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The Cooper's Wife Is Missing: The Trials Of Bridget Cleary

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Marginalia(the study of notes people leave written in their books) is a growing area of academic study. Future readers of my personal copy of "The Cooper's Wife is Missing" will find that I have several notes relating to rambling, incoherent sentences and grammar errors that an editor should have found before the book went to press. The book wanders repeatedly away from its subject, the trials of Bridget Cleary, and dabbles into Celtic folklore and Irish History. I am a fan of both, but the authors of this book do a poor job of making clear the connections between Bridget and Irish History and Myth. I understand their point, but someone not as interested in Ireland would have put this book down long ago if they were looking for a story( which was why I actually picked it up myself.) If you stick with the story, the idea of Bridget's case being used as a reason for Britain to keep the Irish in subjugation is interesting, but it requires great patience and an ability to translate horrendous grammar to do so.

In 1895 a relatively unimportant incident occurred in a rural part of Ireland that literally was used by the British to overstate the superstitions and backwardness of the the Irish nation thus depriving the Irish of any possibility of Home Rule at that time.

Bridgit Cleary, the wife of a barrel maker was suspected by her friends and relatives of "conversing" with the fairies. Many of the rural people somewhat believed in spirits and thought that the fairies convened in a wood near the Cleary "residence". When Bridgit returns one night and does not look herself, they suspect she has been possessed by the fairies and is a changeling. Various herbs are tried in an attempt to "exorcise" Bridgit. When these fail the last resort is fire and Bridgit is held into the fireplace. She expires and all those present at the "exorcism" are put on trial. Indirectly, the Catholic Church is also "on trial" being held responsible for the superstitious nature of the Irish population. The whole experience becomes somewhat of an international news item propagated by the British for the aforementioned purpose. The group is found guilty and given various sentences. The most severe, ten years in prision, is placed on her husband

This book is a wonderful review of the Irish struggle for independence. Irish patriots and sympathetic British statesman are depicted. The harshness of the British during famines is also underlined. On the lighter site, several fanciful tales regarding the faries are related.

At the back of the book there is a very complete set of notes for anyone wishing to pursue topics in greater detail

The essential story is the one about the cooper's wife, one Bridget Cleary to give the woman her due, and her murder at the hands of her husband and relatives. Her death occurred at a "fairy trial" when she was suspected of being a changeling and no longer the woman Bridget Cleary. It ended in her death by burning and charges being brought against all the (Catholic) peasants present.

The bigger story presented throughout this book is the story of Ireland at this point in time. The reader will learn much about Celtic folklore, the power of religion in people's lives, and, most importantly, the struggle for Irish nationalism that effected everyone's lives. Sometimes the side stories may seem forced onto Bridget Cleary's own narrative but it all still provides for an interesting hodgepodge of Irish history. A winding and long road of a read but always interesting.

Other readers before me have summarized what this book is about, so I won't do it here. I will only say that I agree with those reviewers who have expressed their frustration at the volume of unrelated material bogging down the narrative and muddling what should have been a fascinating story. Pages and pages about an archbishop who did not know any of the people in the murder case and had no involvement in it, for example --- or lots of (often superfluous) tales about fairy encounters, which become wearisome after a while (three or four would have been enough to make the point). Yes, we get it --- the Irish peasantry were superstitious, and believed in fairies and goblins and the supernatural --- and the English authorities saw this case as an opportunity to foil Home Rule projects --- but can we please get to our story?

The authors seem unable to refrain from quoting every single fairy abduction incident on record, sometimes inserting them at very gripping points in the main story --- which has the effect of an anticlimax. I skipped a lot of the fairy anecdotes, and pages and pages on the historical context, which I thought were over-abundant. Maybe someone who's very, very interested in this specific period in Irish politics will be interested in reading it --- but it was not my case.

There are quite a few unwarranted assumptions in the book, as when the authors state their opinion that Bridget was likely the lover of a man who lived nearby and who committed suicide around the time she was killed. Apart from the fact that this man sold eggs (as did Bridget) and that one person (who had his own reasons for it) once mentioned the husband's belief that his wife was seeing a nameless 'eggman', there is no evidence at all that Bridget even knew the man who killed himself, even less that she was having an affair with him. There is simply no evidence that she was having an affair with anyone, period.

