tenant. It signifies that
in bad years the landlord gets nothing; in good years, what the tenant
pleases to give him, after buying manure and paying up arrears of debt
all round. It is, however, hardly surprising that the landlords see
the question through a differently tinted medium. They entertain an
idea that the land is their property, and, like any other commodity,
should be let or sold to a person who can pay for it. Strict and
downright "landlordism," as it is called, as if it were a disease like
"Daltonism," does not see things through a medium charged with the
national colour, and Miss Gardiner is a true type of downright
landlordism such as would not be complained of in England, but in
Ireland is viewed with absolute abhorrence.
As a proof how utterly an exacting landlord puts himself, if not
outside of the law, yet beyond any claim to public sympathy, I may
cite the conduct of Mr. James C. MacDonnell, the sub-sheriff of this
county. I have the story from an intimate friend of that gentleman, on
whose veracity I can implicitly rely. I say this because I did not in
the first place pay much attention to the story, but have since been
enabled to verify it in every particular. Last spring Mr. MacDonnell,
in his capacity as sub-sheriff, was required by Miss Gardiner to serve
notices of ejectment against about a score of her tenants who had not
paid up. There was great excitement when it became known that twenty
families would be evicted from their holdings, and a breach of the
peace appeared very probable. In England the public voice would
possibly be in favour of executing the law at all hazards. Some of the
tenants owed two years' rent. The patience of the landlord was
exhausted. The tenants would neither pay nor take themselves off.
There was no option but to evict them; the sub-sheriff must do his
duty, backed by as large a body of constabulary as might be necessary.
Law and order must be enforced. This would be the view taken in any
other place but this, but in Ireland the matter appeared in a totally
different light. To begin with, the idea of blood being shed in order
that Miss Gardiner might get in her rents appeared utterly
preposterous. Secondly, the two past crops had completely failed in
Mayo. Thirdly, the bad crops of 1878 and 1879 in England had prevented
the Mayo men from earning the English harvest money on which they
entirely depend for their rent, and much more than their rent.
Finally, the sub-sheriff himself, who, despite his being at once a
proprietor, a middleman, and an officer of the law, has won popularity
by sheer weight of character, felt a natural reluctance to enforce his
authority. Compelled to execute the law, he determined to make a
personal appeal to the tenants before evicting them. Accordingly, he
adjured them to get together a little money to show that they really
meant to act well and honestly, and that he would then help them
himself. The matter ended in his advancing them about 140l. out of his
own pocket, on their notes of hand, and paying Miss Gardiner, who
observed that "he had done well for her tenants, but not so well for
her." To the credit of the tenants helped by Mr. MacDonnell it must be
added that all have met their notes save two or three, who among them
owe but 15l. This little story is entirely typical of the kindliness
and honesty of Mayo men, and of their peculiar ideas of right and
justice. Miss Gardiner's tenants would not pay her a shilling; they
were prepared to resist eviction by force, and would have been backed
by the whole country side, but they paid the sub-sheriff with the
first money they got. He had stood their friend, and they could not
act meanly towards him.
