‘Ireland in Schools’
Blackpool Pilot Scheme
National Secondary Strategy - Thinking Skills/Leading in Learning
First draft, 260606
Cromwell in Ireland
Collective memory
&
Audience & Purpose
by
Helen Loxton & Lauren Haywood
Highfield Humanities College
Contents
About this unit
Scheme of learning (PlanEasy2)
Worksheets
Naked Protestants - image to be enlarged to A3 for group exercise
Naked Protestants - Image with transcription for checking and debrief
Song package, ‘Young Ned of the Hill’
What & how have we learned?
Notes for teachers
1641 Rising
Cromwell & Ireland
Background note to ‘Ned of the Hill’
SIS
Also Assessment for learning
About this unit
This unit of work introduces two thinking skills activities from the Secondary National Strategy, namely
‘Collective memory’ and ‘Audience and purpose’.
‘Collective memory’
In ‘Collective memory’ pupils work in small groups to recreate an image, map, poem, or other item that has
an obvious physical structure.
1. They take turns to look at and memorise a central image for a limited length of time before returning
to the group.
2. After each turn, groups reflect and plan the next visit.
3. After a few visits each, pupils are asked to compare their versions with the original.
This strategy helps pupils to process and ‘decode’ visual information; enables them to look carefully at
component parts of images; and devise strategies to commit them to memory.
Above all, it requires pupils of whatever ability to do a task that is complex, and unless they plan and do it
together they will fail. In this collaborative process they have to be metacognitive, that is, they have to talk
about their thinking.
‘Audience and purpose’
‘Audience and purpose’ aims to develop pupils’ awareness of, and skill in addressing, what they are doing and
why.
There is a strong link with literacy, but pupils need to be made aware of the connections between different
subjects.
This strategy encourages pupils to think hard about why things are done and takes them into the realms of
meeting a need or a demand rather than just doing or supplying something.
PlanEasy2
This unit of work was developed by, and for, a school that is developing Accelerated Learning, and so the
lesson structure uses the PlanEasy2 format of four phases: connect; activate; demonstrate; and consolidate.
Time
The unit is designed to take place over two lessons, each of one hour.
Blackpool PS, Cromwell in Ireland, 2
Cycle 1 - Cromwell in Ireland
Scheme of learning
PlanEasy2
Overview:
To assess if Cromwell was a hero or a villain.
Learning Outcomes:
By the end of the session we will ...
1
Start to explain if Cromwell was a hero or a villain
2
Analyse sources about the views of the Irish and the English towards Cromwell.
We are learning this because ...
We are trying to find out if Cromwell was good or bad.
We will know we are successful ....
If we can explain how people in England and Ireland viewed Cromwell.
Online Resources:
Delivery of Cycle
Phase
@
Process
Resources
Connection
(Links to previous
lessons)
Pupils have to write down 3 facts and 2 key words they already know
about Cromwell.
They also have to write down 1 unanswered question about Cromwell.
Feedback as a class
Activation
(Giving information
you want pupils to
learn)
Pupils will then undertake a collective memory exercise in groups of 5.
Possibility of Assessment for learning as the pupils decide which poster
is the best. Debrief on the board what information this poster tells the
pupils about the view of Cromwell in Ireland. Play pupils the song
‘Young Ned of the Hill’. Discuss what this song tells us about
Cromwell.
START OF LESSON TWO
In groups of 3-4 pupils are given a copy of a verse of ‘Young Ned of
the Hill’. In their group the pupils need to work out what view the
song has on Cromwell. Each group shares their ideas with the class.
Sources of Irish
Rebellion/Risin
g 1641
Demonstration
(Pupils demonstrate
to selves and others
what they know)
Play to the class again ‘Young Ned of the Hill’.
Give pupils a copy of the whole lyrics to follow. Demonstration
Pupils then need to write a whole new verse for the song writing from
an Irish person’s point of view.
Individual
verses of
‘Young Ned of
the Hill’.
Consolidation
(Feedback to
teachers)
Moving debate. Using a series of statements about Cromwell the
pupils move around the class. One corner of the room is agree and one
disagree. Pupils move to different corners depending on their opinion.
Statements.
This cycle lasts approximately min.