Also, I find it surprising that the authors have not followed in more detail the different possible motives behind Bridget's murder. The only one that is explored is the ostensible motive, the one put forward during the trial --- i.e. that the husband and relatives believed Bridget had been taken by the fairies and replaced with a changeling. I wonder whether there was not at least a slight possibility that the husband and other participants may have been motivated (at least partly, and however unconsciously) by their frustration at her independence and feistiness, at a time when most Irishwomen were submissive and compliant. Bridget earned her own money (by selling eggs and working as a seamstress), was outspoken and opinionated, and probably not as respectful of her husband's and male relatives' authority as she would have been expected to be. Of the ten people initially arrested in connection with her death, nine were men. Among these were her husband, father, and four cousins. The woman arrested was her aunt. Another, female cousin witnessed the prolonged torture inflicted on Bridget, but did nothing to prevent it. This cousin, who was uneducated and the family drudge, may have (again, perhaps unconsciously) envied Bridget's resourcefulness and high self-esteem. The possibility that jealousy or resentment of a woman who was 'different' may have played a part in the crime was not considered in the book.

This is a harrowing tale of ignorance, cruelty, and also misguided love. Even Michael, the husband, inspires compassion, if one adheres to the thesis that he was really trying to get his wife back, not do her in (and his misspelling-riddled pleas for early release from prison make pathetic reading). Unfortunately, in the end, these people's actual feelings and intentions remain obscure to us --- most of all those of Bridget, who doesn't even have a face, as there appear to be no photographs of her (nor would there be any of Michael, if he hadn't happened to be arrested and convicted). The authors don't offer any detailed analysis of Bridget's inexplicable passivity during her ordeal (she apparently didn't try to escape or call for help), which puzzled the judges and led the medical expert in the case to conclude that she was dead before the burning, with important legal consequences. In the end, the survivors from those terrible days at the Clearys' cottage disappear from history, and we hear no more of them, or how they (especially the husband) lived out their days after serving their sentences. This is not the authors' fault, of course, but a muddled storyline and heaps of boring digressions don't serve Bridget's story well either.

The Cooper's Wife Is Missing: The Trials of Bridget Cleary

Poor Bridget Cleary, killed for her belief in fairies. These fairies, embedded deep in Irish folklore, are not the of the Tinkerbell ilk at all. Rather, they are capable of bringing all sorts of mischief into the lives of ordinary mortals. Bridget's husband believed that she became a changeling, her body inhabited by an evil fairy spirit while her own was taken to live in the other world. As a result, her husband, with some friends and relatives, attempted to drive out the evil spirit, and in doing so, burned Bridget to death. The narrative in this history is chilling in its detail.

Interspersed with this incredible account are more prosaic chapters covering the history of Ireland around the turn of the 20th century. Belief in the spirits of folklore, very much alive in spite of the efforts of the Catholic church to eradicate it, was one of the reasons given for withholding home rule from Ireland; the tale of the cooper's wife played into the political situation by providing sensational propoganda for the opposition to exploit.

Amazing story, well researched.

The authors have set within a macrocosmic perspective of Irish history and politics; a microcosmic insight into the lives, beliefs and actions of a small community in late 19th century rural Ireland. Occasionally, but not often, the "blame the Protestant British" mentality beloved of some writers on Ireland brushed against the bias of this Protestant Irish Australian reader. Generally though, the authors are even handed in their assessment of events and do not push any one of the idiological elements that impinged on these troubling events in County Tipperary.

I thought this book was broken into two disconnected parts that did not work well together-- the trials of Bridget Cleary and the historical happenings during this time period. I found myself skimming through the chapters that detailed the history of Ireland during this time period and looking forward to the chapters related to Bridget Cleary. This novel was too much like a school textbook with boring and wandering descriptions of the historical times of Ireland. The relevancy of these historical descriptions to the trials of Bridget Cleary was exaggerated by the authors.

Hyped as "The Tipperary Witch Case," peddled as "The Cloneen 'Fairy' Mystery," shunned as "The Ballyvadlea Horror," Bridget Cleary's 1895 burning by her husband to free her from the spell of the fairies-- no sprites but terrors-- comprises the reason she was said to have went missing. "It's a simple story that shows how simple beliefs can shape big events." (392) Two historians eschew feminist theories (for these see Angela Bourke's 1999 study), arguing after sifting enormous amounts of primary evidence from court testimony, and secondary sources that span the nineteenth century far beyond the case itself.

Buried within closely-printed if fascinating "notes on sources," Hoff and Yeates sum up this thoroughly researched, if perhaps too broadly conceived, work: "the true power exercised in the Cleary incident was the power of fairy beliefs, which, at a critical juncture of Bridget's illness, overrode the individual power of the men in her life, and the collective power of the state, religion, and medicine." (439) The Church, eager to ally itself not with "superstition" of the credulous peasantry but with Home Rule and respectable Irish nationalism under local but powerful prelate Archbishop Croke (about to celebrate his Golden Jubilee of ordination), strove to distance itself from complicity with Fenians, agrarian agitators, and "paganism." Unionists used the Cleary case to embarrass the Church; Justice William O'Brien labored long to implicate the clergy with those seven local men sentenced to hard labor for her death. The British and Irish press rushed to sensationalize the skulduggery.

