Peep o' Day Boys

Originally noted as being an agrarian society around 1779–80, from 1785 it became the Protestant component of the sectarian conflict that emerged in County Armagh, their rivals being the Catholic Defenders.

[5][7] In a sign that tension over the linen trade was still a burning issue, 'Wreckers' continued the Peep o' Day Boys strategy of smashing looms and tearing webs in Catholic homes to eliminate competition.

He described it as "a persecution conceived in the bitterness of bigotry—carried on with the most ferocious barbarity by a banditti, who, being of the religion of the state, had committed, with greater audacity and confidence the most horrid murders, and had proceeded from robbery and massacre to extermination!

[5] Blacker, one of the very few landed gentry to join the farmer-weaver dominated Order at the onset, and later its first Grand Master of County Armagh, would suggest that no 'wrecker' or Peep o' Day Boy was ever admitted into the Orange Institution.

[4][7] It is possible that some members of the Orange Order were involved,[5] for in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of the Diamond, Blacker described his disapproval of the outcome of the battle: "Unhappily... A determination was expressed to drive from this quarter of the county the entire of its Roman Catholic population... A written notice was thrown into or posted upon the door of a house warning the inmates, in the words of Oliver Cromwell, to betake themselves 'to Hell or Connaught'".