Where the Word "Boycott" Comes From: Lough Mask, Mayo

Most words come into a language slowly, worn smooth by long use before anyone thinks to write them down. Boycott is different. It can be dated almost to the week. The origin of the word boycott lies on the shore of Lough Mask in Co. Mayo, in the autumn of 1880, in a dispute over rent between a community of tenant farmers and the land agent set over them. The agent’s name was Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, and by that Christmas his surname was appearing in the London papers as a common noun. Within a generation it had passed into French, German, Dutch and beyond, and it has never left.

Lough Mask House, 1880

Boycott was a Norfolk-born former army captain who had spent most of his adult life farming in the west of Ireland, first on Achill Island and then, from 1873, at Lough Mask House near Ballinrobe, where he farmed on his own account and acted as land agent for Lord Erne, an absentee landlord with an estate in the district.

The harvest of 1880 was poor, the second hard year running, and the Land War, begun the year before at Irishtown in the same county, had made Mayo its storm centre. Lord Erne offered his Lough Mask tenants an abatement of ten per cent on their rents. The tenants, organised and confident now, demanded twenty-five. The difference was not settled, and in September 1880 eviction processes were issued against eleven of the estate’s tenants. Serving those papers was the agent’s business, and it made Captain Boycott the test case for a new weapon.

The tactic finds its target

On 19 September 1880, at Ennis in Co. Clare, Charles Stewart Parnell had asked a great crowd what should be done with a man who bid for a farm from which his neighbour had been evicted. His answer was to shun him, on the roadside, in the street, in the shop, in the fair green and the market place, “as if he were the leper of old”. No violence: isolation, a moral Coventry. Within the week, Lough Mask became the first great trial of that doctrine.

When a process server went out from Ballinrobe with a police escort of seventeen constables to deliver the eviction papers, he was met by the estate’s tenants, the women of the townland well to the fore, and driven back into the town. Then the isolation began in earnest. Boycott’s labourers and household servants left him. The blacksmith would not shoe for him, the laundress would not wash for him, the shops of Ballinrobe would not serve him, and his post came no further than the town. His crops stood in the fields with winter coming, and no hand in Mayo would lift them.

The tactic bit so hard because no farm of that size could be run alone. An estate needed herdsmen and harvesters, carters and a smith, and the shops and dealers of the town behind them; withdraw all of that at once and a man with hundreds of acres, and the law entirely on his side, simply could not carry on. In mid-October 1880 Boycott set out his situation in a letter to The Times of London, and within days the affair at Lough Mask was national news, then international.

A priest, a journalist and the origin of the word boycott

The campaign was only days old when it was given its name. James Redpath, an American journalist covering the Land War for the New York press, was gathering material around Lough Mask and calling on the parish priest of The Neale, Father John O’Malley. By Redpath’s own account, set down soon afterwards, he complained that he had no word for what was happening: “ostracism” would mean nothing to the country people. O’Malley considered the problem and offered a plainer solution: make the agent’s own name the word, and call the thing boycotting. The conversation is usually dated to 23 September 1880, and Redpath took the coinage straight into print.

The word behaved like nothing else in the language. Within weeks it was appearing in Irish and British newspapers without explanation; The Times was using it by November 1880 as a general term for organised social isolation, and within a decade it had its place in the dictionaries. It crossed almost immediately into other languages, needing no translation in any of them. Captain Boycott had become that rare thing, a man outlived by his own name while he was still alive to hear it used.

Fifty-seven men and a thousand soldiers

What was left of the harvest at Lough Mask was saved, in the end, at a cost that proved the League’s point better than any speech could have. Unionist newspapers raised a relief fund of some 2,000 pounds, and in November 1880 fifty-seven labourers from Cavan and Monaghan travelled to Mayo to dig out the crops. Because the government feared what might happen to them, they came with an escort of close to a thousand soldiers. For two weeks, in bitter weather, the expedition camped in the grounds and gathered the crops while cavalry stood guard over the fields, and correspondents from the British and American papers followed the whole strange siege of a Mayo farm for readers around the world. The government’s own costs were put at around 10,000 pounds. Parnell’s arithmetic was crueller: a shilling, he reckoned, for every turnip dug from Boycott’s land.

On 27 November 1880, Boycott and his family left Lough Mask under escort of the 19th Hussars. No local driver could be hired at any price, so they travelled to the railway station at Claremorris in an army ambulance wagon, and took the train for Dublin. He left Ireland soon afterwards, and died in England in 1897, seventeen years into the strange afterlife of his own name. No one had raised a hand against him through the whole affair, and that was precisely the point. The campaign’s power lay in withdrawal, not attack, and against withdrawal his position simply could not be held.

What one townland’s discipline meant

The affair at Lough Mask was a single episode of the Mayo land agitation it grew from, but it became the episode the world remembered, because it came with a word attached. Boycotting passed at once into the Land League’s regular armoury, used against land-grabbers and evicting landlords across the country, and from there out into every later struggle that needed a name for organised refusal. It is a strange distinction for a quiet corner of south Mayo: a dispute over a ten per cent abatement gave the world’s languages a word they still use every day. The emigrants carried the story with them too, and the American papers that had reported the siege made sure the word landed in New York and Boston as quickly as it reached London.

And it happened in the middle of an ordinary family’s ordinary year, which is how such things were actually lived. In Yours, From Ireland, Michael Gallagher writes to his cousin in New York in September 1880 with the whole country watching his county, and a new word passing from mouth to mouth in the fair and the chapel yard. You can read those years in Book Three, Distance and Devotion, 1871 to 1882, and follow the family’s whole century in all eight Books.