Hoff and Yeates labor mightily to recover the contexts. It's nearly a hundred pages of local history, Parnell, and even Brian Boru (who could not have fought except in legend if at the Boulick "in the twelfth century," [pg. 9]-- having died after Clontarf's battle in 1014) before Bridget's fatal nine-day torment commences. Nine days, as the authors helpfully explain, for beyond nine for Celts lay infinity. (165) Nine days, therefore, a window in which Michael Cleary and his neighbors and father-in-law sought to allay their suspicions about the wandering, headstrong, infertile, and folk-remedy inclined woman who, according to lore they all believed, had her body taken by the fairies, the threatening forces of the Otherworld that haunted rural life even as the Church and nationalists longed to advance Irish causes.

"How could anyone seriously consider granting political independence to a nation whose populace still believed in fairies?" (9) This was the implicit challenge dramatized by the ordeal of Bridget. Her assailants sincerely believed that they had but nine days to free her from her plight, for unless of her own will she chose to return to her mortal body, her changeling spirit would inhabit it while her true self was spirited off to the underworld forever. If Michael and his mates failed to convince her to come back, the fairy forces could abduct her with never a hope of return. By exorcising her, with the help of the priest and of iron as they entered the feared fairy-fort at midnight if through ancient if crude and repulsive and violent rituals her freedom was not first attained, they hoped to heal her of her mysterious pains. By such desperation, her husband and neighbors and father tried to tame the strong-willed woman, who'd never born a child after eight years, and who seemed maddeningly to resist the conformity expected of her, as if she continued to embody the women in her own line who were said to employ herbal remedies and cures.

If the changeling within Bridget was not expelled, they held she'd fulfill the folk tales, and die. If the creature imitating her was driven out by urine, beatings, and fire, however, Bridget might return. The folk tales also assured him of this hope.

With great sympathy, the historians allow us to enter this now-vanished frame of the traditional Irish mind. They avoid facile second-guessing or anachronistic theories; their scholarship rests on archives, books, visits to the long-abandoned Cleary cabin, and interviews with locals still spooked or annoyed long into the twentieth century by the blame cast upon South Tipp. Reviewers have sniffed at the anti-British or Protestant-blaming tone, but this reflects the nationalist accounts themselves as filtered through Hoff & Yeates' attempt to recreate this mindset. And, when one reads of the Famine with "entire families walling themselves inside their mud huts to die together with a modicum of dignity," indeed for many later in the century, "these images would not go away." (13)

Those contending against long memories of oppressed "Old Irishry" encountered hostility. "The constable made it his business to know everything because his life depended on it." Often a peasant's son, one who "tended to be brighter than average but was a social leper in his own community-- an insider made forever an outcast because he was too bright to spend his life mowing the landlord's hay, too complacent to leave, and too willing to betray his countrymen. If he needed good ears, sharp eyes, and quick reflexes, he also needed a thick skull." (111) They preface this pithy description with a nearly Sherlockian account of how the RIC man could observe at a few casual glances an "Irish Yankee," a Fenian returned from the Civil War to subvert the calm slumber of the southwest countryside, with its persistent rebel reputation.

This detail may seem the sort of tangential one that some readers skim over. I admit the trials themselves wore on with more recitals than I personally needed, but others will benefit from the diligence shown here. Similarly, while the extended forays into the storied setting of Slievenamon and Charles Kickham of one-time "Knocknagow" fame seemed detours, they will inspire others to follow up with their own forays into the footnotes, as I will with a couple linking Victorian titillation to the fairy craze spinning off of the Celtic Revival! (I add that singer Liam Clancy's memoir "The Mountain of the Women"-- the probable derivation for Slievenamon's looming presence over the region-- and Patricia Monaghan's chapter on the same area in her folkloric feminism fashioned as "The Red-Haired Woman from the Bog" will both satisfy those wanting more on Southwest Irish landscapes, women, and lore. Find truly frightening encounters with fairy folk collected by Eddie Lenihan in "Meeting the Other Crowd." I've reviewed these on Amazon.)

Therefore, as I read on, I realized how Hoff & Yeates strive to illuminate the shadows over the Cleary case itself for a wider audience than the Irish, and more academic, one of Burke's history published but the year before. The accused, both Bridget and those sentenced for her death, emerge as people that, as far as the limits of documents and newsprint can restore, you learn to understand as caught up in forces, Crown or fairy, Celtic or political, Catholic or judicial, that they cannot control. For an American, this book may daunt by its heft and detail, but out of such attention, one comes away with a far more comprehensive perspective on the whole century that culminated in an unwitting showdown between the pressures of modernity and those of tradition.

well written account of a murder ain the tun of the century ireland. tells not only of the murder but also of the history of the period. really interesting insight into rural ireland and the belief in fairies. a very good read.