After the 16th and 17th century dispossession,
emigration, and
outlawry of the
Irish clan chiefs and the loss of their
patronage, the teachers and students of the schools that for centuries had trained composers of
Irish bardic poetry adapted, according to
Daniel Corkery, by becoming teachers at secret and illegal
Catholic schools, which doubled as
minor seminaries for the increasingly illegal and underground
Catholic Church in Ireland. While the "hedge school" label suggests the classes took place next to a
hedgerow, when the
Penal Laws were relaxed, classes were normally held in a house or a barn. Payment was generally made to teachers per subject, and bright pupils would often compete locally with their teachers, or even be smuggled to Mainland Europe, for
Catholic higher education at one of the
Irish Colleges. Subjects included the reading, writing, and grammar of both the
Irish and
English languages, and
maths (the fundamental "
three Rs"). In some schools, the Irish
bardic poetry,
local history and
home economics were also taught. In
Munster especially,
Greek and
Latin were also taught. In
Westminster a parliamentarian complained '
I do not wish to see children [in Ireland]
educated like the inhabitants [of Munster]
, where the young peasants of Kerry run about in rags with a Cicero or Virgil under their arms". Reading was often taught using
chapbooks, sold at village fairs and typically filled with exciting stories of well-known
rapparees, many of whom were outlawed members of the
Gaelic nobility of Ireland who still held to the
code of conduct of the
traditional chiefs of the
Irish clans. While all Catholic education was forbidden under the penal laws from 1723 to 1782, no hedge teachers are known to have been prosecuted. The penal laws particularly targeted
Catholic schools run by
religious orders, whose property was routinely confiscated. The laws were intended to force
Irish Catholics of all classes to convert to the Protestant
Church of Ireland if they wanted a decent education. Historians agree that the hedge schools provided education, occasionally at a very high level, for up to 400,000 students by the mid-1820s. J. R. R. Adams says the hedge schools testified “to the strong desire of ordinary Irish people to see their children receive some sort of education”. Antonia McManus argues that there “can be little doubt that Irish parents set a high value on a hedge school education and made enormous sacrifices to secure it for their children....[the hedge schoolteacher was] one of their own”. Formal schools for Catholics under trained teachers began to appear after 1800.
Edmund Ignatius Rice (1762–1844) founded two religious institutes of religious brothers: the
Congregation of Christian Brothers and the
Presentation Brothers. Both opened numerous schools, which were visible, legal and standardized. Discipline was notably strict. Hedge schools declined from the foundation of the
national school system by the British government in the 1830s. Most of the Catholic bishops preferred the new system, as the new schools would be largely under the control of the Catholic Church and would allow formalized teaching of Catholic doctrine.
James Doyle, Bishop of
Kildare and Leighlin, wrote to his priests in 1831: A study of hedge schools by Yolanda Fernández-Suárez of the
University of Burgos found that hedge schools existed into the 1890s and suggested that the schools existed as much from
rural poverty and a lack of resources as from religious oppression. After 1900, historians such as
Daniel Corkery tended to emphasise the hedge schools' classical studies (in
Latin and
Greek). Those studies were sometimes taught (based on a local demand) but not in every school. Fernández-Suárez quoted a Board of Education inspector visiting a school in 1835: ==In popular culture==