Lexical Portraits of Vulnerable Women in War: The 1641 Depositions

Lexical Portraits of Vulnerable Women in War:

The 1641 Depositions

Nicci MacLeod & Barbara Fennell University of Aberdeen

The 1641 Depositions are testimonies collected from (mainly Protestant)

witnesses documenting their experiences of the Irish uprising that began in

October 1641. As news spread across Europe of the events unfolding in Ireland,

reports of violence against women became central to the ideological construction

of the barbarism of the Catholic rebels (McAreavey, 2010). Against a backdrop of

women’s subordination and firmly defined gender roles (Fletcher, 1995), this

article investigates the representation of women in the Depositions, creating what

we have termed lexical portraits of particular categories of woman. In line with

other research dealing with discursive constructions in 17th century texts (e.g.,

Prentice & Hardie, 2009), a corpus-assisted discourse analytical approach is taken.

Adopting the assumptions of Critical Discourse Analysis (e.g. Van Dijk, 1991;

1996), the discussion is extended to what the findings reveal about representations

of the roles women, both in the reported events and in atrocity propaganda more

generally.

1. Introduction

The uprising that began in Ulster in October 1641 was a crucial event in Irish history,

and is considered by many to be one of the most successful revolts of the early modern

period (Ohlmeyer, 1995). Beginning as an attempt by the Irish Catholic gentry to

overthrow the English State, it soon escaped the control of its instigators and

deteriorated into chaotic violence between the native Irish and their Protestant settler

neighbours. The collection of documents that has come to be known as the 1641

Depositions are testimonies collected from witnesses – mostly English and Scottish

Protestant settlers – documenting their experiences of the uprising. A number of

different types of text are represented, including the relatively spontaneous reports

collected by commissioners in 1641-42 as the uprising was ongoing, and records of

judicial interrogation collected in the 1650s for the purposes of prosecuting individual

2 Nicci MacLeod & Barbara Fennell

rebels. The initial commission set out to collect information about robberies committed

against Protestant settlers, and subsequent commissions extended the scope to include

murders, massacres and apostasy (Clarke, 1986).

‘Accepted as unimpeachable by the earliest historians’ (Read, 1938:231), the

Depositions have since been regarded with considerable scepticism, based on the

significant threat to their objectivity presented by their position within a tradition of

anti-Catholic propaganda (Marotti, 2009). With selected extracts of the most grisly

reports being reproduced in publications such as Henry Jones’ Remonstrance of Diverse

Remarkable Passages Concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland (1642) (Cope,

2001) and John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion (1646), the uprising was constructed as

the ruthless slaying of Protestant settlers by their dispossessed Catholic neighbours. It

has been noted that pamphleteers were motivated to portray the victims of the rebellion

in a positive light, and to construct a ‘coherent community of victims’ (Cope,

2001:388), and that they selected, edited and interpreted the Depositions to this end in

order to mobilise support for assisting this apparently unified body of victims. In

contrast, the rebels were depicted as ‘a diverse if not conflicted assembly of Irish and

popish malcontents’ (Cope, 2001:380). A reliance on the Depositions as the chief

evidence that the uprising began with a bloody and indiscriminate massacre – thereby

justifying Cromwell’s subsequent brutal re-conquest of Ireland – has led to them being

described as standing at the centre of one of the most protracted and bitter controversies

of Irish history (Clarke, 1986). Thus, while the assumptions and ideology underlying the

texts that resulted from the Depositions have already been subject to scrutiny, this

article aims to explore the extent to which such phenomena are observable in the

original texts.

It has been noted that within portrayals of the Irish as barbarous and violent,

rebel women were constructed as ‘having a particular talent for aggression and

instigating rebellion’ (Knox, 2004:21), earning ‘an almost mythical reputation for their

ferocity’ (O’Dowd, 1991:95). Crucially, as O’Dowd (1991) points out, this reputation

reveals more about the assumptions and prejudices of the individuals reporting the

events than about the reality of the matter – ‘in a conflict where the main issue was male

political control the participation of women...must have surprised and shocked many

observers’ (O’Dowd, 1991:96). Women’s involvement in the rebellion was central to

British concerns about female behaviour, and consequently contemporary accounts of

Irish women’s actions constitute a discourse of female agency and empowerment.

Conversely, accounts of violence against Protestant settler women were one of the

central media through which the barbarity of the rebels was depicted in atrocity

propaganda (McAreavey, 2010) – thus, the discourse around Protestant women is one

of disempowerment. This seeming contradiction in ideological constructions of

womanhood makes sense when we consider that the priority for contemporary authors

was a differential and negative construction of the ‘other’. ‘Our’ women require ‘our’

protection from ‘them’; ‘their’ women are not like ‘our’ women, and do not display the

same characteristics. Such representations allow for a view of the Irish as a distinct

category, having little in common with the ‘civilised’ settlers, and at times as barely

LEXICAL PORTRAITS OF WOMEN IN WAR 3

even human. This fear of ‘savage femininity’ (Knox, 2004: 27) is supported by the

following extract, which describes the confession of an Irish woman to the wounding

and intended cannibalism of one of her own number.

(1)

And about one yere now since there is was brought to this deponent at his howse called

Ballyhornan an Irish woman for wounding & attempting to kill another Irish

woman and her child which woman soe accused & brought * before him vpon her

examinacion confessed That she had hurt (but had an intent to haue killed) the

other woman and her child, and to haue eaten the child, wherevpon & becawse he

was credibly informed that such a lyke fatt woman hadd killed and devowred divers

others, he this deponent cawsed her to be hanged

(Peter Hill, County Down)

This paper will go on to demonstrate how, in stark contrast to this active construction of

the Irish woman as aggressor, the Protestant settler woman tends to be represented as

the passive recipient of the rebels’ despicable actions. In order to shed light on the

context in which the texts construct these differential representations of particular

‘types’ of woman, it is necessary to explore the general position of women in 17th

Century society, before narrowing the focus specifically to women’s roles in the 1641

uprising. The paper then moves on to an outline of the theoretical framework of Critical

Discourse Analysis (CDA), and a discussion of the data and selected methodology of

corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Section ** introduces the concept of lexical

portraits, beginning with an examination of the terms man and men in context, by way

of setting up the subsequent analyses of women’s roles. These analyses are presented in

section **, organised according to the three categories identified as most salient for the

construction of women’s identities. We conclude with some remarks on how the

processes involved in the collection and consumption of the Depositions, alongside

their position within a patriarchal and essentially anti-Catholic social context, impacts

and shapes the discursive patterns therein.

2. 17th Century English Woman

The role allocated to women in seventeenth century England was a protected and

conservative one, ‘justified by arguments from her naturally pre-ordained function’

(Fletcher, 1995:61). The characterisation of women as ‘the weaker vessel’ allowed for a

clear division of roles based on gender, as well as women’s ‘exclusion from public life,


responsibility and moral fulfilment’ (MacLean, 1980, in Fletcher, 1995:61). While

women’s perceived frailty limited them to the domestic sphere, men’s perceived

strength and boldness meant that part of their expected duties was the protection of

‘their’ women. It was generally accepted that differences between the sexes were

‘natural and designed to fit women for running the household and men for public duties’

(Eales, 1998:23). Alongside these attitudes, there existed a widespread fear of women’s

power among sixteenth- and seventeenth- century English men, with women who

ignored or disobeyed the guidelines set down by society ‘typified as shrews, wantons or

even witches’ (Eales, 1998:23).

An important consideration in any discussion of the position of women during

the 1640s is the significance of reputation. Honour codes, drawing on assumptions

about manhood and women’s frailty, formed the basis of the system that kept men’s and

women’s social roles distinct. For women, their reputation relied in the main on their

sexual reputation. As Fletcher points out, ‘men’s sexual reputations mattered to them as

well as women’s and their behaviour in this respect was part of their honour code but it

was not its centrepiece as it was for women’ (1995:103). Thus, chastity for the

unmarried woman – and fidelity for the married woman – was pivotal to female honour.

There was a perceived relationship between a woman’s sexual history, her moral worth

and her material circumstances – thus, a woman’s sexual reputation was constructed as

a commodity, for her husband as much as herself. Sexual ownership was one key

element of men’s honour code, and it was seen as men’s duty to ensure the fidelity of

their wives in order to protect their own reputations. These issues will all require

consideration when interpreting the data.

