☘️ A small community in County Mayo got so fed up with one cruel land agent that they invented a form of resistance so effective it added a brand new word to the English language. That word is used to... View More☘️ A small community in County Mayo got so fed up with one cruel land agent that they invented a form of resistance so effective it added a brand new word to the English language. That word is used today in every corner of the world, in dozens of languages, and it's the surname of the man they defeated.
In 1880, during the Irish Land War, the tenants of Lord Erne's estate in County Mayo were struggling. Bad harvests had left them unable to pay their rents, and they faced eviction from the land their families had worked for generations. Lord Erne's land agent, the man responsible for collecting those rents and carrying out those evictions, was a retired English army captain named Charles Cunningham Boycott. When the tenants asked for a fair reduction in rent, Boycott refused and moved to evict them.
The Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell, president of the Irish National Land League, had recently proposed a new kind of weapon. Instead of meeting injustice with violence, which had defined so much of Irish resistance and had always been met with brutal reprisal, Parnell urged the people to use something else. In a speech at Ennis, County Clare, he told a crowd that when a man grabbed the land of an evicted tenant, or served the landlord's cruelty, they should shun him. Isolate him from his kind as if he were a leper of old. Show him your detestation of the crime he has committed, and leave him severely alone.
The people of Mayo chose Captain Boycott as the test case. And they did it perfectly. His farm laborers stopped working. His household servants walked out. Local shops refused to serve him. The blacksmith wouldn't shoe his horses. The postman stopped delivering his mail. Nobody would harvest his crops. Nobody spoke to him. No violence was used against him, not a single blow, which meant the authorities had nothing to arrest anyone for. Boycott was completely isolated in the middle of a community that simply acted as though he did not exist. To save his harvest, the government eventually had to send in fifty Orangemen from Ulster to do the work, protected by over a thousand soldiers and police. The cost of protecting that harvest was many times what the harvest was worth. Boycott was ruined. He fled back to England.
The press seized on it immediately. Within weeks, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic were using Boycott's name as a verb to describe this new form of organized, nonviolent, collective shunning. The Times of London used it in November 1880. By the following year it had entered dictionaries. Today the word exists in French, German, Dutch, Russian, Spanish, and dozens of other languages, all of them borrowing the surname of a defeated land agent from County Mayo. The tactic the people of Mayo perfected went on to inspire Gandhi in India and civil rights movements around the world. A small farming community at the edge of Europe, with no weapons and no power, invented one of the most effective tools of peaceful resistance in human history, and named it, forever, after the man they beat. Follow The Irish Remembered for more. ☘️
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