Anyone who has had an email address for any length of time has probably received a chain-email- one of those emails sending you a poem or a melodramatic story, followed by a dire warning to forward it on to ten friends or risk pain of horrible accident, illness and even death. Today, the less superstitious among us mutter bitterly about our gullible friends, who are effectively creating email address lists for spammers, but the emails continue to come highlighting that many of us just won’t take the chance of pressing delete. This phenomenon, however, is not new to the age of technology.
In the 1830s, cholera was sweeping across Western Europe, charted in the newly burgeoning local newspapers as it reached city after city- Moscow, Berlin, Paris, finally reaching the British town of Sunderland in 1831. In Ireland, peasants and farmers checked their weekly papers and their local gossip mills waiting for the inevitable. The first reported case was in Belfast in March 1832, reaching Dublin a week later, and Cork in April. As the Irish waited for the disease to hit their hometown, rumours of cholera led to heightened fear. It is against this backdrop that the Irish schoolteacher Humphrey O’Sullivan witnessed the predecessor to the chain mail.
The lower classes of the Irish are a credulous people. Some practical joker sent a fool out with a small piece of charred stick, or some other bit of kindling, which had been extinguished in Easter-water, or holy water, and told him to divide it into four parts, and give it to four persons in four houses, telling them that the cholera would kill them unless each one of them did the same thing. By this means 16 persons, and 64, and 256, and 1,024, and 4,096 etc., etc., got this fire, until the entire country was a laughing stock for protestants.
Within six days, a remarkable popular panic swept the countryside, as peasants ran from village to village with their kindling. In other parts of the country, it was reported that the Virgin Mary had appeared at an altar in Charleville and left ashes that she warned were a protection against cholera. She ordered that small packages of the ashes should be taken to neighbouring houses and placed under the rafters. Then, the house owner should take ash from their hearth to four other houses that had not already been visited, and give the inhabitants the same message. In other parts of the country, it was turf blessed by priests that was taken from house to house.
As one commentator noted:
‘Such was the anxiety to put her [the Virgin Mary’s] orders into execution that the whole country was up in a moment and one of my work people told me that when he was called up at about three in the morning and looked out he saw the fields full of people in their shirts running about as if they were mad.’
The extent of the phenomenon caused considerable concern amongst the British administrators of Ireland, fearing it was a test to see how quickly a message could be sent amongst the peasants in the event of nationalist uprising. Local police and magistrates charted the progress as the kindling and turf worked its way across the countryside. In the space of six days, the message travelled 300 miles (in the days before cars or even trains in Ireland) and reached at least three-quarters of the counties in Ireland- a success rate that perhaps would put our modern chain-mailers to shame!
Further Reading
S. J. Connolly, ‘ The ‘Blessed Turf’: Cholera and Popular Panic in Ireland, June 1832’, Irish Historical Studies, 23, (1983), pp. 214-232.
Katie Barclay deletes chain mail supersticiously. She conducts research on Irish marriage at the University of Warwick.