It is also fitting to consider the crucial significance of marriage itself for the

construction of 17th century women’s identities (Laurence, 1994). It was taken as a

given that women would marry and raise a family of their own, and it was believed that

‘women’s proper sphere was the family where they could fulfil their roles as dutiful

daughters, wives and widows’ (Eales, 1998:60). Indeed, it was thought that women who

did not engage in regular sexual relations within marriage were at risk of mental and

physical illness (Eales, 1998). Marriage was represented as a serious undertaking for

both sexes, and was routinely associated with notions of honesty and completeness

(Shepard, 2003). It held a special significance for women, however, as ‘the

metamorphosis from ‘maid’ to ‘wife’ transformed every aspect of their existence’

(Mendelson & Crawford, 1998:126). While women’s experiences of marriage varied

greatly according to their social class, married women throughout the social strata were

expected to fulfil a domestic role and to be heavily involved in processes of family

formation (Eales, 1998). Within the Depositions, female deponents’ marital status is

invariably cited after their name, often by way of explanation for why they are deposing

at all:


(2)

Joane Parker widdowe (the Relicte of Dominicke Parker late of Dromonam in the

County of Cavan yeoman deceased) being duely sworne & examined before vs...

(Joane Parker, Cavan)

Thus, marital status was pivotal to the construction of women’s identities, while for

men alternative resources such as occupation and social standing were available and

preferred (Fennell, 2009).

As McAreavey (2010) points out, the 1641 Depositions represent women and

children as the primary victims of the rebellion. She also emphasises that events are

‘repeatedly represented in terms of threats to the maternal body...the mutilation and

murder of pregnant, labouring and lactating women, and their children’ (2010:78),

tropes that re-occur throughout the Depositions and the texts that drew on them. The

1641 rebellion, like other catastrophic events of the 17th Century (e.g. the Gunpowder

Plot), ‘generated anti-Catholic texts that were part of a developing narrative of English

history’ (Marotti, 2005:132), and a key component of this anti-Catholicism, particularly

in political texts, was the construction of Catholicism as conflated with barbarity and

inhumanity (Hall & Malcolm, 2010). Thus, it could be argued that the tendency to place

such emphasis on representations of violence against women and children in the

contemporary texts is a recognisable propaganda tool by which the rising Irish were

portrayed as particularly cruel and barbaric (McAreavey, 2010), thereby producing more

persuasive grounds for support of the radical suppression of the rebellion. For the

Depositions too, the processes involved in their collection meant that they were subject

to much in the way of summary and formulaic re-statement, as individual

commissioners and scribes inevitably brought their own influence to bear on witnesses’

accounts. Thus the Depositions, far from being the objective and verbatim records of

testimony they were once claimed to be, were in fact ideal vehicles for government

propaganda.

The aim of this article, then, is to explore the means by which women are

represented across the Depositions, with a particular focus on the vulnerability of

Protestant women as a feature of atrocity propaganda. While women’s reported

experiences of the uprising have been approached from a literary stance, focussing on

the Depositions as ‘trauma narratives’ (McAreavey, 2010), this article considers all

volumes of the Depositions in order to draw out and comment upon recurrent patterns

concerning descriptions of women and their experiences. It provides a systematic and

theoretically informed linguistic analysis that is absent from historical and literary

approaches to the Depositions, and which is now possible thanks to the recently

completed transcription and digitisation of the data. Insofar as it aims to discuss such

representations in relation to the socio-historical context in which they occur, the


research reported on here falls within the remit of Critical Discourse Analysis, as

outlined in the next section.

3. Method

3.1 The Data

Depositions are eye witness accounts that were given orally and recorded in writing by a

scribe (Kytö, Walker & Grund, 2007). The Commission for Distressed Subjects was

established in 1641, and consisted of eight commissioners – all Church of Ireland

clergymen – collecting depositions from refugees who had fled to Dublin (which

remained under British control). As it became clear that refugees from further afield

were unable to make the journey to Dublin, a second commission was set up to collect

depositions from the province of Munster. A further set of documents were collected in

the 1650s by commissioners – generally army officers and local officials – across

Ireland, in order to provide evidence for use in the courts.

The 1641 Depositions have been digitised by historians at Trinity College,

Dublin and the University of Aberdeen, and are available to browse and view online1 .

The data consist of 6,338 individual text files, which include the main sets of

Depositions as described above, as well as letters, copies and other miscellaneous

documents. The Depositions follow a fairly set structure, generally beginning with

information about the deponent’s name, address, status and/or occupation before

moving on to their account of events (see Lawless, Fennell, Murphy & Ó Siochrú, in

prep., for more on the wider 1641 project). Thus, we might describe the Depositions as

quasi-legal texts.

3.2 Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis

The use of large electronic bodies of language data (corpora) and the various tools

provided by corpus linguistic software has provided critical discourse analysts with an

indispensable set of resources for uncovering evidence of power imbalances and

ideology (see, for example, Krishnamurthy, 1996; Baker & McEnery, 2005; Prentice &

Hardie, 2009). Corpus methods allow for a quantitative angle to an analytical approach

that has traditionally been wholly qualitative, thus addressing some of the criticisms that

have been levelled at discourse analysis on the grounds of potential researcher bias

(Baker, 2006). Furthermore, corpus tools are able to show repetitive associations

between words in ways that an in-depth analysis of a small number of cases cannot, thus

providing ‘better evidence for an underlying hegemonic discourse’ (Baker, 2006:13).


The application of these tools to the 1641 corpus is a novel aspect of our

Language and Linguistic Evidence in the 1641 Depositions project. The rigorous

analysis made possible by corpus software contrasts with existing Depositions research,

which has approached the data from historical and literary perspectives rather than one

grounded in linguistic theory. Rather than constituting a method of analysis in

themselves, corpus tools allow for the organisation of large amounts of data and the

identification of widespread patterns of language as well as rare examples, which can

‘help to illuminate the existence of discourses that may otherwise be unobserved’

(Baker & McEnery, 2005:198). This provides a point of departure for the selection of

particular phenomena for further investigation.

A critical approach is taken to the analysis of the data, which is to say that the

focus is on the relationships between discourse and social power (van Dijk, 1996). The

approach taken here shares van Dijk’s focus on patterns of privileged access to public

discourse and communication as a valued social resource. Since the overwhelming

majority of Depositions were collected from British Protestant witnesses by

representatives of the British government, it is these groups who are considered to hold

the discursive power. This does not mean that the authors consider the Protestant

settlers to have literally been in a powerful position throughout reported events – rather,

it is their voices that are accessed, thus it is their ‘truth’ that is represented in the data.

In terms of the mechanics of carrying out the analysis, Fairclough’s (1992)

three-dimensional model begins at the level of text, with a description of the linguistic

phenomena therein. For the purposes of the current study the central focus at this level

of analysis is choices in vocabulary, particularly in terms of labels and adjectives

associated with women. Since the Depositions tend to deal with perpetrators, actions

and victims, attention is also paid to transitivity (as defined by Halliday & Matthiessen,

2004), drawing comparisons between the processes associated with women and those

associated with men, and investigating the specific relationships between these

processes and their respective participants, and the contributions of these patterns to

how particular groups are represented. Thus, ‘transitivity’ here is used in a rather broad

sense, describing entire clauses rather than simply verbs and their objects (Thomson,

1996). This approach is compatible with van Leeuwen’s (1996) approach to the analysis

of the representation of social actors, from which the current study draws considerable

influence.

The second phase of Fairclough’s approach is an interpretation of the linguistic

patterns identified during the initial analysis at the level of discourse process. Here,

consideration must be given to who produced the text, for whom, and for what purpose,

and also to intertextuality and interdiscursivity, i.e., the text’s relationship with other

texts, and other types of text. It has been suggested elsewhere that such practices in

relation to historical data are largely inaccessible (Prentice & Hardy, 2009). However,

we do have the information that the depositions are written records of spoken testimony,

recorded by scribes with the authority of commissioners employed by the government.

Thus, the issues arising from the transformation of lay people’s speech into

institutionally useful written documentation (see Haworth, 2010; Rock, 2001) must be


taken into consideration. We might also want to consider any potential clashes between

the expectations of the deponents and those of the officials who had been tasked with

collecting the statements – in Wodak’s (1996) terms, the ‘disorders of discourse’ arising

from ‘the gulfs that separate insiders from outsiders, members of institutions from

clients of those institutions, and elites from the normal citizen uninitiated in the arcana

of bureaucratic language…’ (Wodak, 1996:2). In terms of the consumption of the texts,

it is crucial to bear in mind that although they were collected ostensibly to make a

record of losses and collect information on the uprising (in the 1640s) and to provide

evidence against individual rebels (during the Commonwealth period of the 1650s),

they also had a fundamental role in mobilising Protestant support for the suppression of

the rebellion. The selective reproduction of the most lurid reports from the Depositions

by London’s pamphleteers gave the impression that every Deposition contained similar

accounts of barbaric cruelty on the part of the rebels. In reality however, according to

Clarke’s (1986) estimates, only one in five Depositions reports death by violence.

