dinner, when even Euclid, who was only four, had the sense not to say a word, Father said to me, “Please write down what you saw. It will last longer if you do it. These things will need to be known one day.”
None of that Treece family can be found in Tipperary today. Their property dissolved early in the twentieth century, when, under new legislation, the British government set a price for any landlord who wished to sell. In many cases, their native Irish neighbors—their former tenants— became the new purchasers, and saw it as no more than the recovery of their ancestral rights. By then, anyway, many of the landlords had been trying in vain to collect their Irish rents. A Treece hadn't lived in the county for years—the name gave off too foul an odor for safety.
The man with the whip died as he lived. A report in
The Limerick Reporter & Tipperary Vindicator
in April 1880 tells that “Mr. George Treece, late of Ballintemple, Tipperary, died at his home in Ontario, Canada, following a fall from his horse, in a violent incident now being investigated by the authorities. He had migrated to Canada in 1872”—that is, three years after the eviction witnessed by the young Charles O'Brien; no further details were given.
Within days after that eviction, Ireland's ballad tradition, a powerful underground, cleared its throat and began to mock:
To hell with the Treeces, that rack-renting crowd;
Their finest apparel's the brown winding-shroud;
From your cats they'd steal fur, from your sheep steal the fleece;
The world's better off when it buries a Treece.
Mr. O'Brien makes a slight error when he says that the Treeces had been rewarded “for helping Oliver Cromwell on his fiery rampage through Ireland in the 1650's.” So they had, but the reward consisted of being granted a bigger acreage in Tipperary than the estate they already farmed in the poorer county of Clare, some sixty miles to the west.
Originally the Treece family had come over from Yorkshire. They formed part of the Munster Plantation in the late 1500s, which sought to replace the native Irish in the country's southernmost province with loyal English subjects. Many went back to England and Scotland when the tides of history began to drown them.
But others of those colonists stayed on. They were called “planters,” because they had been planted in the land from which the native Irish had been uprooted. Now they rode the waves of change, and having caused much of the past's turbulence, they had to survive in the ever more violent future.
Of the nameless tenant's house torn down in that eviction, not the slightest vestige remains, not even a mark on the ground. Its location—or, rather, the outlined locus of a tenancy—can still be traced on nineteenth-century land maps. An old fence post still stands that might have marked the tenant boundary, but the ground has long been pasture, probably since the day George Treece leveled the place.
The woods, though, have survived, and increased. After the 1921 treaty between Ireland and England, the new Irish Forestry Commission took over that terrain northeast of the town of Tipperary, close to the village of Dundrum. It maintained the fine growths planted by English governors, and even though some modern house building has encroached on the roads up from the sawmill, the countryside still offers a deep sense of peace. And there are still tall ferns and bracken at the edge of the trees.
As for the people who, in Charles O'Brien's words, “lived in the cottages, all gaunt with the same undernourishment”—they must have traveled some distance that day. Many no doubt came from the village of Dundrum, where the Treeces were particularly hated. It also seems likely that some walked out from the town of Tipperary itself—word of a threatened eviction spread like wildfire in those days.
The fact that they brought no weapons suggests that (a) they had heard in advance that a militia would attend; typically,
None of that Treece family can be found in Tipperary today. Their property dissolved early in the twentieth century, when, under new legislation, the British government set a price for any landlord who wished to sell. In many cases, their native Irish neighbors—their former tenants— became the new purchasers, and saw it as no more than the recovery of their ancestral rights. By then, anyway, many of the landlords had been trying in vain to collect their Irish rents. A Treece hadn't lived in the county for years—the name gave off too foul an odor for safety.
The man with the whip died as he lived. A report in
The Limerick Reporter & Tipperary Vindicator
in April 1880 tells that “Mr. George Treece, late of Ballintemple, Tipperary, died at his home in Ontario, Canada, following a fall from his horse, in a violent incident now being investigated by the authorities. He had migrated to Canada in 1872”—that is, three years after the eviction witnessed by the young Charles O'Brien; no further details were given.
Within days after that eviction, Ireland's ballad tradition, a powerful underground, cleared its throat and began to mock:
To hell with the Treeces, that rack-renting crowd;
Their finest apparel's the brown winding-shroud;
From your cats they'd steal fur, from your sheep steal the fleece;
The world's better off when it buries a Treece.
Mr. O'Brien makes a slight error when he says that the Treeces had been rewarded “for helping Oliver Cromwell on his fiery rampage through Ireland in the 1650's.” So they had, but the reward consisted of being granted a bigger acreage in Tipperary than the estate they already farmed in the poorer county of Clare, some sixty miles to the west.
Originally the Treece family had come over from Yorkshire. They formed part of the Munster Plantation in the late 1500s, which sought to replace the native Irish in the country's southernmost province with loyal English subjects. Many went back to England and Scotland when the tides of history began to drown them.
But others of those colonists stayed on. They were called “planters,” because they had been planted in the land from which the native Irish had been uprooted. Now they rode the waves of change, and having caused much of the past's turbulence, they had to survive in the ever more violent future.
Of the nameless tenant's house torn down in that eviction, not the slightest vestige remains, not even a mark on the ground. Its location—or, rather, the outlined locus of a tenancy—can still be traced on nineteenth-century land maps. An old fence post still stands that might have marked the tenant boundary, but the ground has long been pasture, probably since the day George Treece leveled the place.
The woods, though, have survived, and increased. After the 1921 treaty between Ireland and England, the new Irish Forestry Commission took over that terrain northeast of the town of Tipperary, close to the village of Dundrum. It maintained the fine growths planted by English governors, and even though some modern house building has encroached on the roads up from the sawmill, the countryside still offers a deep sense of peace. And there are still tall ferns and bracken at the edge of the trees.
As for the people who, in Charles O'Brien's words, “lived in the cottages, all gaunt with the same undernourishment”—they must have traveled some distance that day. Many no doubt came from the village of Dundrum, where the Treeces were particularly hated. It also seems likely that some walked out from the town of Tipperary itself—word of a threatened eviction spread like wildfire in those days.
The fact that they brought no weapons suggests that (a) they had heard in advance that a militia would attend; typically,
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