Captain Rock was a mythical Irish

folk hero A folk hero or national hero is a type of hero – real, fictional or mythology, mythological – with their name, personality and deeds embedded in the popular consciousness of a people, mentioned frequently in Folk music, folk songs, folk tales ...

, and the name used for the agrarian rebel group he represented in the south-west of

Ireland Ireland (, ; ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe. Geopolitically, the island is divided between the Republic of Ireland (officially Names of the Irish state, named Irelan ...

from

1821 Events January–March * January 21 – Peter I Island in the Antarctic is first sighted, by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen. * January 26 – Congress of Laibach convenes to deal with outstanding international issues, particularly ...

1824 Events January–March * January 1 – John Stuart Mill begins publication of The Westminster Review. The first article is by William Johnson Fox * January 8 – After much controversy, Michael Faraday is finally elected as a member of th ...

. Arising following the harvest failures in 1816 and 1821, the drought in 1818 and the fever epidemic of 1816-19. Rockites, similar to the earlier

Whiteboys The Whiteboys () were a secret Irish agrarian organisation in 18th-century Ireland which defended tenant-farmer land-rights for subsistence farming. Their name derives from the white smocks that members wore in their nighttime raids. Becaus ...

, targeted

landlord A landlord is the owner of property such as a house, apartment, condominium, land, or real estate that is rented or leased to an individual or business, known as a tenant (also called a ''lessee'' or ''renter''). The term landlord appli ...

s who were members of the

Protestant Ascendancy The Protestant Ascendancy (also known as the Ascendancy) was the sociopolitical and economical domination of Ireland between the 17th and early 20th centuries by a small Anglicanism, Anglican ruling class, whose members consisted of landowners, ...

. Captain Rock (or Rockites) were responsible for up to a thousand incidents of beatings,

murder Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification (jurisprudence), justification or valid excuse (legal), excuse committed with the necessary Intention (criminal law), intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisd ...

arson Arson is the act of willfully and deliberately setting fire to or charring property. Although the act of arson typically involves buildings, the term can also refer to the intentional burning of other things, such as motor vehicles, watercr ...

and mutilation in the short time they were active. With the return of "a bearable level of subsistence", the low-level insurrection for a period subsided, but was to flare repeatedly through, and beyond, the

Great Irish Famine The Great Famine, also known as the Great Hunger ( ), the Famine and the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland lasting from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a historical social crisis and had a major impact o ...

of the 1840s. Over this period and in subsequent years, well into the nineteenth century, threatening letters signed by "Captain Rock" (as well as other symbolic nicknames, such as "Captain Steel" or "Major Ribbon") issued warnings of violent reprisals against landlords and their agents who tried to arbitrarily put up rents, collectors of tithes for the Anglican

Church of Ireland The Church of Ireland (, ; , ) is a Christian church in Ireland, and an autonomy, autonomous province of the Anglican Communion. It is organised on an all-Ireland basis and is the Christianity in Ireland, second-largest Christian church on the ...

, government magistrates who tried to evict tenants, and informers who fingered out Rockites to the authorities. That Captain Rock, in particular, became a symbol for retaliation by "an underclass which had nothing left to lose"The Irish Examiner
Review of 'Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821-1824'
March 6 (2010) owes much to the publication in 1824 of Thomas Moore's '' The Memoirs of Captain Rock''. Moore relates the history of Ireland as told by a contemporary, the scion of a Catholic family that lost land in successive English settlements. The character, Captain Rock, is fictional but the history is in earnest. When it catches up with the narrator in the late

Penal Law Criminal law is the body of law that relates to crime. It proscribes conduct perceived as threatening, harmful, or otherwise endangering to the property, health, safety, and welfare of people inclusive of one's self. Most criminal law is esta ...

era, his family has been reduced to the "class of wretched cottiers". Exposed to the voracious demands of spendthrift Anglo-Irish landlords (famously pilloried by

Maria Edgeworth Maria Edgeworth (1 January 1768 – 22 May 1849) was a prolific Anglo-Irish novelist of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and a significant figure in the evolution of the novel i ...

in '' Castle Rackrent''), both father and son assume captaincies among the "White-boys, Oak-boys, and Hearts-of Steel", the tenant conspiracies that attack tax collectors, terrorise the landlords' agents and violently resist evictions. In 1829,

Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (1 October 1790 – 12 July 1846) was a popular Victorian English writer and novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Charlotte Elizabeth. She was "a woman of strong mind, powerful feeling, and of no inconsiderable share ...

, published a riposte to Moore's ''Memoirs'' which she denounced as an incitement to rebellion inspired by the Vatican. ''The Rockite: An Irish Story'' links to recurrence of "Rockite banditti" to the failure of a dissolute Protestant gentry to win by example their tenantry to the true faith. Notable representations in popular culture include a hand-colored lithograph of "Captain Rock's Banditti swearing in a new Member", caricatures of "Lady Rock" depicting Rockites cross-dressing as women when committing acts of violence, and the painting "The Installation of Captain Rock" by the celebrated romantic artist Daniel Maclise (exhibited in London in 1834, now in the National Gallery in Dublin).

See also

References

Further reading