Land War

Land War, a campaign of agrarian protest, commencing in 1879, in which tenant demands for rent abatements in consideration of a serious downturn in agricultural incomes were transformed into a campaign against landlordism per se orchestrated by the Land League. Starting in Co. Mayo, where the distress was greatest, the militancy had spread to most of the southern provinces and parts of Ulster by autumn 1880. When landlords did not concede the reductions demanded by their tenants, rents were refused and the attempts to recover them were thwarted by a variety of expedients. Much activity centred on the matter of evictions: delaying them by legal means, physically impeding them, and preventing the replacement of evicted tenants. Thus the power of landlords to control their tenants and to secure a proportion of the income of the soil was nullified. This was backed by rhetoric which challenged the legitimacy of landlordism in Ireland and identified it with the British connection. The revolutionary political implications of the rhetoric reflected the ulterior objectives entertained by the majority of the Land League executive, if not by its president, Charles Stewart Parnell.

Economic motivation was linked with a sense of resentment against privilege to give the Land War a distinctly democratic flavour. Indeed it was the occasion of a very impressive nationalist mobilization providing the basis for Parnell's subsequent political triumphs. Mass meetings, marching bands, and speech‐making were the hallmarks of the Land War as much as the social ostracization to which Captain Boycott and numerous others were subjected. In addition to non‐violent activities there were violent actions, not officially approved by the Land League. Crime figures rose dramatically and the challenge to the civil authority was serious.

Gladstone's incoming government of 1880 acknowledged the need for concessions and established a parliamentary commission of inquiry under the earl of Bessborough (see ponsonby). The consequent delay placed a premium on tenant militancy. The government felt obliged to put coercive legislation in place before introducing the 1881 Land Act. This, particularly when complemented by the Arrears Act of 1882, conceded enough to the tenants to take the steam out of the anti‐landlord campaign. Yet what ended in 1882 was only the first phase of the Land War. Politicized agrarian strife on a serious scale was to occur intermittently down to 1923, as in the Plan of Campaign, the agitation of the United Irish League, and the land seizures and rent strikes of the period 1917–23.

Bibliography

Clark, S. , Social Origins of the Irish Land War (1979)
Donnelly, J. S. , The Land and the People of Nineteenth‐Century Cork (1975)

Richard Vincent Comerford