The causes and effects of these skewed representations bring us on to the third

and final dimension of Fairclough’s framework – the explanation of the relationship

between discourse processes and the social context within which they are produced. At

the level of social practice, consideration of ideological struggles and power inequality

become crucial for explaining why a text or stretch of talk is how it is. A successful

critical discourse analysis has the potential to reveal the ideological assumptions and

power imbalances that have shaped a text’s creation. Thus, in line with Wodak’s (1996)

approach to discourse, much consideration is given to the historical context in which the

texts are situated, as outlined in the previous section.

For our purposes, the corpus tool of most use in starting out at the text-level

analysis is the Concordance function of WordSmith2, which allows the researcher to

observe how a specific search word behaves in context in a given set of texts. The

program returns information on what other words frequently co-occur with the search

word (collocates), how the search word is dispersed throughout the texts, and clusters in

which the search word frequently appears. Examining the relative collocates of a set of

labels attributed to women in the Depositions allows us to draw out and comment upon

the ways in which these ‘types’ of women are written about, and how their role in

events is constructed.

A number of frequently occurring words were omitted from the collocate

searches with the use of a stop list, including grammatical words such as the, of, they, a

etc., as it was felt that such lexically ‘empty’ elements would do little to assist in

building a picture of how women are represented in the Depositions. Furthermore,

words that occurred frequently as a result of the texts’ role as written records of spoken

testimony were also omitted. These included items such as ‘examinant’, ‘deponent’,

‘duely’, ‘sworne’, ‘deposeth’, ‘saith’, and other terms which are over-represented owing

to their place within a number of different formulaic segments of the documents (eg.

‘This Examinant being Duely Examind saith...’). Popular proper names were also

excluded – the noun John, for example, is the fourth most frequently occurring word in

the Depositions after the function words and formulaic items have been removed.


Further complications arise from the variable spelling that typifies written

documents of this period. This has been addressed with the use of WordSmith’s lemma

matching function, which allows for a list of variants to be grouped together and for the

frequencies and collocates of all variants to be consolidated3. Thus, where a frequency

appears for the item ‘wife’, for example, the number actually represents the total

occurrences of the variants ‘wife’, ‘wiffe’, ‘wyfe’, ‘wyffe’, ‘wyf’, ‘wyefe’, ‘wif’, ‘wief’,

‘wiefe’ and ‘wiff’, enabling an exhaustive search of even the most variably spelled

items. As well as variable spellings, different grammatical forms of verbs were also

matched – thus the figure for ‘stript’ also includes ‘stripping’ and ‘strip’ (along with the

various spellings of all three forms). Because pluralisation is a key feature of how social

actors are represented (van Leeuwen, 1996), singular and plural forms of nouns were

not matched.

4. Lexical Portraiture

The term ‘lexical portraiture’ is used here to describe the means by which categories of

person and group identities are ideologically constructed through lexico-grammatical

choices. It has been noted elsewhere that distinctions between categories of woman

were considered to be very important, with labels indicating their matrimonial status

and the status of their husband or father (Laurence, 1994). As Fletcher points out,

‘[women’s] occupational identity, given their gendered role, was simple and three-fold:

they were spinsters, wives and widows’ (1995:225). While our analysis will go on to

show that there are other options available for the identification of women, it is

certainly true to say that marital status was a fundamental component. Of current

concern is the role that lexical choices in a more general sense – i.e., beyond this closed

set of category labels – have to play in constructing women’s identities within the

Depositions. This approach has been influenced by van Leeuwen’s (1996) framework

for the analysis of the representation of social actors. With a focus on the linguistic

means by which socio-semantic categories are activated, van Leeuwen discusses the

various choices available for including and excluding social actors from a stretch of

discourse. Although the bulk of this article will be concerned with representations of

Protestant women, the opportunity will also be taken here to show how this can be

applied to representations of Irish rebel women, who were often described in subhuman

terms (O’Dowd, 1991). The following extract provides an example.

(3)

And further saith That many of the poore protestants That escaped at the first the bloudy

hands of the Rebell souldjers: were after most cruelly murthered by the very irish


criples & these base trulls and whores that kept them company Whose which

Creples and whores & lewd women did much vawnt & glory in such their cruelties

wherein they had noe little assistance by their children that if as farr as their powres

extended, assisted (if not exceeded, them in ther cruelties merciles & bloudie acts

(Alice Gregg, Armagh)

In this extract we see the collectivisation (van Leeuwen, 1996) of Irish women, with the

labels ‘base trulls’, ‘whores’ and ‘lewd women’ applied to them as a social group.

Furthermore, we see evidence of assumed shared background knowledge in the use of

presupposition through the use of the definite article ‘the very irish criples’ and deictic

expressions ‘these base trulls’. The evaluative terms attached to the women’s actions –

‘cruelly murdered’, ‘their cruelties’, ‘bloudie acts’ also indicates a ‘common sense’

status attached to these evaluations. That the women ‘did much vawnt & glory’ in their

actions is presented as evidence that they are beyond contempt – not content with

merely carrying out these hideous acts, they also see fit to revel in them. This removes

them still further from the ‘poore protestants’, who are passivated ‘were after most

cruelly murdered’ and can act in no way other than to ‘escape’.

It is fitting at this point to turn to the corpus software in an attempt to gain

further insight into the differential roles assigned to men and women. The tables below

show the most frequent collocates for man and men respectively.

Table 1: Collocates of man (n= 1231)

Word Total %

ENGLISH 176 14.30

IRISH 67 5.44

KILLED 65 5.28

WOMAN 52 4.22

OLD 46 3.74

CHILD 43 3.49

MURTHERED 39 3.17

POORE 37 3.01

CAME 35 2.84

HANGED 33 2.68

SCOTCH 31 2.52

REBELLS 27 2.19

GOODE 25 2.03

CALLD 23 1.87

SENT 21 1.71

PROTESTANT 21 1.71

YONG 21 1.71

TOOKE 21 1.71


SERVANT 20 1.62

WIFE 20 1.62

1 http://1641.tcd.ie 2 http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/

Table 2:Collocates of men (n= 2695)

CASTLE

20 1.62

A cursory glance at these two lists reveals that frequent collocates of man and men can

be grouped into a number of categories. The first group of collocates to be discussed are

those terms that describe other categories of person, with a high frequency of woman

with child and women with children – in no small part due to the prevalence of the

formulaic constructions man, woman & child and men, women & children throughout

the Depositions, such as in the following extract.

Word Total %

WOMEN 306 11.35

CHILDREN 273 10.13

ENGLISH 214 7.94

NUMBER 154 5.71

KILLED 137 5.08

ARMES 136 5.05

IRISH 114 4.23

ARMED 114 4.23

CAME 98 3.64

COMPANY 85 3.15

REBELLS 77 2.86

PROTESTANTS 69 2.56

CASTLE 64 2.37

HOUSE 57 2.12

MURTHERED 56 2.08

SENT 55 2.04

NAMES 54 2.00

PERSONS 53 1.97

SCOTCH 51 1.89

http://1641.tcd.ie/


(4)

And it was comonly reported amongst the Rebells that none of the Protestantes neither

man woman nor child shold live in Ireland

(Elizabeth Peirce, Down)

This string represents each of the categories only in terms of its relationship with the

others, and the sequencing reinforces women’s secondary status. Woman in this context

does not refer to any individual woman, but rather to an abstract, generic category. The

separation of the categories of person and inclusion of woman and child function to

represent the rebels’ actions as total and indiscriminate.

The ethnic and religious classifiers English, Irish, Scotch and Protestant appear

to varying degrees in the two lists, with English unsurprisingly the most frequent in

both. These classifiers will be discussed in greater detail when we move on to

examining women’s identities. The presence of calld as a collocate of man but not of

men is worthy of discussion. It is fairly straightforward to recognise that on many

occasions when an individual is referred to as a man, it is because his name is unknown.