Teacher Notes:
This cycle should take place over 2 lessons. A bell work activity could be used in lesson two
Assessment Notes:
Differentiation:
Blackpool PS, Cromwell in Ireland, 3
Blackpool PS, Cromwell in Ireland, 4
This woodcut bears the inscription:
English Protestants stripped naked and turned into the mountains in the frost and snow, where
many hundreds perished to death, and many lying dead in ditches and savages upbraided them
saying ‘now are ye wild Irish as we are’.
It is from the History of the Irish Rebellion by Sir John Temple’s (1600-77), first published in 1646. It is
the most well-known of the lurid propaganda pieces produced in the aftermath of the 1641 Rising.
Blackpool PS, Cromwell in Ireland, 5
Blackpool PS, Cromwell in Ireland, 6
Have you ever walked the lonesome hills
And heard the curlews cry
Or seen the raven black as night
Upon a windswept sky
To walk the purple heather
And hear the westwind cry
To know that’s where the rapparee must die
Blackpool PS, Cromwell in Ireland, 7
Since Cromwell pushed us westward
To live our lowly lives
There’s some of us have deemed to fight
From Tipperary mountains high
Noble men with wills of iron
Who are not afraid to die
Who’ll fight with Gaelic honour held on high
Blackpool PS, Cromwell in Ireland, 8
A curse upon you Oliver Cromwell
You who raped our Motherland
I hope you’re rotting down in hell
For the horrors that you sent
To our misfortunate forefathers
Whom you robbed of their birthright
‘To hell or Connaught’ may you burn in hell
tonight
Blackpool PS, Cromwell in Ireland, 9
Of one such man I’d like to speak
A rapparee by name and deed
His family dispossessed and slaughtered
They put a price upon his head
His name is known in song and story
His deeds are legend still
And murdered for blood money
Was young Ned of the hill
Blackpool PS, Cromwell in Ireland, 10
You have robbed our homes and fortunes
Even drove us from our land
You tried to break our spirit
But you’ll never understand
The love of dear old Ireland
That will forge an iron will
As long as there are gallant men
Like young Ned of the hill
Young Ned of the Hill’ by The Pogues
Peace & Love CD, 1989, Island Records, 422-842-838-2 http://www.pogues.com/Releases/Lyrics/LPs/PeaceAndLove/YoungNed.html
Have you ever walked the lonesome hills
And heard the curlews* cry
Or seen the raven black as night
Upon a windswept sky
To walk the purple heather
And hear the westwind cry
To know that’s where the rapparee* must die
Since Cromwell pushed us westward
To live our lowly lives
There’s some of us have deemed to fight
From Tipperary mountains high
Noble men with wills of iron
Who are not afraid to die
Who’ll fight with Gaelic honour held on high
A curse upon you Oliver Cromwell
You who raped our Motherland
I hope you’re rotting down in hell
For the horrors that you sent
To our misfortunate forefathers
Whom you robbed of their birthright
‘To hell or Connaught’ may you burn in hell tonight
Of one such man I’d like to speak
A rapparee by name and deed
His family dispossessed and slaughtered
They put a price upon his head
His name is known in song and story
His deeds are legend still
And murdered for blood money
Was young Ned of the hill
You have robbed our homes and fortunes
Even drove us from our land
You tried to break our spirit
But you’ll never understand
The love of dear old Ireland
That will forge an iron will
As long as there are gallant men
Like young Ned of the hill
*
*
Curlews - Shore birds
Rapparee - Vagabond, one with no home
Blackpool PS, Cromwell in Ireland, 11
Plenary - what & how have we learned?
Thinking words
You will need to consider, discuss, look up, or ask about the following words:
adapt
evaluate
link
apply
explain
negotiate
assess
hypothesise
organise
assumption
identify
prioritise
compare
interpret
reflect
contrast
interrelate
sequence
convert
judge
structure
decide
justify
summarise
differentiate
juxtapose
visualise
Working with a partner:
(Tick the boxes where you have used those skills in this piece of work.)
˜ Choose any 3 skills from this list that you think you have used in this task, and be able
to explain how and at which points you have used them.
˜ Choose any 3 different skills from this list that you have used both in this task and in
other subjects, and explain how and where you have used them in other subjects.
