“Swearing & vowing they would kill them because they were of English kind.”

In October 1641 Catholic residents of Ireland united and rose in arms against English settlers. These Protestant, so called 'New English', were either chased out of their home or killed. This violent uprising went down in history as the 'Irish Rebellion of 1641.' The insurgents were of different origins, and can be divided into Gaelic, a population which was divided into clans, and whom had lived on the island since a few centuries BC, and 'Old English', Catholic Englishmen who had settled in Ireland since the Middle Ages, and belonged to the political, economic and social elite. Both groups had been affected greatly by the arrival of English settlers during the Tudor Conquest: A lot of land, previously owned by them, was now owned by settlers. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, this colonization was accompanied by an increasing restriction of the Catholic faith. One of the most interesting things about this particular rebellion is the fact that Gaelic and Old English rose in arms together against the New English. Over time they had come to share the same religion, language and traditions. They had become so connected that Englishmen used violence against other Englishmen, in the name of the English king. One could argue that during this rebellion a new form of identity emerged, that was not based on a native connection, but on a national one. This is contradictory to the modernist perspective of nationalist theorists, who state that national identities are constructed in accordance with the arrival of the nation state, and cannot be found in the pre-modern period. From 1642 onwards, the English government began to collect incriminating Protestant statements about the events during the uprising. The emphasis was on the material damage and suffered violence. The respondents gave a list of the lost goods, and a chronological account of events. The depositions vary in length and detail. These statements are known as The 1641 depositions. To research if there were any notions of a national identity in seventeenth century Ireland, these depositions were examined through a quantitative analysis. The depositions from the Counties Cavan and Cork were searched for descriptions of the insurgents; indications of how the fled English Protestants characterized their attackers. The research question was formulated as: “Do the statements of Protestant victims in the Irish rebellion of 1641 indicate a perception of an Irish and English national identity?” As the findings of both Cavan and Cork clearly state, both Irish and English were considered as a group, using the terms frequently to describe themselves and each other, yet making a clear distinction between religious divisions. The English used the terms Irish and rebels commutable, sometimes making an exception by calling them the: rebellious Irish. There was no distinction made between Gaelic and Old English; they were persistently referred to as Irish. The protestant victims referred to themselves as either English or British and occasionally Irish. These findings are the answers to the different sub-questions, and the cumulative conclusion and answer to the research question is therefore: “The statements of Protestant victims in the Irish rebellion of 1641 indicate a strong and clear perception of Irish and English national identities.”