A new year

Well this blog has been very quiet, no action for 2014. This is not to say there was no action in 2014, more of course that there was a lot! So this is a post to start again by recapping my research and writing in 2014.

2014 was the first full year of funding for a project (funded by the Australian Research Council) on the Irish in colonial Australia that I am conducting with a colleague from the University of Melbourne, Elizabeth Malcolm. 

The title of the project is "The Irish in Colonial Australia: Race, Representation and Repression"  and its main aims are: 
 

 1.    to analyse the racialisation of the Irish in Australia between 1788 and 1914, charting their movement from an excluded group to part of the founding ‘white’ race;

 2.   to evaluate how such racialised perceptions impacted the lives of Irish immigrants who were institutionalised in colonial Australia;

             3. to analyse how the Irish interacted with other racialised groups

 So far we have had some very good research assistants work with us to collect data on Irish-born patients of Mental asylums in Sydney and Melbourne and we will be starting to collect similar sorts of data on prisoners in the NSW and Victorian colonies in the latter half of the nineteenth century. 
We have also worked on representations of the Irish visually through cartoons published in some of the major periodicals of the late ninteenth century in Australia - The Bulletin and Melbourne Punch. We published an article "Now him white man: Images of the Irish in Colonial Australia" on this analysis in History Australia in late 2014. I will post more about the cartoons another day, they really are lots of fun. 

So that is one project that has been occupying me over 2014. The other major one is the Gender and Violence project, which Elizabeth Malcolm and I have been working on for some time now. Although life - by way of changing jobs, new jobs, families expanding etc - have meant this has taken longer than we had hoped. The length of time we have spent on writing the monograph, thinking, talking and writing about our ideas has meant that the results are much better than they would have been otherwise. 

So far I have committed to writing three articles on aspects of this project in 2015 as well as continuing with the remaining chapters of the monograph. I have been able to secure support for some of this by way of fellowships, including one as Associate Investigator with the Centre for the History of Emotions, for research on the ways that violence associated with children was written about and incorporated into emotional responses to violence in 17th century Ireland. I will post more about that over the coming months as well. 

So all in all there has been much to occupy me over 2014. Now for 2015, with my full writing program.

 

Her "apron was all blood"

I am writing about gender and violence in early modern Ireland at the moment for the larger book project. Although my co-writer and I are not concentrating only on violence against women, that has of course been a significant part of the research. So I have been thinking about how women and men spoke about violence when it occurred between members of the same household, usually husband and wife. I want to explore a little of one of the cases I am writing about here. I spoke about this household at the ANZAMEMS (Australian and New Zealand Medieval and Early Modern Society) conference in Melbourne February 2013.

In 1666 Dublin woman, Ann Brogh, supported by her brother-in-law, Walter,  wrote a desperate petition to the king asking for mercy for her husband who had been convicted of murdering his landlord, William Wells. The presiding judges had found that John Brogh, and the landlord’s wife Sarah, were guilty of murder. This case is particularly interesting to me because it is about a non-elite household and gives glimpses of the crowds of people who watched, heard and interpreted violence as it happened.

John Brough, a surgeon, had been a lodger in the household of William Wells, who lived with his wife Sarah, 8 year old son and at least one servant. Apparently John had been out at night alone with Sarah and when they returned together, William had been ‘very angry’ with her. Neighbours, heard not only the angry words, and the subsequent cries of ‘Murder’ but also saw and felt the blood seeping through the floorboards into the cellar from the Wells’ rooms. A crowd of neighbours tried to find out what was happening, but could not get through the locked door until it was forced. When they entered the room they saw the dying Wells, dressed in his night shirt, while his wife Sarah with ‘an apron all blood”, a servant and another woman Ellinor, surrounded him. John Brough stood apart in the next room with a bloodied knife in his hand, saying he had killed William. Both Sarah and John tried to convince their neighbours and then the authorities that William had started the fight by hitting John with a chamber pot during an argument but suspicions were aroused because William had been in the bed with his son at the time, while John and Sarah had been out at night alone together.

This is a crowded and bloody scene – the married couple, the child, at least one servant, and another woman all seemed to have lived in the rooms. Then a soldier, Dilkes, who was in the adjoining house belonging to Nichola Harrison and heard clearly what was happening. Nichola's hapless servant was in the cellar under the Wells’ rooms when the blood dripped down onto her. Then the neighbours gathered to help Dilkes to force the door.  While Sarah tried to deflect attention by explaining that her husband had caused the fight, her neighbours read her words as evidence of her guilt and gave full testimony against her.

What can we make of this chaotic scene? The neighbours seemed certain of what they had seen, heard  and felt. John and his relatives put a very different interpretation on the violence, while Sarah's voice is silent except for the defiant statements her neighbours heard when the door burst open. How she was covered in blood is never explained - was she struggling with William when he was struck? Did she kill her husband and John try to shield her? Where was the child through all this? 

As is usual,  there is a frustrating lack of closure for the modern reader here. John’s relatives petitioned to the highest level for his release, arguing that William was quarrelsome, implying the violence was directed at Sarah and that John was an innocent bystander. When Sarah tried to ‘plead her belly’ to avoid execution, a midwife assured the justices that she as not pregnant. Their executions were stayed for a while, but we don’t know what was their ultimate fate. [The reference is Calendar of Ormond papers, HMC vol X, app. 5. pp. 16-8.]