Calld occurs most frequently one position to the right of man, representing those

occasions when an individual is both described as a man and is named. Often these

constructions also include additional modifiers, for example an old man calld Syms.

This pattern is also found with woman, as will be discussed later.

A further theme identifiable in the listsis that of military action and violence.

Words such as killed, murthered and hanged occur most frequently two positions to the

right of man or men, forming both active constructions, where it is the man or men who

carry out the actions, and passive constructions, in which the man/men are the Goals in

these violent material processes. Thus, there are occasions when they are constructed as

powerless actors in the discourse – this is a point to be returned to later. Another item in

this category is castle, which features as a collocate of both man and men, and many of

these instances describe the man in question in an active role, with the castle in object

position. The man is described variously as having sumoned, entered and betrayed the

said castle, which functions to portray him in a decidedly powerful role. A more general

comment to be made about these patterns is that through their association with castles

these men are presented as being in close proximity to the military action.

Another category identified in Tables 1 & 2 is a set of adjectives relating to

vulnerability, including poore, old, yong and goode. Goode appears most frequently to

the right of man in prepositional phrases, in constructions such as a man of good

substance, a man in good esteem and a man of trust & in good opinion with him – that

is to say, in an attributive position. Poore, yong and olde, on the other hand, appear

most frequently immediately to the left, in determiner position. An inspection of these

concordance lines reveals that the adjectives are often used in combination, as in the

following extract.


(5)

...the said Thomas Dixon drew his sword and murdered the poore ould man Cutting

him in peeces & tooke away his mony...

Phellymy Smyth, Down

As extract 5 demonstrates, the use of these adjectives functions to project an image of

the individual as powerless in the face of violent onslaughts from the enemy – his

identity as a victim is rendered indisputable by these choices. These patterns will be

revisited as we move on to examining constructions of women in the Depositions.

5. Wives & Widows: Portraits of 17th Century Women

5.1 Overview

As discussed earlier, 17th century women’s identity relied in the main on their marital

status and the occupation of their father or husband. Thus, the labels wife and widow

form a central focus of this analysis. We begin, however, with the relatively unmarked

terms woman and women, in order to draw some broad comparisons with man and men

as discussed in the previous section. Like man and men, woman and women are terms

that tend to be used in those instances when the woman or women in question are

unknown to the deponent. In those instances where the subject is known, they tend to be

either named or described in terms of their relationships with named males. The most

frequent collocates of woman and women appear in tables 3 and 4.

Table 3: Collocates of woman (n=373)

Word Total %

ENGLISH 67 17.96

CHILD 57 15.28

MAN 52 13.94

KILLED 43 11.53

IRISH 32 8.58

POORE 22 5.90

OLD 20 5.36

MURTHERED 19 5.09


MEN 19 5.09

WIFE 19 5.09

SERVANT 17 4.56

HOUSE 16 4.29

HANGED 15 4.02

SCOTCH 15 4.02

CALLD 14 3.75

CHILDREN 14 3.75

AFFORESAID 13 3.49

STRIPT 11 2.95

YONG 10 2.68

CAME 9 2.41

REBELLS 9 2.41

SAWE 9 2.41

Table 4: Collocates of women (n=559)

Word Total %

CHILDREN 334 59.75

MEN 306 54.74

ENGLISH 77 13.77

PROTESTANTS 64 11.45

KILLED 47 8.41

NUMBER 43 7.69

PERSONS 35 6.26

STRIPT 28 5.01

POORE 25 4.47

MURTHERED 22 3.94

IRISH 22 3.94

DIVERS 21 3.76

OLD 18 3.22

REBELLS 17 3.04

TIME 16 2.86

DROWNED 16 2.86

SCORE 16 2.86

MAN 13 2.33

CASTLE 13 2.33

NAMES 11 1.97

CHILD 11 1.97

NAKED 11 1.97

CAME 11 1.97


The first observation to be made is that the overall totals for woman and women are

substantially lower than the corresponding figures for man and men, rendering them less

visible in relation to reportable events. In terms of content, the tables display a number

of similarities with tables 1 and 2, such as the appearance once again of other categories

of person such as man/men and child/children. Where the figures for woman/women

differ in this respect is the frequency with which these co-occurences appear. For

example, while women appears in the context of men in around 11% of instances of

men, over half of the total occurrences of women appear alongside men. Similar patterns

are observable for children, which co-occurs in a little over 10% of the instances of men

but in almost 60% of the instances of women. Thus, while men and their actions are

frequently described independently, women are far more likely to be described only

inasmuch as they and their actions and experiences relate to those of men and children.

Once again we should remind ourselves that a large proportion of these instances can be

accounted for by the formula men, women & children, and that the actual frequency of

women as a concrete group of social actors as opposed to a generalised category is thus

even lower than these figures suggest. In terms of the singular forms man and woman,

similar patterns are evident although the differences are decidedly less substantial.

In terms of the ethnic and religious classifiers English, Irish, Protestant and

Scotch there appears to be little difference in the way they are applied to woman as

compared to man (with combined frequencies for these items being 23.97% and

30.56% respectively) , although for the plural forms the difference is somewhat greater.

While ethnic and religious labels appear alongside men in 16.62% of instances, the

figure for women is a little over 29%. Inspection of the relevant concordance lines

reveals that around half of the occurrences of women with Protestants, for example,

have Protestants in either L2 or R3 position, and the majority of these examples display

the now familiar men, women & children pattern:

(6)

the wiffe of the said Brian kelly cawsed 20 protestants men women and children to be

drowned

Ellenor Fullerton, Armagh

( 7)

Rosse mc Laghlin mc Maghan drowned 17 men women & children all protestantes

(Elizabeth Clark, Louth)


This supports the argument that rather than describing a particular group of women, the

tendency is for this phrase to be used to identify three generic categories of person in

order to represent the rebels’ actions as ruthless and indiscriminate. The fact that men

appear in the accounts without religious and ethnic descriptors with greater frequency

than do women may also be indicative of the lack of any other basis on which to

construct women’s identities – denied opportunities in the public sphere, they are

wholly reliant on their ethnicity and religion as a means of identification outside of their

domestic and familial roles, while men have other resources at their disposal.

5.2 Ethnicity& Religion

A comparison of sample concordances of English woman and Irish woman sheds light

on the differential constructions of these groups, giving insight into what attributes are

associated with each of these categories. In Figure 1 we see the English woman

frequently being presented as the recipient of some violent material process, either in

object position (e.g. 110, 113, 118-120), or as part of a passive construction (112, 128,

141). She is rarely activated, i.e. ‘represented as the active, dynamic force in an

activity’ (van Leeuwen, 1996:43), and when she is it is in processes that reinforce her

powerless state, eg. fled (143), came a begging (135). Thus, the overall impression of

the English woman is not a particularly active one – she rarely engages in a material

process that has an effect on other entities in the physical world. As well as patterns of

transitivity it is revealing to look at the adjectives associated with the English woman.

In the sample list above she is variously described as poore (134-137), yong (143, 144)

and stript (139), adjectives which arguably function to foreground the vulnerability of

these individuals.


Figure 1: English woman sample concordance (n=52)

There are fewer examples of Irish woman (20 as compared to 52 for English woman).

One simple explanation for this is that the Depositions are primarily about what

happened to the English. A further plausible explanation is the tendency to construct

Irish women as particularly barbaric or otherwise subhuman, prompting the use of

alternatives to Irish woman, which is perhaps too much of an unmarked choice to be

particularly prevalent in the texts (see Extract 3, above). The Irish woman concordance

lines appear in Figure 2.


Figure 2: Irish woman concordances

In terms of transitivity choices, a slightly different pattern emerges for Irish woman than

did for English woman. The Irish woman does find herself occupying the Goal position

in relation to violent material processes (6), albeit to a lesser extent than the English

woman, as well as being presented as the recipient of such acts through passive

constructions (16, 19). The concordance reveals that when the Irish woman is presented

as the victim of a violent act, it is as likely to be at the hands of other Irish people as at

the hands of protestant settlers. It is also telling that a number of the women mentioned

here were either in the employment of protestants at the time (16, 18) or married to a

protestant (10), and this may take us some way towards understanding why they are

described in these relatively neutral terms – these Irish women who are part of the

household are a special case, somehow distinct from the bulk of the barbaric rabble.

A number of these concordances place the Irish woman in a decidedly more

active role than was true for the English woman. On line 5 for example, although the

central action being described is that the woman was brought to this deponent, the

reason given is that she was wounding and attempting to kill...On a less violent note, we

also have an Irish woman cominge down the hill (2) and another carrying water (17).

