the crown to have "complete authority over the Curragh and to prevent, if possible, the vice and misery which now infects the place".

He tells of their "common look" and "hard depravity" and how they "existed in and by rebelling against society".

Charles Dickens twice commissioned pieces about them for his magazine, All the Year Round. Most famously, there was the work of James Greenwood, a journalist who spent time with the women before writing a series and pamphlet about them for London's Pall Mall Gazette.

There were also accounts of gang rapes by soldiers, and tales of terrible drunkenness among the women themselves.

I knew they'd been stoned and beaten off the streets in surrounding towns. That in Newbridge a priest had "torn the thin shawl and gown" from a Wren before flogging her bare shoulders with his riding whip "until the blood spurted onto his boots". All without a voice in the watching crowd raised in protest. I'd read how another priest made a practice of pouncing with a scissors on Wrens who ventured into the towns and "cutting their hair close to the head". That the only local shop to serve them was owned by a widow, but that they were allowed attend the market held in the army camp twice a week. That the British army sent water wagons out to them twice a week.

Their number included unmarried mothers, free-thinkers, alcoholics, prostitutes, vagrants, ex-convicts and harvest workers. All of them women who had, in one way or another, put themselves beyond the pale of respectable society. They shared everything, even children, living by what they called "communistic principles". Many chose to be Wrens because of the relative dignity and control it offered over their lives. Many others saw life on the Curragh as infinitely preferable to the workhouse.

Songbirds on society's margins