The earliest sketches I have for the peasant in Ireland are from the famine year of 1847 (see 1847 Famine Pictures ). The next dated image is from 1874 (see Emigration ). I have a lot of images from 1880 to at least the turn of the century. These images show that there was not much change in the attire of the Irish peasant. Be sure to also look at what everyone was wearing on the following pages: Famine 1880 , Irish Peasant 1897 , Turf, Land Issues, and Transportation

While women's skirts appear to have become a little shorter over time, there is little other change in their attire. They wore full long skirts over petticoats sometimes with an apron on top. Their petticoats were frequently died a bright red. Red petticoats were frequently mentioned by travelers in Ireland. For warmth women wore capes and shawls. Hear covering include kerchiefs and occasionally a bonnet. Women are frequently seen bare footed.

Men wore either straight-legged paints or knee britches and almost always have on clogs or boots. There was a wide range of types of hats and caps for men and boys.

Women and children are frequently barefooted even when the weather appears to be quite cold, see bottom of this page.

"POVERTY IN IRELAND

The dress of the people is so wretched, that, to a person who has not visited the country, it is almost inconceivable. Shoes or stockings are seldom to be seen on children and often not on grown persons. The rags in which both men and women are clothed are so worn and complicated, that it is hardly possible to imagine to what article of dress they have originally belonged. It has been observed that the Irish poor never take off their clothes when they go to bed; but the fact is, that not only are they in general destitute of blankets, but if they once took off their clothes, it would be difficult to get them on again. Their dress is worn day and night till it literally falls to pieces; and even when it is first put on, it is usually cast-off clothing; for there is not one cottager out of ten who ever gets a coat made for himself. A considerable trade has long been carried on from the west of Scotland to Ireland, consisting of the old clothes of the former country, and to those who know how long all ranks in Scotland wear their dress, there is no more conniving proof of the poverty of the latter county can be given.

IRELAND, supplement to the forth, fifth and sixth editions (1816-24)

'An Anthology of Pieces From Early Editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica',1816-24."

Kindly sent by John Doherty, May 2010

A Description Of The Irish Peasants Near Ballinrobe In 1870

"There was no denying that "in those days we looked on our tenants as animals, and they looked on us as kings." They lived in hovels, and came twice a year to pay their rent, taking out of their tall hats banknotes dirty with sweat and soil. Most of them could not speak English, and when he was a child, George recalled always having been afraid of them: he used to run into the woods when he saw the women coming up from Derrynanny with the men's dinners. On Sundays at the Carnacun chapel the family in its carriage would pass by the men in knee breeches, frieze coats, and stovepipe hats; inside the church, the men sat on one side, the women hiding their faces behind shawls on the other, while from the family pew the boy stared down on a grinning dwarf, a blind girl, and other people strange in the young master's eyes. During the sermon Father James Browne threatened them all in Irish with hellfire, making the women fall to knees and beat their breasts. GM claimed to have wondered what would happen should they meet their tenants in heaven: would the men doff their hats, and say, "Long life to yer honor?" Would the women curtsey? In the days after the funeral, they paid the heir all respects; indeed, he mischievously boasted that a woman came to the door with a donkey, laden with two creels of chickens, and her daughter, shyly hiding behind a shawl. Both the girl and the birds were an offering to the new master of Moore Hall, but he had seen, Moore later wrote, the women of London with their kits off, as painted by his uncle Jim Browne, and would have none of the shy girl. In contrast to his father's remarkable identification with his Catholic tenants, George Moore confessed that he felt for them only bewilderment, fear, and repulsion.

George Moore 1852-1933 by Adrian Frazier Yale University Press, Chapter on "His Fathers' Funeral and the Birth of George Moore" from The New York Times on the web

"Moore's literary output is diverse: A Mummer's Wife (1885), A Drama in Muslin (1886), Esther Waters, (in print since its first edition in 1894, dramatised and filmed), and the short stories of The Untilled Field (1903), are moderately well-known; his ground-breaking, autobiographical Hail and Farewell (1914) created significant aftershocks in Dublin social and literary circles, and so irritated W.B.Yeats that he saved his retaliation until after Moore's death twenty years later."

Unversity College Cork

My dad, Bud Land, always used to tease my mother, Agnes Goehle, about her Irish grandmother who smoked a pipe.

No postmark

Irish women smoking was a rather frequent image in "sketches" and on postcards.

Post marked 1906

There is no date on this postcard, however, the same picture is in Stoddard's Lectures on Ireland which are dated 1901

Not dated

No postmark

No postmark

No postmark

Postmarked 1904

This postcard

"was sent to Alfred Haddon from Belfast on 9 July 1931 by the photographer of the image. The message reads "Hows this for ethnog?"

