The Riddle of Peggy Mountain: Regulation of Irish Women’s Sexuality on the Southern Avalon, 1750-1860
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A STRIKING SCENE FROM THE LIFE of an Irish-Newfoundland woman, Peggy Mountain, emerges in the court records of the southern Avalon and the diary of a local magistrate. In early December 1834, Peggy brought her husband, Michael, before the local magistrates at Ferryland for desertion. She was pregnant and the court ordered that Michael support Peggy and the expected baby during the winter; arrangements would be made with a Patrick Welsh to take her into his home at Michael’s expense. Michael initially indicated his willingness to comply “as well as his ability would allow”, but the very next day, he reneged on his promise “by order of [Catholic parish priest] Father [Timothy] Browne”. Michael held his ground, even when the magistrates ordered that he be put in jail for contempt and kept on bread and water for a month. Meanwhile, Peggy was temporarily placed at a local public house, but Father Browne, “under threat of the highest nature he could inflict”, ordered her removed and, as there was no other accommodation available, the justices housed her in the local jail. Magistrate Robert Carter, Jr., was taken aback by the activities of Father Browne and wrote in his diary: “The Priest is inveterate against a poor unfortunate female under his displeasure and against whom he appears to direct his greatest malice and enmity. . . . How such conduct will end let time decide”. Matters came to a head rather quickly. Peggy was very ill and the jailer reported that there were no coals for heating her cell. The priest did not relent and continued to speak out against Peggy in the chapel and wrote an open letter against her that was read publicly at the jailhouse. In the meantime, the local magistrates arranged for a Mrs. Cahill to attend Peggy in the jail. Peggy finally gave birth to a daughter on a night so cold that the ink froze in Carter’s office and the bread froze in his storeroom. The child survived only a few hours. Peggy was then moved to Mrs. Cahill’s house, but again, the priest ordered that she be removed. Finally, magistrate Carter himself took her in. Several days later, Peggy left for St. John’s in the Water Lily and slipped quietly out of the annals of the southern Avalon.1
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".