Ten thousand pounds to protect roughly three hundred and fifty pounds' worth of turnips. That was the final accounting of the state's intervention at Lough Mask House in November 1880 — nearly nine hundred soldiers and police, fifty volunteers marched in under armed escort, all mobilized to bring in a harvest worth less than four percent of what it cost to save it. The absurdity of that ledger was not an accident or a miscalculation. It was where an escalating, entirely nonviolent isolation campaign had pushed the British state by the time it was finished, and it started with something much smaller: Charles Cunningham Boycott, land agent at Lough Mask House on the shore of Lough Mask in County Mayo since 1873, collecting rent for John Crichton, third Earl of Erne, on roughly 1,500 acres worked by about 120 tenant families. The arrangement paid him well — five hundred pounds a year plus ten percent of everything he collected — and asked little of him beyond enforcing terms the tenants had no legal standing to negotiate: no security of tenure, no compensation for any improvement they made to land they didn't own, no real means of resisting a rent increase. The late 1870s had brought repeated bad harvests. In September 1880, after another failed season, Erne's tenants asked for a twenty-five percent rent abatement. Erne offered ten. The tenants refused it, and Boycott, following his instructions, began issuing eviction notices against those already behind.
On September 22, 1880, a process-server arrived at Lough Mask with an RIC escort to serve the writs. A crowd of local women met him on the road and drove him off with stones, mud, and manure. Not one eviction notice was successfully served that day. The following morning, roughly a hundred people arrived at Boycott's farm and told his employees — labourers, herders, stable boys, and house staff alike — to stop working for him. Every one of them did. Within days the campaign had spread past the farm gate: shopkeepers in nearby Ballinrobe were warned against serving Boycott at all, and he found himself, a man earning five hundred pounds a year, unable to buy bread in the town he had lived in for seven years. No one laid a hand on him. The tactic — organized, total, and entirely nonviolent — was itself new enough that no settled English word yet existed for what was being done to him.
The standoff drew in outside actors on both sides. Michael Davitt's Irish National Land League, founded the previous October specifically to fight for fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale — the "Three Fs" — had encouraged exactly this kind of isolation campaign as an alternative to agrarian violence, and Boycott's case became its proof of concept. On the other side, in November, Captain Somerset Maxwell organized roughly fifty Protestant volunteers from Counties Cavan and Monaghan to travel to Mayo and bring in Boycott's harvest by force of numbers. They walked from Claremorris railway station to Lough Mask in driving rain, since no local driver would carry them, and were housed in tents on the lawn, in barns, and in the boathouse under the protection of nearly nine hundred soldiers and police stationed around Ballinrobe and the Neale for the two weeks it took to finish the work. When the volunteers marched back to the station on November 26, the roads that had jeered them on the way in were empty; a Belfast newspaper reporter called the silence itself remarkable.
What they had protected, at that cost, was a harvest historians have since valued at somewhere near three hundred and fifty pounds — turnips and whatever else stood ready to be brought in. The bill for the soldiers, police, and volunteers came to roughly ten thousand pounds, on the order of thirty times what the crop itself was worth. It was not, on any ledger, a rational transaction. It was a state spending whatever it took to prove that isolation alone could not be allowed to defeat a landlord's authority — and losing that argument anyway, since the amount it cost to make the point was itself the story every newspaper in Britain and Ireland ran with.
One detail from the campaign's own aftermath is worth keeping in view. The day before the volunteers' departure, Father John O'Malley, a local Land League leader, posted placards around Ballinrobe addressed to the "Men of Mayo," commending them for having "manfully" upheld the cause and instructing them to let the Orangemen and the army leave the county unmolested. The address made no mention of the women who had actually turned back the process-server on September 22 and forced the confrontation's opening move — the same women whose names appear nowhere in the placard commemorating a victory they had started. Boycott himself left Lough Mask that December, quietly, in an army ambulance wagon escorted by a troop of the 19th Hussars. The Times of London had already begun using his surname as a common verb for organized social and economic isolation, and that word would outlast every other detail of the dispute that produced it — including the names of the women who made the word necessary in the first place.