Hi Lou, Personally I have heard of both, but I don't know if they go hand in hand.... Automatically when I hear Orange or Orangmen I think Ireland, and the parades of July 12th that are held in Ireland that can be quite volatile, ie...Protestant vs. Catholic......something to do with King William 3rd. also known as William of Orange! I don't know much about either so perhaps someone who is more in the know of the two can answer your question, I found this online and am cutting and pasting for you to read..... Christine ____________________________________________________________________________ ______________ IRISH JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, VOL 3 1998, pp. 97-102 Reviews Neil Jarman. Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland. Oxford and New York: Berg 1997. Pp x + 290 photographs, bibliography and index. ISBN 1 85973 124 4 Cloth; 1 85973 129 5 paper. In a year when parades have been the focus for major controversy, Neil Jarman could scarcely have chosen a better moment to publish a study of parades. His book gives an account of parades for the last 300 years, drawn mainly from the Belfast and Dublin newspapers. He buttresses this with ethnographic field research, mainly in Belfast, and he looks at the visual accoutrements of parades, the banners, arches and murals. In the eighteenth century, he argues, processions by the great and the good were intended to impress the lower classes with their might and majesty. Both the state and the city corporations held regular processions, as did, from the 1720s, the Order of Freemasons. In the later eighteenth century, parades became a major feature of the Volunteer militias, and more generally they became part of popular culture. Important to this evolving picture was the figure of King William. From soon after the victory at the Boyne, Williamite anniversaries provided occasions for stately perambulation. By the mid-eighteenth century, King William was a popular figure, for example, giving the title "Orange" to Belfast"s Masonic lodge. This symbolism was unfortunately dogged by a deadly ambiguity. For the Establishment, and no doubt for Belfast"s Freemasons, King William was the opponent of Catholic absolutism, champion of constitutional, almost republican freedoms. But for many in Ireland, William symbolised defeat and repression. Despairing of William"s capacity symbolically to unify the population, Dublin Castle eventually tried to divert the population towards celebrating St Patrick on 17 March. By 1822, therefore, processions on St Patrick"s Day, were a well-established custom, and King William had become simply a Protestant hero. With the foundation of the Orange Order in 1795, processions commemorating King William became more popular, especially among the rural Protestant poor. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, not only Orangemen, but also Ribbonmen and Freemasons held processions, each of them trying, sometimes with violence, to discourage the processions of their rivals. For long periods in the nineteenth century, parading was declared illegal, and it was not until 1872 that the right to process was finally established. From 1872, Orange Order processions lost at least some of their casual violence and became a more formalised and stolid expression of Protestant solidarity against the threat of Home Rule. They were popular not only among the working classes but also among the middle class and gentry. Such was the appeal of the Orange Order that after partition in 1921, the Twelfth of July became virtually a state occasion celebrating the dominance of a Protestant people in a Protestant state. Protestant opposition to the Twelfth, found not among only sections of the middle class and gentry but also importantly among fundamentalists, remained muted. After a heyday between the wars, the popularity of the loyal orders sank somewhat, and it took the Troubles of the late 1960s to revive their fortunes. The book also considers the parades of Catholic and nationalists, from those of the Ribbonmen in the early nineteenth century, through the more conservative Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Irish National Foresters at the end of the century, to the Republican parades of the present day. These processions, he says, were confined by Protestant mobs and authorities alike to geographical areas of Catholic preponderance. He also examines in tantalizing brevity the parades of the Freemasons whom he sees as a fading but worthy beacon of non-sectarianism. And he looks at the Civil Rights marches of the late 1960s. The book looks rather exclusively at controversial parades, especially those of nationalists and loyalists, and one wonders if this does not somewhat distort the picture. In the late 1840s, at a temporary restoration of the legality of parading, he gives a glimpse of the processions of the "Freemasons, Ribbonmen, Thrashers or Repealers," the Belfast Teetotal Societies, the Independent Tent of Rechabites, Dr Spratt's Teetotalers and Father Mathew's Benevolent Society." By the Great War, however, this trickle of parading bodies had become a river. Now there were Shepherds, Good Templars, Boys Brigade, Catch My Pal, Catholic sodalities, trade unions and countless others. One would like to have seen more of a mention of these groups. Why, for example, is there no mention of the great Corpus Christi processions which annually halted the traffic in Belfast"s Falls Road? Orange processions may have been the most conspicuous of Ulster"s parades, but they were also the least typical. Jarman considers how processions, arches and murals are used to define territory. Arches­­early ones were floral and sometimes consisted of little more than a string of flowers across a road­­were widely used at both official and non-official demonstrations in Ireland from at least the eighteenth century. Interestingly, he sees the painting of murals­­which began in Belfast in the early twentieth century­­as an extension of that of building arches. Both arches and murals, he says, define a territory ethnically, and in some cases, therefore, the raising of an arch or the painting of a mural has been an occasion for riot. Looking at the territorial significance of the parades themselves, he relies on ethnographic observation especially on Belfast's Sandy Row. Not only do parades give definition to contentious areas, but also they create a symbolic unification of the "county" as the diverse lodges and districts come together in a single unified parade. He suggests that the cycle of Orange parades over a period of years symbolically defines the whole province as both united and Protestant, since scarcely a town or village is excluded from at least an occasional Orange procession. Perhaps this analysis makes an over-simple assumption that to parade through an area implies that the area "belongs" to the people who parade. Processions of Boy Scouts, for example, have taken place annually in most Ulster towns and villages for much of this century. But if an Orange procession defines a territory as "belonging" to the Protestants, why does not a procession of Boy Scouts define an area as "belonging" to the Scouts? Another aspect of the processions is religion. This is discussed most closely in a very thorough analysis of different kinds of banner. It might have been good to see more mention of the rituals which gives so much meaning to what is displayed on banners, arches and murals. It would have been good too to have seen a fuller description of the qualitative difference between the Twelfth of July processions and the more sober "church parades." At least some of the heat generated over disputed parades in 1996-97 arose from attempts to stop church parades which Orangemen have seldom seen as triumphalist or territory-defining. It is easy, however, to quibble over a topic so familiar and controversial. Jarman"s book gives an excellent account of the controversial parades of Ireland, showing how the pattern of parading has changed quite drastically over three hundred years. His study is important for it shows how parades are not an immutable part of "Ulster tradition," but that they have been subject to change. Anthony D Buckley Ulster Folk and Transport Museum > > > > ==== SCOTS-IN-CANADA Mailing List ==== > Whoever said "seek and ye shall find" was not a genealogist! > > ============================== > To join Ancestry.com and access our 1.2 billion online genealogy records, go to: > http://www.ancestry.com/rd/redir.asp?targetid=571&sourceid=1237 >