The Law of Captain Rock

Abstract

This chapter examines the threatening letter as a form of potential brutal social control and a manifestation of alternative law, or ‘legal parallelism', during the Rockite disturbances of the 1820s. The author focuses on 135 instances of these threatening letters and notices gathered in Dublin Castle during investigations to paint a picture of charivari Irelandaise, rough music, or community justice of sorts. The chapter reads these protest and threats through the prisms of Mikhail Bakhtin and Antoni Gramsci, with authority challenged, but not threatened; with the dissolving of legal protection of customary rights being questioned, but not the law itself.