Dungannon, United Kingdom

As part of the Plantation, in 1608 James I chartered a number of '"free schools" for the sons of local merchants and farmers. This included the Royal School Dungannon, established in the town in 1636, and from 1789 occupying its present site, south-east of Castle Hill, with the erection of a building known locally as the "Old Grey Mother" by the Archbishop of Armagh, Richard Robinson.

Sir Phelim O'Neill seized the town in the opening stages of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, and issued the Proclamation of Dungannon, in which the rebels set out their aims and proclaimed their loyalty to Charles I. O'Neill claimed they had been ordered to rise by the King, and later produced a forged commission in support of this.

During the course of the Irish Confederate Wars, Dungannon changed hands several times; Scots Covenanter forces under Alexander Leslie captured it in September 1642, before O'Neill took it back in spring 1643.

In 1689, during the Williamite War, Castle Hill, with still extant fortifications, was occupied by a Jacobite force, and hosted King James II as he passed en route to the Siege of Derry. In 2007, the castle was partially excavated by the Channel 4 archaeological show Time Team, uncovering part of the moat and walls of the castle.

In 1782, as the "most central town of Ulster", Dungannon was chosen as the site for a convention of the Volunteers. Initially formed for defence against the French in the American War of Independence, the Volunteers had increasingly been agitated by the same kinds of grievances driving rebellion among their kinsmen in America (among them, local emigrants who, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, had established the township of Dungannon, Virginia).

Delegates from 147 Volunteer corps assembled at the Presbyterian church on Scotch Street, previously favoured as a meeting place for the Presbyterian Synod of Ulster. Taking on "the substance of a national assembly", the Convention resolved that the right asserted by the British Crown to overrule the Irish Parliament in Dublin, and to legislate for Ireland from Westminster, was "unconstitutional" and "illegal".

Two further Volunteer conventions were held in Dungannon, in 1783 and 1793. In the context, of debating reform of the Irish parliament, the Volunteers divided over the question of Catholic emancipation, Protestants alone having the right to vote, to assume office and to carry arms. They also divided on the question of parliamentary reform. The Protestants of Dungannon had no elected representation as the town was one of Ireland's many pocket boroughs. Its MP was the nominee of its proprietor, Thomas Knox, 1st Viscount Northland.

Local veterans of Volunteer movement broke into two camps; those who joined the new-formed Orangemen, sworn to uphold the Protestant Ascendancy, in forming a loyal yeomanry, and those who, having taken the United Irish oath "to obtain an equal, full and adequate representation of all the people of Ireland", began raiding the homesteads of these yeomen to procure arms and gunpowder.

Martial law imposed on the area from January 1797, broke the local United Irish organisation. The rebellion in the summer of 1798, which saw risings in counties Antrim and Down, was chiefly marked in Dungannon by courts martial in which United Irishmen were sentenced to floggings and to penal transportation.

The town in which the Volunteers had gathered, was still largely a settlement of thatched houses. But by 1802, a surveyor for the Dublin Society was able to describe it as "one of the most prosperous towns in the North of Ireland in the linen trade," and as "inferior" to no other "for its rapid progress in building". In the 1820s and 30s, buyers for the bleachers would come from Belfast every Thursday and take their places on the "standings" on the east side of Market Square where the farmers brought their "webs" of raw, unbleached linen woven by their families and servants.

In 1842, following the application to Ireland of the new English Poor Law system of Workhouses (an alternative to outdoor relief, that made it easier for landlords to clear their estates in favour of larger English-export-oriented farms), a Workhouse was built in Dungannon. Until its closure in 1948, about 1000 people passed through its doors. A memorial on the former site, now the grounds of the South Tyrone Hospital, commemorates "all those who sought shelter" within its walls. This includes the victims of the Great Famine and the attendant cholera and typhus. Among these were the "Irish Famine Orphan Girls", a group of young women sent from the workhouse to Australia between 1848 and 1850.