˜
Choose any 3 different skills from this list that you have used both in this task and in
other situations in your life and, again, explain where/ when/ how.
Blackpool PS, Cromwell in Ireland, 12
1641 Rising
taken from The Oxford Companion to Irish History edited by S.). Connolly, OUP, 1998, 0-19866-240-8
The rising commenced in Ulster on 22 October 1641 amid a constitutional and related economic crisis convulsing Charles I’s
multiple monarchy. There were three plots - a conspiracy by Rory O’More and Conor Maguire in February 1641; a conspiracy
of army officers disbanded from Wentworth’s army, subsequently abandoned; and the coalescence of these earlier plots under Sir
Phelim O’Neill in August.
The insurrection has traditionally been seen as a revolt against the Ulster plantation. However, the main conspirators were
debt-ridden scions of families who were originally beneficiaries rather than victims of the plantation. Their demands were for
improvements in property rights and safeguards for religious freedom, reflecting their fear of the Puritan administration that had
succeeded Wentworth in Ireland and of the growing assertiveness of a virulently anti-Catholic English parliament. The successful
recent revolt of the Scots Covenanters provided a model.
Although the plan to take Dublin Castle on 23 October was betrayed by Owen O’Connolly, the rising in Ulster had already
begun. Co-ordinated attacks took the colony by surprise but what was conceived as an armed constitutional protest legitimized
by forged royal commissions degenerated into a spate of sectarian massacres as the gentry lost control of untrained levies. At least
4,000 settlers were murdered in such incidents as the notorious drowning of a refugee convoy at Portadown. Reprisals followed
against Irish living in planter-controlled districts, notably the massacre of the inhabitants of Islandmagee, Co. Antrim. From
Ulster, the insurgents turned south, capturing Dundalk on 31 October and defeating a government force at Julianstown (29 Nov.).
Around 3 December the Old English gentry of the Pale, having been again denied the Graces and fearing a government backlash
against all Catholics, made a historic decision to throw in their lot with their co- religionists. Thereafter the insurrection spread
nationwide, laying the basis for the Confederate War.
Lurid propaganda produced in the aftermath of the rising, notably Temple’s Irish Rebellion (1646),1 alleging a premeditated
plot to exterminate the Protestant population and wildly exaggerating the numbers killed, helped legitimize the sequestration of
Catholic land in the Adventurers’ Act and Cromwellian land settlement. Many of these accounts drew on depositions collected
from Protestant survivors. For over a century annual church services of deliverance inaugurated on 23 October 1662 alerted Irish
Protestants to the fundamental disloyalty of their Catholic compatriots evidenced by the rising.
1
History of the Irish Rebellion by Sir John Temple’s (1600-77) was published in 1646 and is the most well-known of the lurid propaganda pieces produced in the
aftermath of the rising.
The propaganda alleged a premeditated plot to exterminate the Protestant population and, wildly exaggerating the numbers killed, helped legitimise the
sequestration of Catholic land in the Adventurers’ Act and Cromwellian land settlement.
The frequent republication of the History of the Irish Rebellion - nine times by 1812 - reflected periods of Irish Protestant anxiety. Conversely, the book was
loathed by Irish Catholics and was publicly burned on the orders of the Patriot Parliament of 1689.
Blackpool PS, Cromwell in Ireland, 13
Cromwell in Ireland
taken from The Oxford Companion to Irish History edited by S.). Connolly, OUP, 1998, 0-19866-240-8
Ireland’s first and only commoner lord lieutenant, Oliver Cromwell (1600-58) campaigned in Ireland between 15 August 1649
and 26 May 1650. Backed by a 20,000 strong army, a huge artillery train, and a large navy, Cromwell projected himself as a
providential liberator from Irish barbarism, royalist misrule, and Catholic hypocrisy.
His best remembered actions were the sieges of Drogheda (11 Sept. 16491) and Wexford (11 Oct. 1649). Giving no quarter to
garrisons refusing to surrender was in line with contemporary European practice. However, Cromwell’s own explanation of the
massacre at Drogheda, which had never been under Confederate Catholic control, was plainly influenced by religious convictions
and propaganda about the 1641 massacres. In Wexford the New Model Army ran amok-killing 2,000 in the market place after
an outpost had surrendered whilst a parley was still in progress. Though not responsible, Cromwell once more justified his army’s
action with reference to massacres of Protestants in the vicinity.
