Davitt

also Mac Dáibhéid

The Mayo cottier family that came back from Lancashire to found the Land League.

Territory of Davitt

The seat of Davitt

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What does the Davitt name mean?

From the Gaelic *Mac Dáibhéid*, son of Dáibhéad (the Irish form of David). The Davitts were a Mayo-Irish-Catholic landholding family of the western county whose Catholic-tenant line was largely dispossessed in the eighteenth-century Penal Laws. The most famous bearer, Michael Davitt, was the son of an evicted Mayo cottier family who emigrated to Lancashire in the famine years and grew up in Haslingden.

The history of Davitt

The Davitts of Straide in central County Mayo were a Catholic small-tenant family on the lands of the Earl of Lucan in the early nineteenth century. In November 1850 the family was evicted from their cottage by the crowbar brigade of the local landlord agent, and emigrated to industrial Lancashire. The young Michael Davitt (1846–1906), four years old at the eviction, grew up in Haslingden, lost his right arm in a cotton-mill accident at age eleven, and rose through the Manchester Fenian movement of the 1860s into seven years of penal servitude at Dartmoor (1870–1877) for arms-running.

On his release in 1877, Davitt returned to Mayo and to organising work; in October 1879 at Castlebar he convened the founding meeting of the National Land League of Ireland, with himself as Honorary Secretary and Charles Stewart Parnell as President. The Land War of 1879–82 followed: the most successful tenant-farmer political movement in modern European history, securing the Land Acts of 1881 and 1903 which together transferred Irish land ownership from the Anglo-Irish landlord class to the Catholic tenant majority over the following thirty years.

Davitt served as Member of Parliament for North Meath in 1892 and for South Mayo from 1895 to 1899, resigning his seat in protest against the Boer War. He toured South Africa as a journalist for *Freeman's Journal* during the war. He was, by the assessment of every Irish labour historian, the principal political teacher of the Irish Catholic working-class of the late nineteenth century, the man who made the land question the founding question of modern Irish politics.

Notable bearers of the Davitt name

Michael Davitt (1846–1906), founder of the Irish National Land League

Stories of Davitt

Davitt at Irishtown
1879
On the afternoon of Sunday the twentieth of April 1879, in the small village of Irishtown on the border between Counties Mayo and Galway, on the western edge of the Plains of Mayo, Michael Davitt, thirty-two years old, the Mayo-emigrant Fenian who had served seven years' penal servitude at Dartmoor between 1870 and 1877 and who had spent the previous eighteen months organising tenant-farmer protest meetings across the western counties, convened the land meeting that is, by the careful judgment of every Irish historian since R. F. Foster, the founding event of the Irish Land War. Eight thousand tenant-farmers and small-holders from the surrounding parishes (and, by the tradition, several thousand more who could not get into the small village square) gathered to protest the impending eviction of forty cottier families by the Catholic priest Canon Geoffrey Bourke of Knock parish, who was the local landlord. The meeting was the first sustained public protest against a Catholic landlord by Catholic tenants in the nineteenth-century Irish countryside, and the political shock-effect (a Mayo-Catholic priest, in a Catholic county, faced by his own parishioners) was the moment the Land War became politically possible. Six months later, on the twenty-first of October 1879, Davitt founded the National Land League of Ireland at Castlebar with Parnell as President.
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Frequently asked

What does the surname Davitt mean?

Where does the Davitt family come from?

The Davitt family was historically based in Connacht in Ireland, in particular Mayo.

Who are some famous Davitts?

Notable bearers of the Davitt name include Michael Davitt (1846–1906), founder of the Irish National Land League.

Is Mac Dáibhéid the same family as Davitt?

Yes. Mac Dáibhéid is historical spelling variants of the Davitt name. They share the same lineage and clan affiliation.