Postcard. R. Welch. Ireland. Haddon Collection. P.490683.ACH2."

Notice the drawing was done in February (and it is certainly cold enough to be wrapped up) yet the one woman is bare footed.

Posted 1906

Not posted

Unlabeled on left the postcard on the right is labeled "Irish Farmer". Notice that the man is the same it is only the background that has changed between the person labeled "farmer" and his counterpart who is clearly leaning against a building in a town. .

Man with the pitch fork "Peasant and turf stack". Click HERE for more information on "turf".

Not dated

Posted 1908

A Galway Farmer

The accompanying article stated that this "splendid specimen of an Irish farmer" wore clothes made of "grey frieze" that was common in the south west of Ireland. It was made of wool by the peasants and lasted forever.

Frieze is a coarse plain woven wollen fabric with an uncut nap on one side.

Wiskey

No date

Postmarked 1907

This picture is connected to the Boycott issue, so these boys must be from somewhere fairly near Ballinrobe.

Date unknown, most likely 1930s

Date unknown, most likely 1930s

Not posted

In June 2010 John Doherty found the text that went with this image, but could not find page 2939 referred to in the caption.

YOUNG IRELAND, TOUCHED TOO SOON BY EARTHLY CARE

Petticoats, as explained on page 2936, may protect him from wicked fairies, but they cannot conceal the masculine character of this stern-faced Connemara boy escorting his sister home from school. The faces of both these children are, indeed, stamped with an unusual maturity, due, perhaps, to the hard struggle with poverty which the Connemara peasant has to wage from earliest infancy.

Photo. A. W. Cutler.

In April 2010 John Doherty sent the above picture whose caption did shed some light on the subject of boys in petticoats.

SCHOOL BOYS CLAD IN PETTICOATS

"The "good" an the "bad" people, supernatural powers ever present to bless or to harm, are very real to the Irish peasant. In Connemara it is believed that the "bad" people run away with little boys but not with girls, so bays are dressed in petticoats to deceive them until they are of an age to protect themselves."

"Incidentally, my late mother, Mary told me of her youngest brother, Tom, wearing a petticoat untill he was about six years old, which was in 1926, when they lived in Ballinamona,Shrule.

I suspect that by then it had become part tradition rather than solely superstition."

"Children scampered in the wake of mothers and sisters—bright-eyed, picturesque youngsters, the smaller boys wearing petticoats differing in nothing from those of the little girls, being thus, according to local tradition, rendered immune from the depredations of the fairies, who, if the secret of the sex were not withheld, might spirit them away. Unpoetically-minded people suggest that the origin of the tradition lay in the fact that tailors are scarce in the neighborhood of Connemara, and that petticoats are more easily manufactured at home than trousers."

See Religion and Alternative Believes

The Graphic, December 3, 1881

Applicants for "Fair Rent"

State of Ireland

The Illustrated London News

January 14, 1882

The State of Ireland

The small article that accompanies this pictures suggests that the people in the jaunting car are the squire and his family and says:

"Whether the Squire and his family be going to the same church or chapel as the two barefoot peasant women is a question that we have not the curiosity to ask; and since the Disestablishment Act of Mr. Gladstone' Ministry in 1869, which redressed a grievous political injustice and secured complete religious equality in Ireland, there is no authority but that of conscience in this affair of "Going to Church"

Martin Langan and Ellen Moghan, both from Ballinrobe in County Mayo, Ireland married in New York City in 1897. They had two daughters, Martha born in 1898 and Helen born in 1900. Apparently Martin and Ellen had their differences. Ellen, also known as Muddy, took the two girls and retuned to Ballinrobe, probably before 1906. According to Ken and Bob Carty (the sons Martha Langan) Ellen worked in the convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Ballinrobe. She and the girls lived on Glebe Street. They returned to the sates in 1920. In her reminiscences of life in Ireland Martha Langan Carty told her sons, Ken and Bob, about what nice shoes she had. They both found it very funny that she should brag about her shoes. However, nice shoes were surely a source of pride to a little girl living in a west Mayo town. Most of the young girls and indeed many grown woman who lived in the countryside outside of Ballinrobe probably only had one pair of shoes and those shoes were more than likely not very nice by a town girls standards. Many pictures of rural Ireland show women and children without shoes even in what appears to be quite cold weather. These ladies who are on their way to church are carrying their shoes. Presumably they will put them on when they arrive at church.

The woman is clearly of a different social standing than the tattered man and his one socked child.

The Graphic, December 3, 1881

These little sketches, entitled "A Landlord", "A Bailiff", and "A Tenant", show the difference in the physique, dress, and demeanor of the three classes connected to the land in Ireland.

Maggie