Cromwell’s campaign was quickly running out of steam. Sickness and the need to man garrisons reduced his army’s size and
on 2 December 1649 he was forced to abandon the siege of Waterford. He resumed the next year, as a string of towns surrendered
with good terms offered to inhabit-ants and defenders, only to meet disaster at Clonmel (17 May 1650). When his men poured
through the breached walls, they were trapped in a killing ground prepared by Hugh Dubh O’Neill. Estimated losses of
1,000–2,500 were the heaviest the New Model Army had experienced anywhere. Cromwell was conspicuously silent about
Clonmel in his dispatches to parliament.
Cromwell’s success lay as much with the Old Protestants as with the legendary efficiency of his army. Michael Jones’s victory
at Rathmines provided him with Dublin as a bridgehead; subsequently the victories and influence of Charles Coote and Roger
Boyle secured Ulster, Connacht, and south Munster. More generally Protestant royalists began deserting in increasing numbers,
culminating in significant submissions in April 1650. Nevertheless Cromwell’s triumphant return from Ireland, coupled with
the revolutionary situation in England, gave him the opportunity for political power that some previous lord lieutenants had
merely contemplated and he ruled England as lord protector from 1653 until his death. He continued to exercise influence in
Ireland through his sons-in-law Ireton and Fleetwood, and later through his younger son Henry Cromwell.
Although Cromwell’s direct connection with Ireland lasted only nine months, his dominance in England has meant that his
name is associated with the events of the whole period 1649-58, which saw the ruthless suppression of Catholic and royalist
resistance, the execution, transportation, or imprisonment of substantial numbers of Catholic clergy, and the wholesale
confiscation of Catholic lands.2 Barnard suggests that the black legend of Cromwell the oppressor took its present form only in
the 19th century. However, his campaign was evidently controversial at the time, and he himself published an extraordinary
defence of his policies in response to the decrees of a Catholic ecclesiastical assembly at Clonmacnoise in December 1649. Gaelic
poets of the 17th century already associated his name with the destruction of the Catholic elite and their replacement by
newcomers of lowly social origins. Hence the ironic picture in Pairlement Chloinne Tomais of churls hailing Cromwell as their
liberator, and the poet Daithi Ó Bruadair’s references to ‘Cromwellian dogs’.
1
This was Oliver Cromwell’s first major, and most infamous, action in Ireland. The parliamentarians were anxious to re-capture Drogheda, wrested from them the
previous July, to prevent a possible juncture between Ormond and Owen Roe O’Neill. The royalist-Confederate Catholic garrison under Sir Arthur Aston defended
stoutly until Cromwell’s artillery began a bombardment on 9 September. The walls were breached on the third day, the Boyne draw-bridge taken, and Aston
overwhelmed in a last-ditch stand on the Millmount.
Official figures were 3,500 slain. The quarter given to the Millmount’s defenders was ignored. Cromwell tried to vindicate the killing of civilians, of whom
possibly 1,000 were slaughtered, on the erroneous grounds of their involvement in the massacres accompanying the rising of 1641. His other claim, that the action
was an expedient to win the war quickly by terrifying other towns into submission, was borne out only in the case of nearby garrisons.
2
This was the greatest early modern transformation in Irish landowner-ship, creating an estate system which lasted with minor adjustments until the late 19th century.
Indeed it is no accident that J. P. Prendergast’s pioneer study, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1865), coincided with the emergence of the Irish land question
as a contentious political issue.
Although the Act for Adventurers had raised only £306,718, the Cromwellian conquest of Ire-land had cost an estimated £3.5 million. Other state creditors,
and arrears of pay due to 35,000 soldiers, had thus to be satisfied out of Irish land. The first object under the 1652 act for the settling of Ireland was to identify ‘rebel’
landowners for clearance. The most guilty, including 105 named chief rebels, were subject to execution, banishment, and transportation, while others who had not
shown ‘constant good affection’ to parliament were subject to various levels of forfeiture and transplantation to Connacht.
