Chronicles: Chapter 11 - The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora | Quizlet

Absentee landlords

Property owners who did not live on their estates. They lived in Dublin or England and left the running of estates to stewards.

Black ’47

1847, the worst year of the Famine.

Blight

A fungus that rots potatoes in the ground and makes them inedible (not fit to eat).

Coffin ships

Name given to the ships that carried Famine-era Irish abroad, because so many starving passengers died on board.

Cottiers

Labourers who worked for a farmer in return for one acre of land. This system was called conacre.

Emigration

People leaving their own country to live abroad.

‘Famine fever’

Starving people died from diseases such as typhus, dysentery and cholera.

Irish Diaspora

All the Irish people and descendants of Irish people, who live outside Ireland.

Laissez faire

The belief that a government should intervene as little as possible in economic affairs.

Landless labourers

People who lived in one-roomed cabins on the outskirts of towns and villages and found work on other people's land (often when crops were either being sown or harvested).

Lazy beds

Parallel rows of earthen ridges used to grow potatoes.

Lumper potato

The most common type of potato grown in Ireland in the 1840s.

Peel’s brimstone

Name given to the corn (maize) imported by Robert Peel's government to feed the starving Irish. It was yellow like brimstone (sulphur), hard and unpalatable.

Public Works Act 1846

Provided employment for rural workers. Many worked on famine roads and piers.

Quakers

Set up soup kitchens in towns throughout Ireland.

Spalpeens

Wandering labourers.

Subsistence farming

Growing enough food to pay the rent and provide meals with almost nothing left over to sell.

Tenant farmers

People who rented the land they farmed. Most grew crops to pay rent, and potatoes to feed their own families.

Workhouse

A place where poor people could get food and shelter in return for their labour. Families were kept apart there, and conditions were terrible.