You Will Dye At Midnight

Victorian Ireland was global champion of threatening letters. This book reveals the murky world where tens of thousands of these letters and notices were nailed to barn doors or sent by penny post, intimidating, giving ‘fair warning’ and terrorising the recipients. These victims were sometimes landlords, land agents and land grabbers. Equally, they could be small farmers disputing land occupancy with neighbours. This book examines the nature, extent and context of this unusual trend. It investigates who sent threatening letters and why they sent them. It also delves into who received such unwelcome correspondence and what action they took, giving new insights particularly into 19th-century rural Ireland.