In September 1653 the English parliament set aside four counties (Dublin, Kildare, Carlow, and Cork) for the government, and ten counties (Armagh, Down,
Antrim, Laois, Offaly, Meath, Westmeath, Limerick, Tipperary, and Waterford) for division between the adventurers and soldiers, with more land to be provided
out of other counties if necessary. A tripartite Civil Survey, by jury inquisition, ‘gross’ estimation, and mapping supervised by William Petty, was ordered. In January
1654 1,500 adventurers began dividing their halves of the ten counties by lot. In this way 1,043 adventurers were eventually assigned 1.1 mil-lion acres, 5 per cent
of total profitable land, the biggest beneficiaries being London merchants who had recently bought out other investors at knock-down prices. The 33,419 debentures
issued to disbanding soldiers, theoretically convertible into Irish land at the same ‘act-rates’ as the adventurers, were worth only Izs. 6d. in the pound after the
adventurers’ share-out. More land had to be made available but only 11,804 certificates of possession were taken out, most soldiers having sold their debentures
cheaply to their land-hungry officers. Some soldiers, particularly Munster Protestants who had turned coat late in the day, got nothing, as indeed did some adventurers
because of the inaccuracies of the ‘gross’ survey. Petty reckoned that II million of Ireland’s 20 million acres had been confiscated, but Henry Cromwell complained
that the land and debt problems were still not fully resolved in 1659. The post-Restoration books of Survey and Distribution show that Charles II confirmed 7,500
soldiers and 500 adventurers in their lands. In the interim land speculation had continued with Old Protestants in particular rounding off their estates.
The Cromwellian land settlement saw no new wave of immigration. Bottigheimer claims ‘that the adventurers were more interested in a return on their
investment than in bringing over English yeomen. By 1657 Catholic tenantry had drifted back into many confiscated territories or had never left, and the 1659 ‘census’
indicates that they still composed three-quarters of the population. However, Catholic landowners had been displaced from Ulster, Munster, and Leinster by victorious
army officers and opportunistic Old Protestants.
Blackpool PS, Cromwell in Ireland, 14
Background note to ‘Young Ned of the Hill’
Based on ‘Young Ned of the Hill and the Reemergence of the Irish Rapparee: A Textual and Intertextual Analysis by Ray Cashman,
University of Indiana, U.SA, Cultural Analyss Volume 1, 2000, http://ist-socratesberkeley.edu/~cafioruMcolume1/vol1_article4.html
1. Summary
In 1989, the Pogues, an eclectic Irish folk/punk/rock band, included ‘Young Ned of the Hill’, a song written by Ron Kavana and
Pogues member Teny Woods, on their ironically titled album, Peace and Love. The song is somewhat remarkable as a political
statement, fiercely condemning Oliver Cromwell and his ruthless seventeenth-century campaign through Ireland.
It is really about the conflict in Northern Ireland. It selectively draws upon and re-interprets the folk-lore of Ned of the Hill
and Irish musical traditions to lend support and legitimacy to the IRA.
Given the song’s juxtaposition of Ned and Cromwell - resistance fighter and English invader - the song provides commentary on the
role of republican paramilitary groups such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in contemporary Northern Ireland, a commentary that
draws on the aura of tradition for its authority.
As an allegory for contemporary political conflict in Northern Ireland, ‘Young Ned of the Hill’ is an attempt to provide that
assignment of virtue and blame and to render the world in black and white. If the IRA volunteer can be equated with the rapparee of
folklore, he, too, partakes of the transgressive power and appeal of one who can simultaneously be bad and do the right thing by
breaking the law. He, too, is a heroic outlaw enforcing social justice and invoking laws higher than those legislated at the expense of
the oppressed.
The song’s tone ‘is also standard fare for this now defunct London-based band of mostly Irish ex-patriots, who cultivated an
image of hard-drinking, blue-collar machismo.’
2. The text
In this song Ned’s function is to provide a platform for the denunciation of Cromwell and the ills he visited on Ireland and
the Irish and to create an ‘us’ and ‘them’ conflict between the Irish and the English.
There are four stanzas and a refrain that appears after the first two stanzas and last two stanzas. The first two stanzas, each
of seven lines, can be taken as a unit, as can the last two, each of eight lines.
