September (Meán Fómhair) 24th 1880 - Mayo agent, Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, was sent to a moral Coventry. He described his plight in a letter to The Times: ...people collect in crowds upon my farm and order off all my workmen. The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house. My farm is public property, I can get no workmen to do anything, and my ruin is openly avowed as the object of the Land League unless I throw up everything and leave the country Captain Charles Boycott a landlords agent, whose job was to collect rents from tenant farmers on an estate in Mayo . The tenants were ill treated in numerous ways by the British landowners who were continually exploiting Irish tenant farmers, and as part of a protest, the farmers on the estate where Boycott worked demanded a reduction in their rents. Boycott refused their demands, and evicted a number of tenants. The Irish Land League advocated that people in the area did not attack Boycott, but rather use a new tactic: refuse to do business with him at all. This new form of protest exceptionally effective, Boycott wasnt able to get workers to harvest crops, no one would serve him in the shops. And by the end of 1880 newspapers in Britain began using the word the way we know it today, not as a persons name, but as a tactic of protest
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 23:23:53 +0000
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