On line 11, the Irish woman appears as the recipient of the material process gaue, and a

more detailed examination of this text shows how her active involvement in atrocious

acts is constructed through the discourse.


(8)

An english man and his wiffe gaue 5 li. to an Irish woman to keepe their child; which

shee with the child haveing received) shee quickly after gaue one [ ] 12 d. to a Rebell

for his hyre to murther it which the bloudy Rebell Villaine performed accordingly:

(William Reinolds, Cavan)

In this extract we see how in subsequent clauses the Irish woman becomes activated –

she takes the place of the English man and his wiffe as actor in the same material

process gaue – but tellingly the circumstances differ quite significantly. In the case of

the Irish woman, her reasons for giving the baby to a Rebell are explicitly stated as to

murther it. Thus, her actions are constructed as deliberate and intentional, and she

herself is constructed as an active participant in events that readers are invited to view

as bloudy and Villaine[ous].

Thus the message seems to be that one must be wary even of those Irish individuals

thought to be trustworthy. This is an important point when we consider that, far from

being clashes between strangers (as would be expected in the context of an invasion, for

example), many of the events reported in the Depositions involved neighbour pitched

against neighbour. The reiteration of the treacherous nature of even the most trusted

Irish neighbours is therefore a key element of constructions of a negative out-group

identity, and the perpetuation of fear of the other.

Again, it is revealing to examine the adjectives that are associated with the Irish woman

as a category. In these concordances she is described as Lustie (13), naughty (9) and

mere (8, 15, 20). The use of lustie implies a vigourous enthusiasm for the extreme

violence in which this individual is engaged (the picking up and tossing of a man’s

severed head), while naughty suggests a degree of treachery in the actions of the

individual to whom it is applied. While on the surface mere might be interpreted to

reflect and perpetuate the assumption of the inferiority of the Irish, it is important to

bear in mind that an alternative meaning of the term during this period was as a

synonym of pure, derived from the Latin merus – thus, the mere Irish is likely to refer to

a particular category of the indigenous Irish. Nevertheless, that the mere Irish are

constructed as a separate category is particularly visible in line 15. Rather than referring

to a specific individual mere Irish woman, what is being talked about here is a category

whose members possess such a recognisable set of attributes that there is an established

and familiar way of performing it – in this case for the purposes of disguise. That these

attributes are negatively evaluated is supported by a more detailed look at the text from

which this line is taken.


(9)

They perswaded her to goe in broages, and mantle like a meere Irish woman (for her

more safety in the way) and to Leave all her clothes with them: which she more for

feare, then by their perswasions consenting vnto she came away in a mantle &

broages & soe filthily disguised that when he sawe her she hee scarcely knew her:

(William Timmes, Tipperary)

The inclusion of the information that she consented more for fear indicates that

disguising oneself as an Irish woman is an action requiring defence, and not something

one would engage in under normal circumstances or without coercion. There is thus a

stark contrast between the ways Irish & English women are represented.

5.3 Violence & Military Action

Items relating to violence and military action, generally depicting material processes,

were another category identified in tables 1 & 2, and we see many of the same items

featuring in tables 3 & 4, such as killed, murthered and hanged. However, there is a

difference in where these items appear in relation to the search term. The graph below

shows the overall percentages for the frequency of killed and murthered to the left and

to the right of man, men, woman and women.


Figure 3: Position of violent material processes in relation to gendered

categories

Figure 3 illustrates that while killed appears to be fairly equally distributed between L

and R positions for man and men, there is an obvious favouring of L positions for

woman and women, with three times as many occurrences in L positions than R. For

murthered it is fairly evenly balanced for men, with a clear preference for R positions in

relation to man and a preference for L positions in relation to woman a nd women. In

order to fully understand what this tells us about representations of men and women in

relation to these events, it is necessary to refer to concordance lines in which these items

appear. An examination of the instances of kill appearing in its most frequent position

in relation to men, R2, reveals a fairly even split between activating and passivating the

men, as shown in

Figure 4.


Figure 4: Men with killed in R2 position

As Figure 4 shows, when killed appears in R2 position in relation to men it is as likely

to be in a passive construction where the men occupy the participant role of goal (e.g.

lines 1235-1237) as in active constructions with the men as actor (e.g. lines 1230, 1238,

1243). The story for women is quite different, with 77% of occurrences of killed

appearing to the left, thus maintaining a structure in which women’s role as victim is

transparant. A selection of these appears below, comprising examples of killed in L4,

L3 and L2 positions.


N Concordance

215 the Rebells) had burnt & killd ffowrescore [ ] of men women & Childeren in the Castell of Lisgoole, and that

216 A woman tenant to the deponent killed 7 men and women of her English fello{w} tenants in one morning,

217 number of the people soe Killed consisting of men women and children came to one hundreth thowsand

218 number of the people soe Killed consisting of men women and children came to one hundreth thowsand

219 Company tha{t} was with him killed Twentie ffiue men women & children in the said Ballemartin that Night, &

220 haue likewise hanged & killed three poore English women belonging to the Castle of Knockmone

221 the Enimy fell on them & Killed thirty fiue men women & Chilldren & wounded sixtenn or Seuenten

222 there, was stoned and killed, by some Churles & women of the parrish of Kilbeggan: And saith that

223 Examinat; And as concerning the killing of the sayd woemen, he sayeth that he knoweth no further but

N Concordance

234 his Carbine wherewith to have Killd twoe english women: which were vpon the bridge: But his flynt

235 they went forth in the night and killd of men, woemen & Children (poore people labouring people, &

236 another not aboue 12 yeares of age kille{d} 2 women and one man att the Seidge of the Augher. A

237 this exemiat examinat was one, and killed 14 men & Women, and the residue to the Number of 40 were

238 fell vpon killinge the said Irish & so killed of men women & children therescore & odd & the names of

239 Candles, with their swords & pikes killed both man woemen & Children, in number about twenty six fol.

240 steeple nere vnto Ballyserchery they killed 35 men women & children Two of the men I knew, William oge

241 Rebells there reported that there were killed of men women and Children protestantes at or nere the

242 morneing and they likewise killed seuerall [] men women & Children to the number of xvijen persons

N Concordance

173 & Edw: Hogg that their two wiues were kild & two woemen more the first winter in the Rebellion at Bally

174 in the sayd toune dwelling when the Irish killed some woemen, as he this Examinat heard reported He

175 and Makillip why they had killed these woemen ( which were three) the sayd McGunstenan

176 he heard saye that the Irish party had killed dyuerse woemen in the toune of Doune Robert Welsh Taken

177 told this deponent that he himselfe had killed seaven women at Cappoquine, this deponent being prisoner

178 we the Ambosh the rose against them and killed 20 women 4 boyes & about 7 men That there was a boy

179 spight of our teeth; but for your people they killed of women and children and old people aboue 3 score My

180 at Shroole by the Boorks. they killed many women & stripped the rest naked, who it is like

181 out of doores & told her that they had ben killing fiue woemen & two boyes between Ballinderry & Glinauy

182 yeares of age with skeanes would stabb & kyll poore woemen & children they mett in the ffeilds, naye the

Figure 5: Women with killed in L4, L3 or L2 positions

Where killed does appear to the right of women, their role as victim tends to be

preserved, as illustrated in Figure 6, below, which displays concordances for killed in

R1 and R2 positions, where they are passive objects in reduced relatives or where killed

is an attributive adjective.


N Concordance

152 say, That thay haue alsoe knowne & seen 7 poore women killed by the Ormonders Campe, as they were

153 troopers that came from Killeleah, did finde the two woemen killed and cast into the water amongst the

154 Rebells did most Cruelly & unhumaynly stripp the woemen & killed severall of the men & others of the

Figure 6: Women with killed in R1 or R2 position

Moving on to the singular forms, since L3 is the most frequent position in which killed

is found in relation to woman, followed by L2, these concordances appear below in

Figure 7.