The first stanza establishes the bleak and lonesome existence of the rapparee in ‘lonesome hill’ , while the second populates
the hills with noble men, the victims of Cromwell, willing to fight with Gaelic honour held up high. Then comes the vilification
of Cromwell in the refrain (‘A curse upon you Oliver Cromwell/You raped our motherland’) and fourth stanza.
Ned is mentioned by name only twice, briefly, and not until the second to last stanza. In fact, only one of the four stanzas, the
third, is entirely devoted to him, whereas Cromwell is introduced in the second stanza and remains the narrator’s addressee in
the refrains and possibly in the fourth stanza. The lyrics provide meagre information about Ned, although they establish that Ned
was prompted to become a rapparee as a result of his family being dispossessed and slaughtered. Consequently, the English put
a price upon his head for which he was murdered.
The use of an authoritative narrator (‘I’ - possibly one of Ned’s fellow resistance fighters and thus a gallant man) creates (lines
8, 9, 10) and ‘them’ groups: Cromwell’s victims described as noble and brave in their resistance, on the one hand, and oppressors
- Cromwell and the English on the other. These groups are in timeless opposition for the narrator indicates that ‘Since Cromwell
pushed us westward’ (line 8) - from the mid-seventeenth century onwards indefinitely - everyone who resists English colonization
is effectively part of the same solidarity.
The use of ‘you’ changes from signifying the imagined listener in the line 1 to Cromwell in the refrain (lines 15-18, 20-1,
38-41, 43-4) and probably in stanza four (lines 30, 32-3). The change signals a shift in attention to the antagonist in the story
of Ned’s life. Not only is Cromwell addressed, in the third stanza he is cursed with ‘A curse upon you . . . and may you burn in
Hell tonight’. The narrator’s curse on Cromwell ironically appropriates and turns on its head a curse directed at the Irish,
traditionally attributed to Cromwell - ‘To Hell or Connaught’, i.e., move westward or die.
The [repeated] curse on Cromwell is performative speech. In doing social work, it has illocutionary force - the act of saying the curse
accomplishes it, and therefore sends Cromwell’s soul to Hell. Its perlocutionary force is persuading the song’s audience of Cromwell’s
unparalleled wickedness. The curse also has potential perlocutionary force in the wider socio-political world outside the song if it
compels audience members to defy in some way the dispossession and colonialism that Cromwell stands for in the songs [especially
since] in face to face performance contexts, the refrain is the part in which the audience would feel most free to join in the singing.
The ‘they’ in line 25 and ‘you’ in the fourth stanza could mean the English army - all those murderous pillagers of whom
Cromwell is the most infamous example. The song would personify both sides - the Irish as Ned and the English as Cromwell
and characterize only seventeenth-century conflict in rigid binary terms: Irish/English, good bad. Yet by leaving the historical
period in question open to any time (‘Since Cromwell pushed us westward’, line 8), Kavana and Woods allow them to mean any
party that oppresses us, and those Irishmen at any time since Cromwell who ‘have deemed to fight’ (line 10).
3. The ‘aura of tradition’
Historical reality
Known in Irish folk-lore as Éamonn an Chnoic or Ned of the Hill, Éamonn Ó Riain (Edmund O’Ryan) really did exist. He was
one of many Irish Catholic landholders forcibly dispossessed by English and Scottish Protestant settlers in the seventeenth century.
Rather than fleeing to the continent, many like Ó Riain chose to remain in Ireland, hoping to frustrate their supplanters. Living
the lives of political bandits - harassing British troops, robbing Protestant planters and landlords, and aiding the Irish poor - these
men were outlawed and termed rapparees and tone by Crown authorities.
Blackpool PS, Cromwell in Ireland, 15
Ned was active in Tipperary in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, long after Cromwell’s death in 1658.
Historically, William III and not Cromwell would have been his antagonist. The choice of Cromwell as Ned’s nemesis might have
been the result of faulty historical research, but it could also have been deliberate because of the resonance Cromwell has for Irish
audiences as the archetypal anti-hero and quintessential evil invader.
