Marriage m Ireland after the Famine : The Diffusion of the ...

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Marriage m Ireland after the Famine : The Diffusion of the Match1

By K H CONNELL, Queen's University

(Bead before the Society in Dublin on IQth Decembe?, 1955, and in Belfast on 20th January, 1956 )

Of all the casualties of Irish social life in the decades after the Famine, one of the most significant was marriage of the kind which had become all but universal in peasant2 families Many of the characteristics of social and economic life in the two generations before the Famine depended on the readiness with which men and women, in their early twenties or younger, could arrange to marry, giving hardly a thought to their future source of income the conventional standard of living was low, but few needed to doubt their ability to provide it for a growing family The marriages that followed engagements so spontaneous weie youthful and general Th^y were the immediate cause of the doubling of population in little more than half a century , they were a cause, as they were also an outcome, of the extreme fragmentation of holdings and of the extension of arable farming Nor can the fire of the agrarian agitation of the 'thirties be explained if its participants' defence of the only family structure they knew is overlooked More obvious, it is true, than this defence is the attack on property, but no small part of the offence of the owners of property lay in their increasing, and understandable, intolerance of a form of marriage which tended to decrease their receipts from rent only less rapidly than it swelled the number of their tenants--and a numerous tenantry might become a costly liability if the advocates of a poor law had their way

The peasantry was attached to this form of marriage by more than its familiarity over a mere couple ol generations In ................
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