N Concordance

152 in one foxes howse, where was likewise kild an English woman att the same tyme as he hath heard, And further saith

153 very long skeane & brack bragged how he had kild an English woman, & what good it had done him to see her child sprawle

154 further saith that the enimies & Irish rebels kild an English woman after they had diuerted her to forsake her religion & turne

155 the first winter after the rebellion did en kill an English=woman neere Drogheda, And further saith not, Connor [mark]

156 & now of or neere Ballycastle aforesaid stabb & kill a naked woeman & her Child with a short pike in a little brooke neere his

157 an Irish woman for wounding & attempting to kill another Irish woman and her child which woman soe accused & brought *

158 affe the skean and that shee was the hardest to kill of any woman that ever he did see, the deponent did ask him what Lyk

159 to Spare the English; & that he threatned to Kill an English Woman, if she woulde Nott deliuer her Mony to him, but what

160 Cohonaght o Gowen now prisoner in Trym, did kill an English woman the wife of John Hovy of Crumlin in the County of Cavan

161 in the head as he wuld and that he had killd an English woman betweene Shrewle & Kilmanaah, and lett two Children

162 That she had hurt (but had an intent to haue killed) the other woman and her child, and to haue eaten the child, wherevpon &

163 other persons; bragging, that he had that day killed a pretty woman, and that she cast her apron about her head when he

164 neere adioyneing to the forte of Leix, & there killed an English woman, & presently hanged fiue or six other protestants their

165 did say That the said Cohanaght O Gowen killed an English woman & further sayeth, That the said Phillip Brady bade bidd

166 Ã´ Gowen that hee the said Coconoght had killed an English woman the first winter after the rebellion neere Drogheda and

N Concordance

183 ffort of Ballileague that fol. 333v 1873 that hee wold kill man woman and Child (in the Collow) of the Irish aswell as hee wold

184 raging manner) threaten and give out, that they wold kill man woman & child of the Irish in the Callow as well as they wold kill

185 here him selfe Cohonnaght a Corbne say that he did kill the woman but did here maney others that was present and before

186 here him selfe (Cohonnaght a Corbne) say that he did kill the woman but did here maney others that was present and before

187 warning from Killeleugh that John Erwyn intendeth to kill man woman & Cheild of that parish through mallice for & in revenge

188 by the Allmighty if he refused this gratious offer to kill man woman and Child belonging to the said deponent Soone after

189 burne & prey all the Country called Ederaown and to kill man, woman, & child they should meete with; and thatt by daylight

190 what els pleased god: And the same then and there killd one woman (a papist) and hurt two or three women more: And at the

191 to assault the Church of Ballentoy, which party killed one woeman through a spike hole in the Church wall by shooting her

192 where this Examinant found the aforesaid warrener killed, & a woman also killed as this Examinant thinketh, that was wife to

193 for pillaginge, which could not be helpt, As for killinge of woman none of my souldiers dare doe as for his life but the

Figure 7: Woman with killed in L3 or L2 position

Figure 7 demonstrates that the most frequent role fulfilled by the category of social

actor woman in the process of killing is one of victim. Note that in these concordances,

we again see women being described in the terms identified earlier – either with

reference to their familial roles (wife, 160; child 156, 157 183, 184, 187-189), to their

ethnicity and/or religion (English, 152-156; Irish, 157; papist, 190) or in terms that

foreground their vulnerability or otherwise contribute to the construction of their


identities as illegitimate victims (naked, 156; pretty, 163). As with women, where killed

appears to the right of woman, her role as victim is nevertheless maintained through

passive constructions, with the exception of one occurrence, which appears on line 180

in Figure 8, below. Tellingly, there are no occurrences of killed in R1 position in

relation to woman, which would be the unmarked structure for representing her as the

actor.

N Concordance

176 he shed was was A litle Child, saying that he rid after an Irish woman to kill her, and shee having the Child on her back, he

177 where this Examinant found the aforesaid warrener killed, & a woman also killed as this Examinant thinketh, that was wife to

178 further this deponent sayeth to the last Article that the English woman was killed vppon the [] land of the said William and by

179 robbed and killed the said Cardinall and his wife, but the other woman was killed by Edmund Ryan (since slaine) but denyeth

180 & becawse he was credibly informed that such a lyke fatt woman hadd killed and devowred divers others, he this deponent

181 River & there drowned & he alsoe heard that another English woman was Killed without Mungrid gate by Richard Gerrald a

Figure 8: Woman with killed in R2 position

Moving on to the process murthered, there are twice as many occurrences to the right of

man as there are to the left, while the reverse is true for woman. While on first

impressions this discrepancy might indicate that man is more likely than woman to

appear as the actor in such a process, a look at the concordances reveals that this is not

in fact the case – the majority of examples involve the said man as the victim, but

within a passive construction.

N Concordance

634 into the aforesaid Cabin and there found the English man and Murthered him.

635 declare and say in the said towne that hee was the man that murthered the said boy and if any of the

636 Richard England late of Malloe smith an English man was murthered hanged vpon the land of

637 the Rebells themsel That the person & flesh of the man that murthered him sent forth afterwards such a

638 with the rest of the reapers wheare the English man was Murthered by the said reapers, but denieth

639 Bourke of Limerick a Drummer was said to be the man that Murthered them for he was imprisoned for

640 whome he knoweth not, onely the said Slater & his man were murthered by Dermod mc Carty his men of

641 from Credible persons that the said Dixon was one man who Murdered Cormucke maGuine with his

N Concordance

665 saw the doggs eate And presently after the man was soe murdered, the said Art and Company

666 saith shee knew no such man or that any such man was there murdred. And being demanded

667 not. That John O Hyne was the most readiest man in the Murther of the said Persons Vallentine

668 shee heard that the saide James mc Vagh was the Man that did murther this Andrew Yonge this

669 conditions sworn etc & causes mr Walters & his man to be murthered. strips and the women stripped

670 Nagle of Monaniny & Henry Dwen another English man was likewise murthered by rebells whose names

671 (hee lastly saith that on George, Joseph Watts his man ffeltmaker) was Murthered in the parish of

Figure 9: Man with murthered in R2 or R3 position


When it is a woman whose murder is being described, however, the preference is to do

so within an active construction, placing the woman in object position and thus making

latent her status as victim.

It was noted earlier that marital status was pivotal to women’s identity in the

seventeenth century (Eales, 1998), and the Depositions contain some important

differences in the ways it impacts on how different women are represented. The next

section moves on to examine some of these differences.

5.4 Marital Status

The following extract represents the typical format in which deponents’ recall of

individuals involved in events is represented in the text.

(10)

[...] killing & murthering many of the Townesmen men women & children vizt Richard

Lowde{n} of the same glouer, Nicholas Wale of the same broge maker Agnis Suger of

the same spinster Er{}ine Suger of the same spinster Thomasie Saunders of the same

spinster Elizabeth Saunders of the same wife to Robert Saunders of the same mercer

Margrett Nance wife to Henry Nance Taylour Alsis Browne wife to Zacharias Browne [

] Mary Groute spinster { } and Allsis Hill widdowe And ffurther he cannot depose

(Walter Croker, Cork)

As this extract demonstrates, men were typically identified by their place of residence

(the phrase of the same indicating that all these individuals originates from a town,

parish, barony and county that has already been mentioned), and by their occupation

(glouer; broge maker). Women, on the other hand, were identified by their place of

residence and their marital status (spinster, widow, wife). It is worth noting that when a

woman is described as a wife, her husband’s name appears, as does his occupation, e.g.

Margrett Nance wife to Henry Nance Taylour. This supports the argument that women

were largely reliant on their husbands for any sense of status or identity outside of the

family sphere.

Apart from holding very different social meanings, the items spinster, widow and wife

also differ in terms of how they are used within the Depositions. A search for

occurrences of spinster, for example, reveals that the majority function in a process of

classification, that is to say the process by which ‘social actors are referred to in terms

of the major categories by means of which a given society...differentiates between

classes of people’ (van Leeuwen, 1996:54). Furthermore, they tend to form part of a

rather formulaic list of details about an individual, rather than functioning in isolation to

describe the individual. A selection of the concordances appears below.


N Concordance

10 192 Elizabeth Gough late of Bellamenagh in the County of Cavan spinster deposeth as followeth beeing duly sworne & examined That

11 gent & others Reb rob 35 Margaret ny Mulmore Rely spinster daughter if Mulmore ô Rely that now claimeth the Castle of

12 Andrew Black of Calwally Com predicti Jenett Kearnes widow spinster of Kilkelly alias Ballybrough Com Cavan Brian Suron

13 same Court, the sixteenth day of April 1653 Anne Loftus of Dublin Spinster aged twenty one yeares or thereabouts, being duely

14 Shane o Ruddy of fferna gentleman Joan Donreck of Ballanamore spinster Margett Dun of the the same spinster and at least 100

15 Donreck of Ballanamore spinster Margett Dun of the the same spinster and at least 100 persons Rebells more vnknowne 135 fol.

