Analysis: Single-shaming customs were especially prevalent in Munster with the 'Skellig Lists' mocking, teasing and insulting unmarried people
Before the 20th century, the majority of Irish weddings were squeezed into the period of Shrove or Seraft, the weeks between Women's Christmas on January 6th and Shrove Tuesday. Once Ash Wednesday arrived, the prospect of marriage waned: marriages during Lent were forbidden, and after that came the busiest agricultural season. People who weren’t married by sundown on Shrove Tuesday might well expect to wait at least another year.
People were marrying later and later in the 19th century, constrained by limited resources and the demographic drain of emigration, and many never married. But Irish culture placed a high value on marriage as the sole legitimator of sexual relationships, and as a means by which an individual might gain some independence of employers or their family of birth.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime, Dr Marion McGarry from ATU on why Shrove Tuesday is called Shrove Tuesday
Throughout Ireland, the week or so around Shrove Tuesday was a time for customs that heaped insult on the injuries of the unmarried, as described in the Irish folklore collections and Kevin Danaher’s The Year in Ireland. On 'Chalk Sunday', singletons might be marked with chalk or tar on their clothing, and ‘old maids’ might have salt thrown over them ‘to preserve them’ for the following year. They were teased on ‘Puss Monday’ (‘pus’ meaning a sour face) or ‘Domhnach na Smut’ (Sunday of the scowls) for looking lonely or jealous.
Single-shaming customs were especially prevalent in Munster. On Shrove Tuesday, single people might be jeered by their neighbours and captured and herded into ponds or around the streets. Their properties might be daubed with rude figures in tar or paint, and firecrackers set off outside. James Beale's 1845 painting Skellig Night on South Mall gets across the carnival atmosphere of Shrove Tuesday in Cork, as people are mocked and manhandled by the light of torches and bonfires.
In the same spirit, ‘Skellig lists’ were regularly produced in the 19th and early 20th centuries in Cork city and county, and parts of Kerry. Based on the conceit that the calendar of the Skelligs islands off the Kerry coast ran a day or more behind the rest of the country, it was derisively suggested that the unmarried should be paired up and sent there, allowing them a final chance to avoid ‘missing the boat’.
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From RTÉ Archives, folklorist Seosamh Ó Dálaigh from Dún Chaoin, Co Kerry, talks about customs and folklore relating to Shrove Tuesday and Lent on a 1982 episode of Fáilte
The lists were poems or ballads that proposed couples to accompany one another on the pilgrimage. They might be circulated in manuscript and even sung in communities, often to the mortification of the subjects or their relatives. Cork's booming early 19th-century publishing industry meant increasing numbers of lists were printed.
As ephemeral publications, almost all of them ended up wrapping the next day’s groceries. A taste of their contents, however, is provided by the large collection compiled in the 1830s by the Cork folklorist Thomas Crofton Croker, held in the Cambridge University Library, as well as some other random survivals from later periods. UCC holds some lists from the 1880s, and others turn up internationally.
Both Catholics and Protestants appear in the lists, and they give us a picture of a small lively city where almost everyone knew almost everyone. Local characters might be teased for their appearance, family, foibles and fancies, relatively gently if the person was reasonably well liked, or more roughly if they were not.
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From RTÉ Archives, Prof Daithí Ó hÓgáin, Eileen Ní Mhurchú and Síle de Cléir discuss Shrove Tuesday customs with host Ciana Campbell in a 1994 episode of TeleTalk
The Snow Drop List pairs Miss McCarthy, a ‘buxome , winsome lass’ and Charles J. Daly and wishes: ‘may they be buckl’d soon [married]/And all their life, in pleasant strife, be one long honey-moon’. However, of Miss Sheehan, the prideful daughter of a pawnbroker, the writer says: ‘You’ve no interest now for any one,—Oh! honey, I am dreaming—/Your six months are long since past—you’re now not worth redeeming.’ No doubt plenty of double-meaning is now lost to us: are the portrayals of ‘a beautiful creature, his own fairy queen’ and of ‘the flower of the flock and the queen of them all’ in The Virgins of the Sun intended to be true or derisory?
The Royal Methodist List satirises various hymn-singing ladies, as well as Miss Hart (‘often this way you have travelled before’), and Mrs Keller who ‘comes next very frisky,/I know by her eyes she have taken some whiskey.’ The Northern Satirist is a long slander of many people, including Miss Gould ‘a sturdy surly wench’ and ‘coarse squat Coal Quay, Mary Lynch/Whose face is not unlike her bottom’. Special glee was taken in teasing policemen: Miss Seward, a ‘maid of swinish race’, rides on a pig to the Skelligs alongside ‘a peeler big,/Mounted on a brother ass.’
There could be a little light sexual innuendo. When Jane Gaggin starts choking on ‘a lump of cow’s heel’ (gaggin’, get it?!) in The Royal Methodist List, Sammy Thompson offers to help: ‘But draw over here near the lamp, and I’ll try/To peep down your passage with my little red eye.’ The Royal Hottentot Skellig list for 1836 introduces ‘Tim Harrington the [uilleann] piper squeezing the bags/He is not intended for to go alone‒/For he’s training Mag Nagle to handle the drone.’
Despite a recent trend for reviving some of Ireland's traditional calendar customs, this may be one best left in the past
One of the most scurrilous of the surviving lists is Better Late Than Never!, which accuses ‘Jack Connell the turner’ of being a ‘brothel ranger and a pimp’, and of being ‘marked in the face’, presumably by venereal disease. Amy Coachford is described as a ‘deceitful b——’ and ‘Fat Nell Connor, the peeler hunter’ as an ‘ugly b—— ’. Harriet O’Brien, ‘as ugly an old maid as ever was born’, is rejected by ‘Slobber-gob O’Regan’ because ‘he could not stand the smell of her breath’.
Amid complaints about wronged reputations, satire about officials and the police, and attacks on ballad sellers by aggrieved subjects, the authorities in Cork and the surrounding towns were cracking down on the sale of Skellig lists by the 1880s. However, manuscript lists still circulated into the early 20th century.. Despite a recent trend for reviving some of Ireland’s traditional calendar customs, this may be one best left in the past.
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Dr Clodagh Tait is a lecturer in History at MIC Limerick. She is a former Research Ireland awardee
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
