The Agreeable Recreation Of Fighting

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1999 by Carolyn Conley

The rules of Irish brawls were not those of the Marquis of Queensbury. Two and a half percent of homicide victims died from kicks and five from infected bites. Both tactics were apparently standard in brawls though parity of results was a factor. After John Murphy bit John Michael Duby's finger off, a witness brought the finger into court to show the judge, who calmly asked, "with the exception of the finger who got the worst of it?" After hearing an account of the fight, the judge told the jury that since Duby had knocked Murphy to the ground and was beating on him the bite was an act of self-defense. Murphy was acquitted.(36)

Beyond the fists, feet and teeth, the single most popular weapon, in part because of availability, was the stone. Throwing stones was a common response to provocation and in some areas was considered no more serious than fisticuffs. In Mayo in 1890 a judge announced that the "only way a jury could find the accused guilty was for committing an assault by throwing stones." Apparently the verdict was unthinkable. The accused was acquitted.(37) At least 212 people were killed with stones between 1866 and 1892. Less than 10 percent of these homicides led to sentences of over two years.

The weapons employed in most assaults and homicides were improvised. A Kilkenny judge complained of, "Cases arising as usual out of drunken brawls, senseless altercations and old feuds raked up, and the stick, the stone, the knife, and in one case the hatchet - whatever weapon is ready to hand - is had recourse to." Thirty-two percent of homicide victims were beaten to death either with fists, sticks or stones. At least 95 people died of skull fractures. At the Limerick summer assize in 1878 Justice Barry complained that "skull fracturing had become so frequent that people did not seem to mind it, and indeed he was informed that there was not a man in a certain part of the county who had not a fractured skull." Even some judges shared the complacency. When a witness brought fragments of a skull to a Tipperary courtroom to illustrate the damage done during a brawl, Justice Fitzgerald sneered: "They would not think anything of that in Clare."(38)

The courts took a slightly less lenient view of the use of the knife. As Justice John George Gibson explained, "A man might attack another with his fists or with his walking stick but the use of the knife was a treacherous and a serious thing." But the comments reveal that it was the weapon itself they objected to, not the violence. A quarter sessions chairman told jurors: "It was all very well in a fair fight to retaliate with the natural weapons a person was intrusted with, but in the prisoner's case it seemed to be an equal fight, and there appeared to be no necessity for the use of the knife." Judges admitted that knives might sometimes be necessary. After directing an acquittal in a Kilkenny case, Justice Dowse warned the accused "on no account in future to use a knife when it could possibly be avoided."(39)