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A Timeline of Tangled Pasts

The historical entanglement of the islands of Ireland and Britain began with the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 during the reign of Henry II (r. 1154-1189) of England.  ​The eight hundred years that followed influenced all aspects of life in Ireland as well as when, why, and where Ireland and Irish people were present in London. 

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However, this history blog begins in the seventeenth century.  Why? Because events in the 1600s were critical to shaping the deeply entangled futures of the islands of Ireland and Britain and the ever-expanding city of London. 

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  • For an overview of key events in Ireland, Britain and London during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scroll through the interactive Timeline.

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A Timeline of Blog Posts

​1600s: Seventeenth Century London
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The original "Irish colony" was established in the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields by the early 1600s. From the 1640s onwards, London increasingly became the preferred destination for the migratory Irish.  While the minority with social status mainly settled within the City, more places of Irish settlement sprung up in the out-parishes beyond the City walls. The Irish Rebellion of 1641 saw an influx of refugees into London.

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By the mid-seventeenth century, people "out of Ireland" - Gaelic Irish, Old English (Hiberno-Norman) and New English gentry, the middling sort, the seasonal worker, the working poor and the destitute - collectively made up London's largest 'foreign' population.  

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​1700s: Eighteenth Century London 

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​By now the Irish worker was integral to London's labour force and associated with many of the worst living conditions in London.  There was a distinct, often Irish-speaking, presence in specific sectors, from weavers in Spitalfields to costermongers and street-sellers, bricklayers and labourers, coal-heavers in the riverside settlements of Wapping and Shadwell, and seasonal migratory workers for the hay harvest outside London.

 

In 1736, a riot broke out in Spitalfields targeted at the Irish who were prepared to work for lower pay than their English counterparts. This was one manifestation of a widespread ambivalence about the workers who made up the majority of the Irish presence in London. â€‹â€‹The Irish in London also included a small but significant cohort of aristocrats and gentry as well as a middle-class presence, mainly merchants but also lawyers, doctors, artists, clergy, MPs and militia. 

 

It's estimated this heterogeneous group of Irish people represented as much as 10% of London's mid-eighteenth century population of 650,000.  

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​1800s: Nineteenth Century London 

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The 1810s saw an increase in the number of migrant Irish arriving in Britain. Ireland's economy was in decline and large numbers of Irish men were part of the mass demobilization of the armed forces that followed Britain's victory over France at Waterloo in 1815. The number of Irish-born in London ballooned from 75,000 in 1841 to 109,000 in 1851 (4.6% of London's population) as part of the mass exodus from Ireland during the Great Famine years of 1845-1852. 

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Alongside the great mass of the Irish poor, Irish London in the nineteenth century included  the small but influential, largely Protestant, aristocratic and political elite as well as an Irish intelligentsia, Catholic priests and nuns, and growing numbers of an Irish aspirational clerical class. The Irish in all their manifestations constituted London's largest group of foreigners until 1875 when new waves of Jewish migration began from Russia and Eastern Europe.

 

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