As a contrast to this pleasant picture I am compelled to draw one not
altogether so agreeable. I mentioned in a previous letter a
particularly "tough customer" who, owing £24 for three years' rent,
would part neither with a single shilling nor with the land. I thought
this champion of the irreconcilables must be worth a visit, and
foregoing the diversion of a call on Tom Molloy, a noted character in
the Ballina district, I drove out in the direction of Cloontakilla. On
the way to that dismal spot by a diabolical road I passed a homestead,
so neat and trim, standing on the hillside clear of trees, that I at
once asked if it were not owned by a Scotchman, and was answered that
Mr. Petrie was indeed a Scot and a considerable tenant farmer. On one
side of his farm was a knot of dismantled houses, telling their story
plainly and pathetically enough, and on the further side stood a row
of hovels, only one of which was uninhabited. The locked-up cabin had
a brace of bullet-holes in the door, those which caused a great deal
of trouble some time since. A Mr. Joynt it seems, in a wild freak,
fired his gun through the door of the cabin occupied by Mistress
Murphy, who with her children is now about to join her husband in
America. Instead of being frightened the courageous matron opened the
door, issued therefrom armed with a fire-shovel and administered to
the delinquent "the greatest batin' begorra" my informant had ever
heard of. Afterwards the law was invoked against Mr. Joynt, who was
esteemed very lucky in escaping punishment on account of his
ill-health. A little further on, still to the right of the road,
branched off suddenly a narrow bridle-path, or "boreen," as it is
called in this part of the country. It was my car-driver, a
teetotaller, opined on this "boreen," that the irreconcilable tenant,
one Thomas Browne, dwelt. There were doubts in his mind; but,
nevertheless, we turned on to the wretched track, and tried to get the
car over the stones and mud-lakes which formed it. It could not be
strictly called a road of any kind, but was rather a space left
between two deep ditches of black peat-oozings from the bog. Finding
progress almost impossible, we at last forsook the car. I can quite
imagine an impatient reader asking why we did not get out and walk at
first; but the option was hardly a simple one. By walking the horse
and letting the car swing and jolt along one experienced the combined
agonies of sea-sickness and rheumatism, with the additional chance of
being shot headlong into the inky ditch on either side. By taking to
what the driver called "our own hind legs," we accepted an ankle-deep
plod through filth indescribable and treacherous boulders, which
turned over when trust and sixteen stone were reposed on them. It was
at this part of the journey that I saw for the first time the Mountain
Sylph. Some women and children, who looked very frightened, cleared
away towards their wretched dwellings, and the place would presently
have been deserted had not my driver roared at the top of his voice,
"Hullo, the gyurl!" Presently, out of the crowd of frightened people
sprang a "colleen" of about twelve years, as thinly and scantily clad
as is consistent with that decency and modesty for which Irishwomen of
the poorer classes are so justly celebrated. Her legs and feet were
bare, as a matter of course; a faded red petticoat, or rather kilt,
and a "body" of some indescribable hue, in which dirt largely
predominated, formed all her visible raiment and adornment, except a
mass of fair hair, which fluttered wildly in the cutting wind.
Skipping from stone to stone she neared us swiftly, and stood still at
last perched on a huge boulder--an artist's study of native grace and
beauty--with every rag instinct with "wild civility." An inquiry
whether "Misther Browne" was at home was met by the polite answer that
he was from home "just thin," almost instantly supplemented by "Oi
know hwhere he is, and will fetch him to ye, sorr." And away went the
Sylph dancing from spot to spot like the will-o'-the-wisp of her
native bog. She had also indicated the dwelling of Thomas Browne, and
I pushed on in that direction through a maze of mud. At last I came to
a turning into a path several degrees worse in quality than the
"boreen," and concluded that, as it was nearly impassable, it must
lead to the home of the Irreconcilable. As a change it was pleasant to
step from deep slippery mud and slime on to stones placed with their
acutest angles upwards, but a final encounter with these landed me
literally at Mr. Browne's homestead.
