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The Agreeable Recreation Of Fighting
Journal of Social History, Fall, 1999 by Carolyn Conley
At the aptly named Strokestown fair in Roscommon in 1866, factions of more than one hundred men each had attacked one another with sticks and stones. Several men were charged with riot, but proving the charge of riot required evidence that reasonable people had been alarmed. The arresting officer testified "I have not one of her majesty's subjects here to swear he was terrified by this mob; I was not frightened myself." After acquitting one of the faction leaders, a juror suggested that the police should return the man's blackthorn stick. The defendants were of the same prosperous farming class as the jurors. In 1873 two Roscommon faction fighters were each able to pay [pounds]100 recognizances to avoid prison.The fights continued in Roscommon, but arrests were rare and punishment even rarer.(28)
Factions were particularly strong in the New Pallas and Cappamore districts of Limerick where the Three Year Olds and Four Year Olds had battled for generations. The names stemmed from a fight held decades earlier over the age of either a colt or a cow. By 1860 nobody remembered which. These factions were contributing factors in over a quarter of all indictments for assault and 8 percent of homicides in Limerick between 1866 and 1892. As in Roscommon, the fighters were often of the same class as the jurors. Justice Fitzgerald lamented that in faction fights "The persons involved are an exceedingly fine class of people physically and also intelligent. They were well-dressed, apparently wealthy."(29)
Between 1866 and 1892 Limerick juries convicted in only 27 percent of faction related cases. Factions continued to enjoy the support of the Limerick community even though the Limerick quarter sessions chairman lamented the bizarre aspect of the practice. "We would say that they were a strange people where one man raises a stick, wheels and utters a cry, when another man comes and breaks his head." That the putative motives of the fights were often ludicrous was immaterial. Factions provided a physical activity through which men could prove their strength and demonstrate their loyalties. As the Munster News noted "in these few adjoining districts in this county it was maintained as a practice which should not be allowed to decline." When a Limerick policeman attempted to arrest an old man who was drunk and wheeling for the Four Year Olds, the constable was assaulted by five hundred people. In another case when a policeman fired a gun into the air to try to break up a faction fight at a fair, the factions united to seize the constable and take him before the magistrates for illegal possession of a firearm.(30)
Though factions are the closest analogy to team sports, huge brawls did not always involve factions. Thirty percent of indictable assaults involved more than two people. The sheer numbers involved in brawls indicate the communal aspect of recreational violence. Once a fight began, friends and relatives of the fighters usually felt free, if not compelled, to join in. A quarter sessions judge in Kilkenny ruled, "there was no mistake but that the law allowed a father to protect his son if he saw him getting the worst of it." In addition to factions and family, group loyalties might also extend to the village or even the county. When Patrick Brien was accused of killing Francis Gorman in a drunken brawl, Brien's response was "it is a nice thing to say that we would kill a man from our own county."(31)
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