they were, having been
destroyed and laid in ruins, they were necessarily driven to seek
shelter in the woods, caves, and other fastnesses of the country, from
which they issued forth in desperate hordes, armed as well as they
could, to rob and to plunder for the very means of life. Goaded by
hunger and distress of every kind, those formidable and ferocious "wood
kernes" only paid the country back, by inflicting on it that plunder
and devastation which they had received at its hands. Neither is it
surprising that they should make no distinction in their depredations,
because they experienced, to their cost, that no "hosting," on either
or any side, ever made a distinction with them. Whatever hand was
uppermost, whether in the sanguinary struggles of their rival chiefs, or
in those between the Irish and English, or Anglo-Irish, the result was
the same to them. If they were not robbed or burned out to-day, they
might be to-morrow; and under such circumstances to what purpose could
they be expected to exercise industrious or laborious habits, when they
knew that they might go to bed in comfort at night, and rise up beggars
in the morning? It is easy to see, then, that it was the lawless and
turbulent state of the country that reduced them to such a mode of life,
and drove them to make reprisals upon the property of others, in the
absence of any safe or systematic way of living. There is no doubt that
a principle of revenge and retaliation animated their proceedings, and
that they stood accountable for acts of great cruelty and murder, as
well as of robbery. The consequence necessarily was, that they felt
themselves beyond the protection of all law, and fearfully distinct in
the ferocity of their character from the more civilized population of
the country, which waged an exterminating warfare against them under the
sanction and by the assistance of whatever government existed.

It was about the year 1689 that they began to assume or to be
characterized by a different designation--we mean that of rapparees; so
called, it is said, from the fact of their using the half pike or short
rapier; although, for our part, we are inclined to think that they were
so termed from the word _rapio_, to plunder, which strikes us as the
most appropriate and obvious. At all events it is enough to say that the
_tories_ were absorbed in the rapparees, and their name in Ireland and
Great Britain, except as a political class, was forgotten and lost