It has been my lot at various times to witness the institution known
as "home" in a state of denudation, as my scientific friends would
call it. It is not necessary to go far from the site of Whitechapel
Church to find dwellings unutterably wretched. Two years ago I saw
people reduced to one "family" pair of boots in Sheffield, and without
food, or fire to cook it with if they had had it; and I have seen a
Cornish woman making turnip pie. But for general misery I think the
home of the Browne family at Cloontakilla equals, and more than equals
anything I have seen during a long experience of painful sights. The
road to it as already described, is a quagmire, and the dwelling, when
arrived at, exceeds the wildest of nightmares. Part of the stone wall
has fallen in, and the two rooms which remain have the ground for a
carpet and miserable starved-looking thatch for a roof. The horses and
cattle of every gentleman in England, and especially Mr. Tankerville
Chamberlayne's Berkshire pigs, are a thousand times better lodged than
the family of the irreconcilable Browne. The chimney, if ever there
were one, has long since "caved in" and vanished, and the smoke from a
few lumps of turf burning on the hearth finds its way through the sore
places in the thatch. In a bed in the corner of the room lies a sick
woman, coughing badly; near her sits another woman, huddled over the
fire. Now, I have been quite long enough in the world to be
suspicious, and had it been possible for these poor people to have
known of my coming I should certainly have been inclined to suspect a
prepared scene. But this was impossible, for even my car-driver did
not know where he was going till he started. And as we could not find
the house without the Mountain Sylph, the inference must be in favour
of all being genuine. There are no indications of cooking going on,
and, bating an iron pot, a three-legged stool, a bench, half a dozen
willow-pattern dishes, and a few ropes of straw suspended from the
roof with the evident object of supporting something which is not
there, no signs of property are visible. And this is the outcome of a
farm of five acres--Irish acres, be it well understood. There is
nothing at all to feed man, wife, sister-in-law, son, and daughter
during the winter, and the snow is already lying deep on Nephin.
While my inspection of the Browne domicile has been going on, the
Mountain Sylph has vanished, never more to be seen. Whether she
disappeared in the peat-smoke or sank gracefully into the parent bog
it is impossible to decide; but it is quite certain that she has faded
out of sight. Poor Mountain Sylph! When she grows older, and goes out
to earn money as a work-girl in Ballina, she will no longer appear
picturesque, but ridiculous. She will wear a cheap gown, but of the
latest fashion, and a knowing-looking hat flung on at a killing angle;
and she will don smart boots while she is in Ballina, and will take
them off before she is far on her way to Cloontakilla, and trudge
along the road as barefooted as of old. But she will never more be a
Mountain Sylph--only a young woman proudly wearing a bonnet and mantle
at which Whitechapel would turn up its nose in disdain. But the Sylph
has gone, and in her place stands the Irreconcilable himself--a
grey-haired man with bent shoulders and well-cut features, which
account for the good looks of the Sylph. He is a sorrowful man; but,
like all Irishmen, especially when in trouble, is not wanting in
loquacity. He shows me his "far-r-rum," as he calls it, and it is a
poor place. He has had a good harvest enough; but what does it all
amount to? An acre (English) of oats, mayhap a couple of acres of
potatoes and cabbages, and the rest pasture, except a little patch on
which, he tells me, he grew vetches in summer for sale as green feed
for cattle. Of beasts he has none, except dogs of some breed unknown
either to dog-fanciers or naturalists, and an ass--the unfortunate
creature who is made to drink the dregs of any sorrow falling upon
Western Ireland. Put to work when not more than a year old, the poor
animal becomes a stunted, withered phantasm of the curled darlings of
the London costermongers which excited the kindly feelings of Lord
Shaftesbury and the Baroness Burdett-Coutts.
A Mayo donkey is a wretched creature, and Mr. Browne has a very poor
specimen of an under-fed, overworked race. But there is a cow browsing
in the field, and the tenant hastens to explain that she is not his
own, but the absolute property of his sister-in-law. I must confess
that I cool somewhat after this--inwardly that is--towards the
Irreconcilable in battered corduroys who amuses me with a string of
stories more or less veracious. I am required to believe that "bating
the ass," no living beast on the five-acre farm belongs to the tenant.
The turkeys belong to a neighbour, as do the geese, and there is
neither hen nor egg left on the premises. "And where is everything?" I
naturally ask.
"And the neighbours is good to me, sorr, and they reaped my oats for
me in a day, and carried 'um in a night. And my pitaties they dug for
me, and carried all clane away before the sheriff could come. And when
Mr. MacDonnell did come my wife was sick in bed, and the house was
full of people, and all he could do was to consult the doctor and go
away."