Judge, Jury, Magistrate and Soldier: Rethinking Law and Authority in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Abstract

The key to understanding law and authority in late eighteenth-century Ireland lies in extraordinary cases. Some historians have dismissed the political trials of reformers and activists as unrepresentative of the typical processes of the Irish judicial system. They argue that the majority of Irishmen in the eighteenth century did not believe that their society was particularly violent and that the disenfranchised Catholic majority fared as well as its Protestant counterpart before the law. Criminals were caught, charged by a grand jury composed of local men, and tried by a jury before any sentence was carried out. From constables to judges of the assizes, Ireland retained the institutional forms characteristic of the English system. These historians argue that the majority of cases, in which strict adherence to legal procedure was carried out in the spirit of a self-policing society, overshadows the few exceptions. However, these extraordinary cases, which dealt not with common criminals, but with reformers advocating constitutional and social change, demonstrate that when the system was under the greatest strain, commitment to English ideals broke down.1 The external parallels between the Irish and English systems obscured fundamental differences, differences that corresponded to Ireland's different political and legal reality. The history of Ireland, with its centuries of unrest and rebellion, and with its social divisions along lines corresponding to economic and religious differences, precluded English legal traditions from being transplanted without alteration. The political climate of late eighteenth-century Ireland was one of mounting tension. The beginning of the eighteenth century was marked by a period of relative peace and stability. However, by the middle of the century, popular protests, like the Whiteboys violence in the 1760s, demanded economic and political change, but seemed to government officials and local gentry to promise only chaos.2 During the last few decades of the eighteenth century, new manifestations of popular protest emerged