The Irish Yeomanry was a voluntary, part-time military force raised in 1796 for local law-and-order duties, with the potential for full military service during invasion or insurrection. It consisted of locally organised corps of up to 100 men serving under commissioned officers, paid, armed and equipped by government. The Irish Yeomanry and Orange Order are popularly associated to the extent of being semantically linked in songs: for example, one ballad claims that the Orangeman:
Prays for peace, yet war will face,
Should rebels congregate;
Like the brave Orange Yeomanry
Who fought in Ninety-eight.
The primary sources apparently corroborate this with much evidence of ostentatiously ‘Orange’ displays by yeomen. On 12 July 1797 eight Catholic Kerry militiamen were killed in Stewartstown, County Tyrone, in a brawl with yeomen and Orangemen after a militiaman seized an Orange cockade. At Hillsborough in October 1798 ‘a party of Yeoman Infantry (calling themselves Orangemen) beat a number of poor Papists out of the market’. Yet to automatically accept the received view on the ‘Orange yeomanry’ risks anachronistical determining cause by consequence.