16 2120 (directly following the examination of John Goll) Mary Bowler spinster, (aged one and twenty yeares or thereabouts) servant to

17 1269 Bojle viijth of May 1653 Anie Mc Brehune of Boyle aforesaid spinster aged thirty yeares or thereabouts deposeth that about six

18 fol. 33r Ann Wiseman late of Knockviccar aforesaid spinster aged 17 yeres & above sworne & examined before the

19 Late of the towne and parish of Ballingary & County of Limrick Spinster widdow duly Sworne & examined before vs by vertue &c

20 that Mrs Anne wodhall wife to Mr woodhall gen with daughter Anne spinster and Josyas walker gen & his wife, Anne Gerrald wife to

21 Baroney of Cundon and Clungibbon and County of Corke Spinster for and in the behalfe of her Husband William Ennington

22 fol. 45r 2083 Ann Horsey, widdowe & Hellen Horsey spinster both of Burgashy in the parish of Rosse barony of Carbry &

23 the Bantry in the Baronry of Beare & Bantry, and County of Corke spinster a Scottish Protestant, duly sworne & examined before vs

24 Gowse Gardner she knoweth not, and one woman calld Margaret a Spinster & a Scottish woman who was first halfe hang’d and then

25 barrony of Condon & Clangibbon and within the com of Corke spinster (an Irish protestant) duely sworne & examined before vs by

26 fol. 76r 731 Martha May spinster in the behalf of her brother & herselfe being partners

27 glouer & Rosse Elizabeth Norman of Glandoore in the said County spinster were likewise murthered by which of the rebells he knoweth

28 parish of Kilmackamoge gen and one Margaret Martyn of the same spinster and John Mumford, & his two sons, calld Henry & James

29 saith that Thomas ffoord Als Tippery of Castlehauen in the County spinster Richard Carpenter of the same fisherman Gabriel Perkins of

30 maker Agnis Suger of the same spinster Er{}ine Suger of the same spinster Thomasie Saunders of the same spinster Elizabeth

31 Nicholas Wale of the same broge maker Agnis Suger of the same spinster Er{}ine Suger of the same spinster Thomasie Saunders of

32 Taylour Alsis Browne wife to Zacharias Browne [ ] Mary Groute spinster { } and Allsis Hill widdowe And ffurther he cannot depose

33 Suger of the same spinster Thomasie Saunders of the same spinster Elizabeth Saunders of the same wife to Robert Saunders of

34 Baroney of Kinalmeiha, and within the County of Corke spinster, by vertue of etc. deposeth & sayth, that about Candlemas

35 said County Anstace mc dermod of the same in the said County spinster likewise parte of thaboue sume is due from the vndernamed

36 since this rebellion turnd papist, & [ ] & Ellish Oge of the same spinster & by the wife of Daniell Dauine of the same taylour &

37 Lady Thurls sheepheard a rebell: thirty shillings & Joane Saunders spinster of Thurls a rebell the totall of his losses amounts to fifty

38 of Mable Byrin late of Castlebarr in the County of Mayo spinster, That aboute the begining of the late rebellion one Mr

39 of Margarett Southwell of Tallow bridge in the County of Corke spinster aged twenty five yeares or thereabouts beinge duely

40 this deponents said Husband & all Husbandmen) and Joane Veale Spinster being one of this deponents servants & Thomas ofline

41 parish of Modelligoe Barronry of Deces and County of Waterford spinster A brittish protestant Deuly Sworne and examined before vs

42 Dauis wife to Henry Dauis, Mary Dauis Boult widdowe Anne Dauis spinster (English protestants) were stripped by the rebells their

43 of the same husb: & Catheren O Carlon of the parish of Killmolash spinster seuenteen shillings 0__xvjj__0 Marion ne Knoghor of the

44 fol. 142r 865. Jane Barton of Ramsfort in the County of Wexford spinster sworne and examined saith That her father Robert Barton

45 Sir James promised to doe iustice therein. Mary Helie of Tirlickin spinster being duely Examined the day aforesaid saith that the

Figure 10: Spinster concordances

It is clear from this sample that the majority of occurrences of spinster appear alongside

an individual’s name, place of residence and often additional kinship-based relational

identification (eg. lines 11 and 20), ethnicity and religious classification (eg. lines 23,

24, 42) and/or age (eg. 13, 16-18). Thus, for women, marital status forms part of a

fairly formulaic (and likely institutionally prescribed) set of details to be recorded about

deponents and named individuals. Since there are only ten occurrences of the male

equivalent bachelor, and three of these refer to the individual’s educated status (eg.

Bachelor of Arts), we can assume that marital status is by no means as significant a

component for men’s identities.

T he word widow, combined with the variants widowe, widow and widdowe,

occurs 636 times in the Depositions. Many of its appearances are within opening

statements, where female Deponents are described according to their place of residence,


age and marital status. As discussed earlier, these opening statements often incorporate

an explanation as to why a woman is testifying at all, and naturally this often involves

the use of the item widow, as in the following extract.

(11)

The Information of examinacion Jane Sanfford widdow late wife of Robert Sanfford of

Crokcanedoeg in the parishe of Disert in the Barronye <of the Barronye> of ffassa and

Dyninge in the Countye of Kilkennye taken this xvijth of Aprill 1644: who beinge

duelye sworne and examined deposeth as followeth

(Jane Sanfford, Kilkenny)

In

(11 we see widdow being used to classify the deponent, much like the vast majority of

occurrences of spinster, while late wife is used in a process of relational identification,

possessivated and thus working to ‘signify the ‘belonging together’, the ‘relationality’

of the possessivated and possessing social actors’ (van Leeuwen, 1996:56). A look at

concordance lines for widow confirms that in the majority of cases it functions in this

way – as a classifier, forming part of a closed set of details commissioners were

required to collect for each deponent and named person. In other examples widow

functions as late wife does in

(11: as a relational identifier, for example the widow of John Stanoway. Another lexical

choice available for this type of representation is relict, which often appears as a

relational identifier when widow has appeared as a classifier, as in (12.

(12)

Alice Clarke Late of Ardmulyan in the Countye of Meath widdowe, relict of Mr

Samuell Clarke Late Deane of Clone Mc Nosh deceased.

(Alice Clarke, Meath)

However, there are a number of occurrences of widow that appear to be functioning

somewhat differently.

(13)

This deponent was left a poore widdow with 7 children, 5 of them since this rebellion

began died by occasion of it.

(Joane Winingtowne, Queens County)


(14)

the said William Allen her husband about the [fir last] xxiijth of october 1642: goeing

out of his howse into the feilds nere hand. was then and there slaine murthered by the

Rebells leaving her a poore robbed widow and fowre children fatherless

(Joane Allen, Kildare)

In

(13 and

(14, as in numerous other examples throughout the data, the presence of the individuals’

status as widow, rather than forming part of a formulaic set of personal details, serves to

construct them as victims in need of relief. This interpretation is supported by the

presence of information pertaining to the deaths of children and of children being left

fatherles [sic], as well as by the presence of the adjectives poore and robbed. Thus, the

mentioning of an individual’s membership of the class widow invites an interpretation

of them as powerless and deserving of assistance, contributing to what Cope (2001) has

termed the ‘fashioning’ of victims.

The term wife is, unsurprisingly, invariably possessivated (van Leeuwen, 1996),

with the most frequent cluster being his wife and followed closely by the wife of. Table

5 below displays the most frequent collocates of wife.

Table 5: Wife collocates

Word Total %

CHILDREN 730 22.77

STRIPT 178 5.55

FAMILY 94 2.93

CHILD 86 2.68

MURTHERED 80 2.50

GENT 71 2.21

HOUSE 70 2.18

SONNE 67 2.09

REBELLS 62 1.93

DAUGHTER 62 1.93

Given what we have already established about the conventional role of the 17th century

married woman, it is perhaps unsurprising that many of the frequent collocates for

‘wife’ are easily identifiable as relating to the domestic and familial spheres (children,

house, child, daughter, family, son). In combination these suggest an emphasis on

kinship ties and the home in constructing the wife, not forgetting of course that children


frequently co-occurs owing to the extensive use of the string [his] wife and children.

While unsurprising, the application of these tools to the data allows for conclusions

based on an exhaustive analysis of all occurrences across the corpus, reaching beyond

the impressionistic accounts that have hitherto been the norm in research into the

Depositions.

