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Croppy


Croppy was a nickname given to Irish rebels fighting for independence from Britain during the 1798 Rising.

The name "Croppy" used in Ireland in the 1790s was a reference to the closely cropped hair associated with the anti-powdered wig (and therefore, anti-) French revolutionaries of the period. Men with their hair cropped were automatically suspected of sympathies with the pro-French underground organisation the Society of United Irishmen, and were seized by the British administration and its allies for interrogation and often subjected to torture by flogging, picketing and half-hanging. The contemporary torture known as pitchcapping, or in Irish An Caip Bháis was specifically invented to intimidate Croppies. United Irish activists retaliated by cropping the hair of loyalists to reduce the reliability of this method of identifying their sympathisers [1].


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