Ribbonman

Ribbonman 

a member of the secret conspiratorial peasant societies that were active in Ireland during the 19th century up to the 1870’s.

A green ribbon served as the Ribbonmen’s emblem. The movement, whose participants were, for the most part, the lower strata of the peasantry (small-scale tenant farmers, farm laborers, and day laborers), reflected a protest by the peasant masses against enslaving forms of exploitation, forced expulsion from the land, and tax extortions. The Ribbonmen were harshly persecuted by the British authorities and were outlawed by an act of 1871. In the 1870’s the Ribbonmen movement was supplanted by forms of struggle among the Irish peasants that were more massive and better organized.