The Irish · 1 of 8
Before the Hunger
1820s to 1850s
The break was not at 1845, and the West was the last part of the country to feel it.
The story everybody knows runs like this. Before the Famine the Irish married young and had many children. The blight came, the potato failed, the land could no longer be divided, and a people who had married at twenty began to marry at forty or never.
It is a good story. The census does not support it.
1841. The country did not marry young
Take the census four years before the blight.
Forty three per cent of Irish men aged twenty five to thirty four were unmarried. Twenty eight per cent of women in the same band were unmarried. About one in ten of that population never married at all.
Those are not the figures of a society of universal early marriage. They sit inside the ordinary Western European range, where ten to twenty per cent never marrying had been normal for three hundred years.
The Irish were not an exception before the Famine. They became one afterwards, and it took ninety years.
1831. The brake was already on
The population of Ireland rose by 14.2 per cent in the 1820s. In the 1830s it rose by 5.3 per cent.
Connacht did the same thing more sharply. It grew by 21.0 per cent, and then by 5.6 per cent.
Something was already holding Irish population growth back in the fifteen years before 1845, and the usual explanation is emigration rather than any change in marriage. Part of the apparent slowdown is an artefact of a bad census, so the size of it is uncertain. The direction is not. [1]
Population change by decade
1821. What the record cannot tell us
One warning belongs here, because a great deal rests on it.
Civil registration of marriages began in 1845 for Protestants, and only in 1864 for everyone else. So there is no reliable record of the age at which Irish people married before the Famine. None. Every figure ever quoted for it is an inference drawn from census age structure or from the parish papers of one place.
The early censuses are weak too. The counts of 1821 and 1831 were attacked as defective by the men who took the census of 1841, and the first Irish census generally treated as sound is 1871. [2]
Anyone who gives a precise pre-Famine marriage age is not reading a record. They are guessing, and usually guessing from the story rather than from the paper.
1845. What the blight actually ended
None of this makes the Famine a small event. It ended a whole class of person.
On the eve of it, twenty four per cent of tenant farms ran to between one and five acres, and another forty per cent to between five and fifteen. Beneath the farmers sat the cottiers, something over half a million households holding a cabin and a potato garden and paying for them in labour, about two hundred days of work in the year. The census of 1841 returned 1,260,215 male labourers against 453,104 farmers.
Under them again was conacre, a letting of a patch of ground for eleven months, deliberately one month short of a year so that no tenancy and no legal right could grow out of it.
Subdivision had reached places that are hard to credit. On the Trinity College estate in 1843 there were 12,529 tenants. One per cent of them paid rent directly to the college. Forty five per cent were sub-tenants, and more than fifty two per cent were sub-tenants of sub-tenants.
And the system was already coming apart. The Poor Law Commission of the 1830s recorded the cottier arrangement as dissolving before the blight arrived. The Famine finished a class that had begun to disappear on its own.
Three things the Famine did not do
It did not invent the single heir. Passing a farm whole to one child was already common practice on the better land before 1845. The arrangement the Famine is supposed to have created was in use before the potato failed. [3]
It did not fall hardest where the people were thickest. Population density across the thirty two counties does not predict where the Famine struck worst. Ireland was poor, and parts of it were desperately poor, but the simple overpopulation explanation does not survive the county figures. [4]
It did not uncover an ancient family system. The arrangement that produced the bachelor farmer was assembled gradually after 1852. It was built in the nineteenth century, by the people who lived under it, and it was younger than the houses they lived in. [5]
The prop that went first
There is a quieter cause, and it did its work in the West twenty years before the potato failed.
Domestic hand spinning put cash into small holdings across Mayo, Donegal and south Ulster. A household with a spinning wheel had an income that did not come out of the ground. It could carry a marriage that the land alone could not.
Mill spinning destroyed that trade from the middle of the 1820s. The wheel stopped paying, and the districts that had depended on it were poorer for a generation before the blight ever reached them. [6]
The order matters. The wheel stopped, then the potato failed, then the land stopped being divided. A reader who begins at 1845 has already missed the first act.
1851. The province that could not afford to leave
Now the fact that settles the argument about direction.
In the decade after the Famine, Connacht sent out the smallest share of its people of any province in Ireland.
Munster lost 23.2 per cent of its 1851 population to emigration across the 1850s. Ulster lost 16.7 per cent, Leinster 13.9, and Connacht 13.5. Within Connacht, Mayo lost 10.5 per cent and Sligo 10.2, the two lowest rates in the country.
Connacht had just lost 28.8 per cent of its people to death and flight in the Famine decade itself, the worst of any province. And still, in the ten years that followed, the poorest province in Ireland sent out the smallest proportion of its survivors.
A passage cost money. Mayo did not have it.
The same pattern holds for the years before the Famine. Between 1815 and 1845 somewhere between 800,000 and a million people left for North America, and at least half a million more for Britain. They came first from Ulster, and then from south Ulster, Leinster, east Munster and east Connacht. The commercialised belt. The Atlantic seaboard is missing from that list.
1864. Where it started, and it was not the West
Permanent bachelorhood rose first in the east and the north, in the 1860s and 1870s, and spread west and south afterwards. The low marriage rates that people now picture on a bare hillside in Connemara began on good ground in Leinster, among the larger farms with the commercial markets, the cash, and the habit of leaving one heir on the land. [7]
The poverty ran the other way from the story as well. The Irish parishes that grew fastest between 1821 and 1841 were also the poorest by 1841. Illiteracy stood at under one in four in Antrim and at four in five in Mayo. Growth was a sign of having nothing to lose, not of doing well. [8]
So the West was not the origin of the Irish bachelor. It was the last place to acquire him, because it was the last place to lose the things that had made a household possible without a farm. The spinning wheel. The potato patch. The cottier bargain. The harvest gang.
The subject of this series is not a country that stopped marrying in 1845. It is a country that had been quietly changing for twenty years, was struck very hard, and then took ninety years to reach the bottom.