THE term 'penal days' is usually taken to refer to the period after the Williamite wars which witnessed the introduction of repressive legislation against Roman Catholics and Presbyterians by the Establishment.
In Ulster, however, the penal times could be said to have begun after the Plantation at the beginning of the 17th century and to have lasted with varying degrees of intensity well into the 18th century.
Even before that date, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, there had been sporadic persecution, but the Tudors were seldom able to exert their power completely throughout Ireland, although since the time of Henry VIII the Protestant Church of Ireland was the Established Church and those who did not worship under its aegis were liable to fines and imprisonment.
King James, on his accession to the throne in 1603, appointed Protestant bishops to all the Ulster sees and these in turn set about taking over the previously Roman Catholic churches and dioceses in order to create an Anglicised Protestant Church.
The Catholic Church went 'underground' to avoid persecution, and reliable information regarding where the people worshipped is extremely hard to come by.
Occasionally, the veil is lifted, and we get brief glimpses of what life for the dispossessed was like, and when we add to this what has been handed down by tradition, travellers' tales and folk memory, a reasonably reliable picture begins to emerge.
James I of England, though he was the son of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, was no friend of the Catholics of Ireland.
Persecution during his reign was intermittent, but those churches which had survived the ravages of the Tudor wars were taken over by the Established Church of which he was head, and the Catholics were forced to find alternative places of worship as best they could.
The majority Roman Catholic Church was an outcast church, territorially rootless and without any material resources.
It is clear from the few available references that the Catholics at this time resorted to remote, out-of-the-way places, where they would be unlikely to attract the attention of unsympathetic officials and a hostile soldiery.
A directive issued by the Synod of Armagh in 1614 gives some idea of what conditions may have been like, and the fact that it was felt necessary to condemn certain practices is an indication of what were the prevailing conditions at that time.
The edict forbade the saying of Mass in places that were smoky or fetid, that contained the stalls of animals or were otherwise dirty or in dark or gloomy places.
Where the congregation was large, Mass was sometimes said in the open air and, in those cases, an attempt was made to protect the altar from wind and rain and from any dirt that might fall on it, and to secure a reasonably level site.
Given the inclemency and unpredictability of the Irish climate, such sites as were used must have been far from ideal, yet they remained as the most common sites where Mass was celebrated for at least another 150 years.
It is probable also that Mass would have been said in private houses in the parish. The kitchen table would have been pressed into service as an altar, and the priest celebrated Mass in lay dress, sometimes still clad in riding-boots and spurs, so that if danger threatened, he could be quickly spirited away to safety.
Periods of political unrest, rebellion or warfare inevitably led to an upsurge in religious persecution. The 1641 rebellion almost succeeded in wiping out the Ulster Plantation, but the initial optimism inspired by the victories of Eoghan Roe proved a false dawn.
Bishop Heber McMahon's active involvement with the native Irish cause, his eventual capture and execution and the triumph of Cromwellian arms left the way open once again for persecution.
Thousands of the native Irish were transported to the Caribbean as indentured servants. Catholics at home reverted to the status of a hunted and dispossessed people, forced to forsake their temporary places of worship, and celebrate the Eucharist once again at open-air sites.
Indeed, it is likely that the traditions of local 'Mass rocks' belong to this period rather than the opening decades of the 18th century.
Archbishop Edmond O'Reilly of Armagh, writing of this era, reported that he had made for himself small huts in mountainous districts, one here and another there, so that his flock would not be put in danger.
Conditions did not appear to have improved much when Bishop Patrick Duffy of the Diocese of Clogher, writing as late as 1674, a decade and a half after the Stuart King Charles II had been restored to the throne of England, stated: "I do not dare to appear in public, but lie low in the mountains and bogs."
Priests celebrated Mass and administered the sacraments and visited the sick at night. They would hear confessions until about midnight and then offer Mass.
The traditional picture – and it is often a romanticised and inaccurate one – is of the priest celebrating Mass on an improvised altar in a cave or some other secluded place, while scouts stationed at strategic places kept watch.
The numbers attending such services were probably small so as not to draw attention to themselves or risk the capture and possible imprisonment or banishment of the priest in their midst.
The defeat of the Jacobite armies at the end of the Williamite wars ushered in a fresh wave of persecution when the Protestant Ascendancy passed a series of draconian penal laws.
Though they were not always strictly enforced, they hung like a sword of Damocles over the Catholic and Dissenter population for the next hundred years.
It would take the coming of the Liberator, Daniel O'Connell, before the last of the penal laws was abolished with the passage of Catholic Emancipation in 1829.
Frank Rogers is the author of The Story of Ireland in Stained Glass and The History of the Convent Chapel, Enniskillen.
