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Why did so many punishment burials occur in Limerick after 1798 rebellion?
Analysis: The scale of brutal punishment burials and interments was such that the burial pits became known as 'Croppies' Holes'
By Shane McCorristine, Newcastle University
Archaeologists in Limerick city recently uncovered the skeletal remains of 36 individuals on the site of the old city gaol, which operated from 1813 to 1904 near Merchant's Quay. There was some surprise at this number, and it was thought that they were the remains of prisoners who were buried there after execution or died from other causes in the prison hospital.
But this is less surprising given the scale of punishment burials and gaol-yard interments in Ireland in the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion. The legal framework for prison burial as a form of postmortem punishment was established with the Hanging in Chains Act 1834 and Offences Against the Person Act 1861. This punishment was for executed murderers only and it replaced the previous sentencing options of dissection or hanging in chains.
Prison burials took place on unconsecrated ground, without traditional burial rites, and without any memorial or marker. In addition to this mark of disgrace, quicklime was used to hasten decomposition and erase the condemned body as quickly as possible, although it was also needed to prevent contagion from corpses in busy prison yards. Long before it was mandated by the law, prison burials were common in Ireland where there was a particular custom of interring bodies in pits known as "Croppies' Holes". People hanged for crimes in Ireland other than murder could also end up being buried in this disgraceful manner.
As the name indicates, these pits date back to the 1798 rebellion when United Irishmen were nicknamed "croppies" due to their cropped hair. Limerick appears to be the region where this practice was first recorded: United Irishman Patrick 'Staker' Wallis was hanged in Kilfinane in July 1798 for insurrection. His head was then spiked on his own pike and his body buried in a pit there (human remains suspected to be his were uncovered during works in 2006).
In the same month, William Ryan Stephen was hanged at Caherconlish. It was reported that after execution "his body was brought back and thrown into Croppie's Hole, in the New Jail yard, appropriated for the interment of Rebels". This place was the "New Gaol" on Mary Street (built on the site of the old Tholsel in 1750), which was overcrowded with "the victims of suspicion and the men on the 'black list'" in 1798.
What started as a temporary place to dump rebel bodies became a macabre landmark in Limerick, raising much disquiet among the people over its use as a postmortem punishment, even for those who were not convicted of capital offences. In 1809, the leader of a gang demanding arms, Garrett Howard, was shot dead during a robbery. His body was sent to the Croppies' Hole. The next year, another bandit died during a raid and was sent to the hole "as a warning to those villains". When the next prison was built in Limerick in 1813 – the city gaol at Merchant's Quay – this custom of using the Croppies' Hole as an extra-judicial form of punishment continued.
At a Select Committee meeting on prisons in 1819, the Whig magistrate for Limerick Thomas Spring Rice (later Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1835-39) confirmed the practice of punishment burials in the hole for offences "of a very atrocious nature". Spring Rice was asked if there was not a law sentencing murderers to be dissected: "We have a law", he said, "but I have not known it to be carried into effect. I have known the plan I have described substituted in its stead". Spring Rice was deceiving his audience as it would have been difficult to forget the notorious executions and dissections of at least nine men for the murder of Thomas Dillon and his wife in Pallaskenry in 1815.
So why were prison burials used as a postmortem punishment so often in Limerick? Spring Rice's evidence to parliament gives us the answer. He noted the importance of the wake to the people of Ireland and said that "the deprival of that rite is one of the greatest punishments to which the surviving relations can be subject".
The wake was (and is) a key funeraral ritual in Irish culture, an opportunity to craft a "good death" and cleanse the body physically and symbolically of its sin. Wakes had the additional value of confirming the death of executed offenders in an era when premature burials or resuscitations of the hanged were a real possibility. In the bloody decades following the 1798 rebellion, interfering in wake customs was one of the many coercive policies designed to deter offenders and aggravate the feelings of communities in "disturbed" districts.
From RTÉ Archives, Aoife Kavanagh reports for RTÉ News in 1998 on a memorial service at the Croppies' Acre in Dublin where United Irishmen leader Wolfe Tone died in 1798
This can be seen in a notorious incident in 1821 after a skirmish in Askeaton when a party of police attempted to arrest "disturbers of the peace" at an assembly. According to Major Richard Willcocks, giving evidence to another parliamentary inquiry, two injured men were taken prisoner and brought to Rathkeale. Willcocks reported that "the vital spark was not extinct" in one of them when he was brought in. "I did hear that shortly after they were brought into Rathkeale, they were thrown into some pit or hole that was dug for that purpose". Quicklime was thrown over them despite the people's clamour that he was still alive.
When the next prison was completed in Limerick in 1821 - the County Gaol on Musgrave Street, which is now Limerick Prison – the Croppies' Hole continued to be used. In 1822 Major General Richard Bourke (later Governor of New South Wales) sent a petition to Dublin Castle requesting a cessation of "burying the bodies of executed Criminals within the walls of the Jail, in a place called Croppy's Hole, without the rites of Sepulture, and throwing quick lime upon them to ensure their speedier dissolution". This custom, Bourke noted, was "unauthorized by the Laws of the Land or the Order of Government".
By this period, the Croppies' Hole was being used to inter ordinary prisoners who had died and even those who died before trial. Bourke was worried about the risk of disease with the yard becoming a "Charnel House", but also the fact that it was generating a "spirit of revenge" among local people.
Prison burials continued long after the 1820s and we are still coming to terms with the legacy of the burials of combatants of the 1916-23 revolutionary period in Kilmainham Gaol, Mountjoy Prison and elsewhere. All that remains today of the old city gaol in Limerick is its limestone façade, which is preserved as part of civic offices on Crosbie Row.
It is possible that some of the remains recently uncovered can be identified as those who suffered the extra-judicial punishment of burial in the Croppies' Hole. One of the ironies of quicklime is that it can occasionally act as a preservative, slowing down decomposition and maintaining, in some tenuous way, the identities of the silent dead.
