Talk:Battle of the Big Cross

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Military history: British / European

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"treat the locals as harshly as possible"[edit]

Sourcing: problems of citation, reliability and (more important?) quotation and interpretation: The article doesn't cite sources - doesn't even have a References section. The top - (maybe the body too?) - relies heavily on a source listed in the External links, The Battle of the Big Cross where one hundred Irish died. There has to be some doubt how reliable we would consider this source, and better sources should clearly be used if findable.

Meanwhile, the article misquotes Moore (as quoted in the source). That is, the source quotes Moore as follows.

"My orders to the soldiers." wrote Moore, "were to treat people with as much harshness as possible as far as words and manners went and to supply themselves with whatever provisions were needed to enable them to live well."

The article misrepresents this, as follows.

Moore issued orders for his troops to treat the locals as harshly as possible

It seems very possible (from the continuing context about provisions for living well for a period of three weeks, and from Moore's reputation in Spain and elsewhere) tht Moore's words "as far as words and manners went" were words of limitation - so that the overall meaning was something like "make it clear by how you talk to them tht they're a subject population: but your actions must be appropriate and there's to be no looting".

What actually happened on the ground, and whether this is indeed how Moore was directing his troops, are issues to explore if possible. (It's British behaviour in Ireland tht we're talking about here!) But at present our article goes well beyond the Wikipedia remit of collating good sources and presenting an encyclopaedic review to the general reader.

Can anyone fix?

-- SquisherDa (talk) 05:49, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Have done a little work on this. At least there is now a reference section. will put in more citations from some of those refs later hopefully. In relation to the source whose reliability you queried, I knew the writer. He was a well-respected local historian (though almost anyone will be relying on handed-down local knowledge in relation to this) and the publication was the local regional paper.Aineireland (talk) 19:01, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]