Of considerable interest here is the high frequency of stript, the most frequent

collocate after the expected children. It is of particular interest that while being the

second most frequent collocate for wife, stript appears somewhat lower on the list for

woman and women – and does not appear at all for either man or men. One reason for

the stripping of individuals was to enforce their death by exposure, as in (15, which

follows on from an account of the violent deaths of several men.

(15)

The poore mens wiues were most of them stript and turned out of towne in cold frosty

weat{her} It seemes they were ashamed to kill them; but thought cold and hunger

should doe it if not the Cruell people of the Country:

(Robert Branthwait, Monaghan)

Thus, while the violent killing of women may have been at odds with the rules of

engagement adopted by many of the rebels, the stripping and effective forcing of death

by exposure or other rebels was seemingly more acceptable. Aside from this likely

outcome there was a further significance in the act of stripping. The following extract

implies a symbolic revenge in the act.

(16)

the Lord <C> Roch after hearing Masse, gaue order That Euery English man with in

that Company should be killed and Every English woman should be stript because his

Lady was stript by the English which order of his had as this Examinant verily beleiueth

been Executed vpon the poore English.

(Jane Cooper, Tipperary)

This extract feeds into a general impression across the corpus of the status of women as

property – the stripping of English women is presented as revenge upon English men,

the stripping of Lady Roch as an injury to Lord Roch. This is strikingly evident in the

following extract, where the deponent’s account of the stripping of his wife appears

alongside his material losses.

(16)


the totall of his losses a mounteth unto the value of fiue pounds and eleuen shillings the

deponent further saith that his wife was striped by the rebells but their names he

knoweth not

(Thomas Herrington, Cork)

The ordering of events (and thus the seeming addition of the stripped wife almost as an

afterthought) is reflective of institutional priorities – the commissioners’ key duty was

to record the losses of despoiled settlers, and in the original Depositions it is these

losses that appear first, followed by other reportable actions. Nevertheless, the

presentation of the stripping in this way is revealing of how wives were viewed during

the period – as commodities whose value, resting as it did in their sexual reputation,

was compromised by an act of stripping. We also saw in Error! Reference source not

found. the presentation of the stripping of women as equivalent to the killing of men.

Further support for this interpretation appears in the following extract.

(17)

& presently ther was a Great number of the Enymye Gotten vpp, & thay fell a killinge

the menn, & strippinge the womenn that weare in the said Roome...Immedyatly a

Lieutenant Collonel of the Irish, & layd hold on the maiors Collor, & tould him that hee

would saue his lyfe, & the said maiors wyfe Cryd to her husband & sayd that thay

weare strippinge her, whear upon the maior wrested himselfe from the said Lieutenant

Collonell;

(Jeane Collens, Queens County)

In (17 the woman is reported as having cried out to her husband about being stripped –

his reported reaction speaks volumes not only about the perceived injury inflicted upon

men by the stripping of their wives, but also about men’s perceived duty to protect their

wives’ dignity. Bearing in mind firstly (as noted earlier) that 17th century women’s

honour lay almost solely in their sexual reputation, and secondly that a key component

of men’s honour code was sexual ownership (Fletcher, 1995), it is reasonable to

interpret the reports of acts of stripping, particularly of women, as a means by which the

rebels were represented as intent on dishonouring the protestant settlers.

6. Concluding Remarks

This article has demonstrated that there are a number of resources available for the

representation of women in this corpus of seventeenth century quasi-legal discourse. A

straightforward comparison of the most frequent collocates of the generic terms man,

men, woman and women provided the point of departure for an investigation into the

lexico-grammatical choices that contribute to an overall impression of the identity of


women in the depositions, and their role in reported events. Firstly, it was demonstrated

that women are more frequently categorised according to their ethnicity and/or religion

than are men, a potential indication that women were more reliant on such factors for

constructing their identity. Furthermore, a comparison of the ethnic markers English and

Irish in relation to woman illustrated some important differences in the constructions of

these two sub-groups that are reflected and maintained through the discourse. While

English women tend to be disempowered, with their status as ‘victim’ made obvious by

both the preferred grammatical structure and adjectival choices, Irish women do not

routinely occupy such a role. They are more frequently activated, and adjectives

associated with them tend to represent them as morally inferior. These findings have the

potential to contribute to discussion about the significance of both religion and ethnicity

in the uprising. Henry Jones, for example, highlighted what he considered to be

evidence of an obvious religious dimension to the conflict, citing support from

Catholics in other parts of Europe, but also emphasised aspects of the accounts that to

his mind supported an overwhelming ‘hatred towards the English ethnicity’ (Cope,

2001:379).

The second basis on which women are differentiated from men identified in the

data was the transitivity choices in relation to the violent material processes killed and

murthered. The first distinction to be made was that women are very rarely presented as

the actor in these processes. Further to this, when a man is portrayed as the victim –

particularly in the case of murthered – there appears to be a preference to do so within a

passive construction, whereas for women their status as victim is made more transparent

through the use of active constructions. As already established, reports of violence

against women were central to the mythologization of the rebellion, and to

constructions of the rebels as particularly barbaric (McAreavey, 2010). Further attempts

to explain the disempowerment of women in texts of the period have taken the approach

that it created a contrast with discourses of male empowerment, functioning to reassure

men of their own capability, and indeed duty, to retaliate (Purkiss, 2005).

The article moved on to constructions based on arguably the single most

important component of 17th century women’s identity – their marital status. The

analyses demonstrated that marital status was pivotal to descriptions of women in the

way that occupation was pivotal for men, and illustrated some important differences in

the ways in which terms relating to marital status – spinster, widow and wife – are used

within the data. While spinster functions purely as a classifier, indicating an

individual’s membership of a particular social group, widow was shown to function in a

number of different ways – as a classifier, a relational identifier, and also to emphasise

victims’ vulnerability and powerlessness. Wife was shown to function exclusively in a

process of relational identification, and it was shown that particular actions hold

particular significance if committed against a wife, most notably the act of stripping,

which appears to be a more serious and newsworthy event when committed against a

married woman than when committed against any other individual. This pattern was

explained in light of what we had already established about the significance of sexual

reputation for women’s honour, and sexual ownership for men’s.


Considered together, these analyses have demonstrated a number of ways in

which ideology is reproduced through the discourse, and provide a discursive basis for

the argument that the Depositions were one mechanism through which consent for the

suppression of the rebellion was manufactured. The patterns of portraying particular

categories of woman as powerless and in need are evident in the Depositions as well as

in the texts that arose from them, and it is crucial to keep in mind the methods used to

collect them when attempting an explanation of these patterns. Collected from a

frightened and largely illiterate population by government representatives, and

transformed into writing by employees of those representatives, it is perhaps little

wonder that the texts display linguistic patterns that support the dominant thinking of

the time, in relation to gender roles as well as to constructions of the enemy more

generally.

As acknowledged earlier, the analyses presented here do not constitute the full

picture. With so many assailants known to the victims and witnesses, a comprehensive

investigation of the representation of all these social actors would require examination

of named individuals as well as the gendered terms of reference discussed here. It is

hoped, however, that this article has demonstrated the strengths of a corpus assisted

approach to a body of data hitherto approached only from an informal and largely

intuitive standpoint. It has also paved the way for further exploration of representation

within the Depositions, particularly in relation to the the effects of patterns of discourse

production and consumption and the wider social context on the language of conflict.

Notes

1 http://1641.tcd.ie 1 http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/ 1 I am indebted to Mike Scott for the modifications made to WordSmith Tools as a result of my

comments.

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About the Authors

Dr Nicci MacLeod completed her PhD at Aston University in Birmingham in 2010 on

the topic of interaction in police interviews with rape victims. She is currently employed

as a Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen on the AHRC funded project

Language & Linguistic Evidence in the 1641 Depositions, and as Research Associate at

the Centre for Forensic Linguistics, Aston University. Her research interests lie in the

language of violence and the manifestation of power through linguistic and discursive

structures, particularly in legal and investigative contexts.

Dr Barbara Fennell is Senior Lecturer in Language and Linguistics in the School of

Language and Literature at the University of Aberdeen, and Primary Investigator on the

AHRC funded project Language & Linguistic Evidence in the 1641 Depositions. She is

the author of A History of English: A Sociolinguistic Approach, and has published in the

areas of language & identity, discourse analysis, and language and colonialism/post-

colonialism.

Documents

Lexical Portraits of Vulnerable Women in War: The 1641 Depositions