'Ride rough-shod': evictions, sheriffs' sales and the anti-hunting agitation

Abstract

Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879-1920 is an important contribution to a neglected topic in Irish literary and cultural history – the modes of protest and cultural forms available to the subaltern classes under landlordism. In this publication, Heather Laird demonstrates that the so-called unwritten 'agrarian code' of popular justice, though often depicted in political and fictional writings as anarchic and pathological, was pro-social as opposed to anti-social, emanating from an alternative moral code whose very existence undermined the legitimacy of the colonial civil law. Chapter III, " 'Ride Rough-Shod': Evictions, Sheriffs' Sales and the Anti-Hunting Agitation", is primarily concerned with the extensive resistance to hunting that took place in many parts of Ireland during the period of the Land War.