Agistment and the Legion Club1736 CE

Dateline

In 1736, public affairs in Ireland came unusually close to the concerns of pasture, parish income and the character of the ruling class. A dispute over the tithe claimed on the grazing of cattle produced a significant House of Commons resolution, provoked Jonathan Swift’s last great political satire, and exposed an enduring tension within Protestant Ireland: the established church depended on revenues which many powerful landowners wished to reduce. Elsewhere, legislation for Cork joined rebuilding, welfare and coercion in one ambitious civic scheme; at Oldbridge, a new monument fixed the Williamite victory of 1690 into the landscape; and Irish-language Catholic preaching reached print in Dublin.

The year must nevertheless be seen in proportion. Ireland was ruled by George II through a Dublin administration headed by the lord lieutenant, Lionel Sackville, Duke of Dorset. The Irish Parliament sat at Dublin Castle and was a legislature of landed Protestant power, not a representative national assembly. Catholics had been excluded from parliament and the franchise, while many civil and professional disabilities imposed by the penal laws remained in force. Their application varied locally and was not uniform, but political authority and the established Church of Ireland were closely bound together. The events of 1736 illuminate that unequal order rather than overturn it.

Pasture, Tithe and Parliament

On 18 March the Irish House of Commons adopted resolutions against the tithe of agistment: a clerical claim on the pasture used for ‘dry and barren’ cattle, meaning animals not kept for milk or breeding. The technical phrase concealed a substantial issue. Grazing was economically attractive to landlords and larger occupiers, particularly where land had been shifted from tillage to pasture. Clergy, meanwhile, regarded tithes as a lawful part of the endowment supporting parochial ministry. The question therefore involved not merely a charge upon cattle but the distribution of income between landowners, tenants and the established church.

The Commons’ action was a resolution, not a final statutory settlement. A bill intended to give the principle legal force did not survive the Lords, where Church of Ireland bishops sat among the temporal peers. Yet the vote mattered. It supplied political cover for resistance to the tithe and became a conspicuous victory for landed interests over clerical claims. The immediate beneficiaries were not necessarily the smallholders who worked the soil. Contemporary defenders of the clergy argued that exempting grassland advantaged proprietors while concentrating the visible burden of tithes upon tillage, including the crops on which poorer rural households depended. That claim was partisan, but it identifies the social stakes behind an apparently narrow fiscal quarrel.

Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, answered with A Character, Panegyric, and Description of the Legion Club, printed in London during 1736 in the miscellany S–t contra omnes. His target was the Irish House of Commons, transformed in the poem into a noisy, corrupt and self-interested ‘club’. Swift’s indignation sprang from his defence of the established clergy, but his satire was wider: it portrayed legislators as detached from public responsibility and susceptible to private interest. The poem is not an impartial guide to the vote; it is a polemical work by one of its fiercest opponents. Precisely for that reason, it records how heated the agistment controversy had become.

Cork’s Church and Workhouse

In Cork, a measure conventionally cited as the City of Cork Act 1735 received effect in 1736. Its unusually broad title authorised the rebuilding of the cathedral church of St Finbarry and the establishment of a workhouse for employing and maintaining the poor, punishing vagabonds, and providing for and educating foundling children. The act’s preamble declared the old cathedral ruinous and unsafe, while also describing a growing number of poor people and vagrants in the city and its liberties. It created a permanent corporation of governors, combining the bishop with the mayor, civic officers and nominated members of the city’s commonalty.

This was not a modern welfare programme. The language of the act joined charitable maintenance to discipline, compulsory labour and the punishment of vagrancy. It treated poverty as a problem of relief, order and labour supply at once. Its provision for foundling children also shows that abandoned infants were understood as a civic responsibility, though within an institutional system controlled by Protestant civic and ecclesiastical elites. The cathedral rebuilding likewise linked public improvement with the established church. A replacement cathedral was built in the years 1735–38, principally funded by a local coal tax. In 1736, therefore, Cork’s changing urban fabric embodied both religious establishment and a more organised, if restrictive, approach to poverty.

A Williamite Landscape

On 17 April Dorset laid the foundation stone of an obelisk at Oldbridge beside the Boyne. It commemorated William III’s crossing of the river and victory over James II in 1690. The sponsors described themselves as Protestants from Great Britain and Ireland, and the intended monument presented the battle as the security of ‘liberty, laws and religion’. That wording was political, not neutral commemoration: it asserted a Protestant reading of the Revolution settlement which underpinned the ruling order of eighteenth-century Ireland.

The placing of the stone was itself significant. Nearly half a century after the battle, its memory was being given a permanent monumental form in County Meath, rather than remaining solely in sermons, anniversaries and inherited loyalties. The completed obelisk later dominated the site; it was destroyed in 1923, leaving only its base and scattered remains. In 1736, however, the project expressed confidence that the Williamite past was the legitimate public inheritance of the kingdom. For Catholics living under continuing legal disabilities, that confidence had an exclusionary edge.

Irish Sermons and Daily News

Religious print offered a different view of Ireland’s confessional life. James Gallagher, Catholic bishop of Raphoe, published Sixteen Irish Sermons in an Easy and Familiar Stile in Dublin during 1736. The title page and prefatory material used English, but the sermons were in Irish, set in Roman type rather than the older Irish typeface. Gallagher explicitly sought a form more accessible to clergy and readers accustomed to English characters. The collection treated confession, penance, prayer, the Eucharist, death, salvation and the joys of heaven: fundamental Catholic teaching presented in a practical and memorable form.

Its appearance should not be mistaken for full religious equality. Gallagher had faced danger and disruption in Raphoe, and Catholic bishops still operated in the shadow of penal legislation. Yet the book’s Dublin publication demonstrates that Catholic religious culture persisted, adapted and circulated. Its long afterlife in later editions confirms its importance, but that later success should not be projected backwards as evidence of unrestricted conditions in 1736. The first edition belongs to a world in which Irish remained essential to pastoral communication across much of the country, even as official power and much commercial print operated in English.

On 6 October, James Hamilton began publishing the Dublin Daily Advertiser. It was Dublin’s first daily newspaper, though it survived only until 1738. Its business model depended upon advertisements: notices of property, goods, services, books, entertainments and other transactions that connected printers, merchants, householders and consumers. Surviving issues from 1736 include theatre notices, charitable appeals and advertisements for fashionable or medicinal goods. A daily paper did not make political information universally available—literacy, money and access to urban networks set limits—but it marked a quickening rhythm in the city’s commercial and cultural communication.

An Unequal Public Year

The year’s principal developments were thus connected by institutions rather than by a single crisis. Parliament debated who should bear a rural religious charge; Cork’s governors were empowered to rebuild, discipline and relieve; Dorset consecrated a Protestant political memory in stone; a Catholic bishop used print and Irish to teach his flock; and a daily newspaper tested the commercial possibilities of regular publication. Together they show an Ireland of active towns, contested revenues and durable religious pluralism, governed through structures that gave a narrow Protestant elite decisive authority while leaving most inhabitants outside formal political power.