Croppy
Croppy was a nickname given to Irish rebels fighting for independence from Britain during the 1798 Rising.Origin
The name "Croppy" used in Ireland in the 1790s was a reference to the closely cropped hair associated with the anti-powdered wig French revolutionaries of the period. Men with their hair cropped were automatically suspected of sympathies with the pro-French underground organisation the Society of United Irishmen, and were often seized by the British administration and its allies for interrogation; they were also subjected to torture via methods such as flogging, picketing and half-hanging. The contemporary torture known as pitchcapping, or An Caip Bháis in Irish, was specifically invented to intimidate Croppies. United Irish activists retaliated by cropping the hair of Ulster loyalists to reduce the reliability of this method of identifying their sympathisers .
