The Whiteboys: Ireland's Secret Peasant Rebellion of the 1760s

For decades, scholars portrayed the Whiteboys as a primitive rural riot. In fact, they were an elaborate secret society with oaths, codes, and a campaign of direct action that terrified landlords across Munster and Leinster. This episode explores the origins of the Whiteboy movement in County Tipperary around 1761, their network of nocturnal raids—leveling fences, maiming cattle, and delivering threatening letters signed by the mythical 'Captain Right'—and the brutal state repression that followed under the Whiteboy Act of 1765. We also examine the social and economic context: rising rents, enclosure of common land, and the tithe system that squeezed Catholic tenant farmers. Lucas and Luna discuss how the Whiteboys represent a continuity of rural protest that would later feed into the United Irishmen and Ribbonism, and why their name remains a byword for agrarian unrest in Irish history. #Whiteboys #AgrarianRebellion #18thCentury #Tipperary #CaptainRight #Munster #Leinster #Tithe #Enclosure #SecretSociety #WhiteboyAct #1760s #PeasantProtest #RuralHistory #UnitedIrishmen #Ribbonmen #History #FexingoHistory Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo