Croppy

The Croppy Boy, 1798 Pikeman Memorial, Tralee, Co. Kerry

Croppy was a nickname given to Irish rebels fighting for independence from Britain during the 1798 Rising.

Origin

The name "Croppy" used in Ireland in the 1790s was a reference to the closely cropped hair associated with the anti-powdered wig (and therefore, anti-aristocrat) French revolutionaries of the period. Men with their hair cropped were automatically suspected of sympathies with the pro-French underground organisation the Society of United Irishmen, and were seized by the British administration and its allies for interrogation and often subjected to torture by flogging, picketing and half-hanging. The contemporary torture known as pitchcapping, or in Irish An Caip Bháis was specifically invented to intimidate Croppies. United Irish activists retaliated by cropping the hair of loyalists to reduce the reliability of this method of identifying their sympathisers.

References

    The Croppy Acre, Dublin.
    Croppies' Acre in summer.

    See also

    External links

    1. http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/seamus_heaney/poems/12705
    This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Saturday, January 16, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.