Beyond a reputation for colourful pageantry and, at times, rancorous expressions of rhetoric, what kind of organisation was the Orange Order? Most particularly, what kind of persons entered its ranks? Until now, a paucity of sources has prevented historians saying very much about the profile of Orangemen in England; but recently discovered manuscript membership details and the opening of the 1901 census offer us an opportunity to visit the character and composition of the movement and to do so in rather more detail than previously has been the case. More will be said, in the course of the present chapter, to support and develop the assertion made in the introduction that the Order in the far north of England was essentially an ethnic organisation comprised mostly of newcomers. We will see that, notwithstanding class imperatives of a mainly working-class constituency, and the importance of gender issues to the Order's sorority, the strong Irish element subsumed all other components. This remained so at least until the inter-war years.

The Order was a more complicated movement than historians have sometimes thought. It clearly cut across the fault lines of class, ethnicity and nationality, suggesting a hybrid of competing impulses and views. While the solidarity that marked out the Orangemen tends to be view primarily in sectarian terms, denoting a fracturing of class along ethnic lines, there was an element to the Order which was partly premised on class realities. Clubbing together, bonding through common work experience, living cheek-by-jowl in regimented terraced housing, sharing the exigencies of migration and unemployment, enjoying life and suffering death, clearly meant, for all these Orangemen, an association by class as well as ethnicity. In stressing the ethnic community-mindedness of Orangeism, we have to recognise that these assertions might very well apply only to the Orangeism we encounter in the north-east and Cumbria. We already know, for Liverpool and early-nineteenth-century Lancashire, that there was a strong Orange loyalist tradition among working men who were not Irish. But this is not what is uncovered in the case of the far north. Micro-histories of other regions’ Orange traditions could well lead to counter-claims and further evidence to support the Liverpool model, but what follows offers the clearest evidence yet of the internal shape and membership of Orange lodges in Britain during the period in question.