Folk-lore
After the historical Ó Riain’s death, ballads, chapbooks, and local legends immortalized him as a Robin Hood-like figure. The
two extant lyric texts paint a very different picture of Ned from that given in ‘Ned of the Hill’. In the Irish one, ‘Éamonn an
Chnoic’, for example, he is seeking shelter from the inhospitable wilderness and bemoans his miserably isolated life as a wanted
man.
Such men were not concerned with battling against the English. They were concerned with social justice and traditionally their
lonely plight and defeat of them attracted commiseration. It was their humanity and vulnerability which lent rapparee lore a sense
of romantic quasi- defeatism.
Re-interpreting (distorting?) folk-lore
In the interests of pitting good against evil, the Irish versus the English, the song ‘Young Ned of the Hill’ transforms this
tradition. Its purpose is vigorously to condemn English oppression. Ned’s defeat solicits anger and indignation, not
commiseration.
To emphasise the conflict between nations, ‘Young Ned of the Hill’ deliberately ignores facets of his life. First, although
outlawed with a price upon his head (line 25), Ned actually received a pardon. Secondly, although despite the pardon, the price
on Ned’s head was his downfall, he was murdered by his own kin -a foster brother or cousin by the name of O’Dwyer. Ignorant
of the pardon, the cousin sheltered Ned but once he was asleep O’Dwyer chopped off his head with an axe. Such destruction is
consistent with almost all Irish outlaw legends: the rapparee can only be defeated by foul or unfair means, most often through
betrayal.
This common motif of betrayal by confederates is rather inconvenient for the purposes of N ed of the Hill’. While it enhances
the rapparees’ quasi-martyr status in Irish folklore, it also prevents any clear-cut distinctions being made between us and them
in rapparee lore.
‘Young Ned of the Hill’, however, is intent on clearly defining the line between the solidarity of Ireland’s gallant men and the
homogeneity of Cromwell’s villainous crew and their successors. Admitting betrayal by the very community Ned defends and supports
would problematise the simplistic view of Anglo-Irish conflict offered by Young Ned of the Hill.
Other elements of Ned’s story in oral tradition are similarly not referred to for fear of invalidating the eternal conflict posited
by the song. A fuller picture of Ned would have meant a more important role in the song than that of a two-dimensional foil to
Cromwell; the nationalistic message of the song would necessarily be subtler, as are the messages embedded in older songs and
stories concerned with Ned and other rapparees. The rapparees’ actions portrayed in older folklore did have political implications
that invite nationalistic interpretations, but explicit antagonism toward a specific English ruler is unique to ‘Young Ned of the
Hill’.
4. Music & structure
Drawing on tradition
Initially, the instrumentation of ‘Young Ned of the Hill’ identifies the musical style as specifically Irish. The first stanza is given
only the sparse accompaniment of tin whistle and accordion, cultivating the lonesome hills imagery of the text. Then in the second
stanza the tempo quickens dramatically, and bass, guitar, and bodhran (percussion) are added, complementing the introduction
in the text of those noble men willing to fight with Gaelic honour held on high.
Departing from tradition
Once the lonesome hills have been populated in stanza two with these as yet unnamed rapparees, backup vocals join in the refrain,
which pounds on in a frenetic pace to the third stanza. This orchestration and intensity is maintained until the end. Thus, given
the management of tempo and instrumentation, the song follows a gradual crescendo toward the third stanza, in which Ned is
finally mentioned by name, then maintains a sort of high plateau through the fourth stanza and final refrain.
With its four stanzas and a refrain, the structure of the song is not a traditional Irish lyric form.
5. Conceiving a present, appealing to a past
The transforming of ‘Young Ned of the Hill’ into a resistance fighter is part of a wider process of re-conceiving Ireland as a
cultural unity and as a nation with the right to independence in train since the late nineteenth century and emphasised by the
renewed violence in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s.
Ned is not the only rapparee text to be re-interpreted. The re-interpretation of traditional texts, including rapparee stories and
songs, have a role to play in granting the IRA and other republican groups the legitimacy of being part of a longer, heroic tradition
of resistance to English colonisation.
6. Caution
This summary does not do justice to the subtlety of Professor Cashman’s scholarship and the way he addresses the central issues
of context and contexualisation, text and entexualisation’. Only a reading of the full text can do that.
Blackpool PS, Cromwell in Ireland, 16