Croppy
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Croppy (sometimes spelt croppie) was a derogatory nickname given to Irish rebels during the period of the 1798 rebellion.
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[edit] Origin
The name "croppy" derives from Ireland in the 1790's as a reference to people with closely cropped hair, a fashion which was associated with the anti-wig (and therefore, anti-aristocrat) French revolutionaries of the period. Those with their hair cropped were automatically suspected of sympathies with the pro-French underground organisation, the Society of United Irishmen and were consequently liable to seizure for interrogation by pro-British forces. Suspected United Irish sympathisers were often subjected to torture by flogging, picketing and half-hanging but the reactive contemporary torture, pitchcapping, was specifically invented to intimidate "croppys". There is evidence of United Irish activists retaliating by cropping the hair of loyalists to reduce the reliability of this method of identifying rebel sympathisers.
[edit] References
- The name is referenced in the title of two famous folk-songs of the period; the antagonistic loyalist "Croppies Lie Down" and the sympathetic rebel "The Croppy Boy".
- There is a memorial park near the site of Collins Barracks Dublin (now a part of the National Museum of Ireland) known as the "Croppy Acre", beside the Liffey into which the bodies of executed rebels were flung after the 1798 rebellion.
- In the church at Crooke, County Waterford , there is a marker to indicate the grave of the "Unknown Croppy", (the "Unknown Soldier" of the rebellion) as the nearby Passage East and Geneva Barracks were sites of execution and transportation of many rebels. The GPS coordinates for the grave of the Croppy Boy are N 52° 13.642' W006° 58.756' and the GPS coordinates for Geneva Barracks are N 52° 13.042' W006° 58.737'.
- The Pikeman Memorial, commemorating the 1798 Risings, in Tralee, is known locally as "The Croppy Boy".
- Seamus Heaney commemorated the fate of thousands of fallen United Irish rebels in his 1966 poem "Requiem for the Croppies".
- The term is used throughout Leon Uris' historical novel on Ireland, "Trinity".
