collection had
been begun by Greene, but it was mainly the work of Boyce. The first
volume appeared in 1760 and the last in 1778. On the 7th of February
1779 Boyce died from an attack of gout. He was buried under the dome of
St Paul's cathedral.

BOYCOTT, the refusal and incitement to refusal to have commercial or
social dealings with any one on whom it is wished to bring pressure. As
merely a form of "sending to Coventry" or (in W.E. Gladstone's phrase)
"exclusive dealing," boycotting may be, from a legal point of view,
unassailable, and as such has frequently been justified by its original
political inventors. But in practice it has usually taken the form of
what is undoubtedly an illegal conspiracy to injure the person, property
or business of another by unwarrantably putting pressure on all and
sundry to withdraw from him their social or business intercourse. The
word was first used in Ireland, and was derived from the name of Captain
Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832-1897), agent for the estates of the
earl of Erne in Co. Mayo. For refusing in 1880 to receive rents at
figures fixed by the tenants, Captain Boycott had his life threatened,
his servants compelled to leave him, his fences torn down, his letters
intercepted and his food supplies interfered with. It took a force of
900 soldiers to protect the Ulster Orangemen ("Emergency Men") who
succeeded finally in getting in his crops. He was hooted and mobbed in
the streets, and hanged and burnt in effigy. The system of boycotting
was an essential part of the Irish Nationalist "Plan of Campaign," and
was dealt with under the Crimes Act of 1887. The term soon came into
common English use, and was speedily adopted by the French, Germans,
Dutch and Russians. In the United States this method of "persuasion" was
taken up by the trade unions about 1886, an employer who refused their
demands being brought to terms by a combination to refuse to buy his
product or do his work, or to deal with any who did. Various cases have
occurred in America in which labour organizations have pronounced such a
boycott against a firm; and its illegal nature has been established in
the law-courts, notably in the case of the Bucks Stove Company v. The
American Federation of Labor (1907) in the Supreme Court of the district
of Columbia, and in a suit against the Hatters' Union (February 1908) in
the U.S. Supreme Court. A boycott has also been held by the U.S. Supreme
Court to be a violati