Flight of the Wild Geese

Not to be confused with the Flight of the Earls (1607) or the Fenian convicts' newspaper The Wild Goose (1867).

Uniform and colonel's flag of the Regiment of Hibernia in Spanish service, mid-eighteenth century
Portumna castle. Wild Geese heritage museum.

The Flight of the Wild Geese was the departure of an Irish Jacobite army under the command of Patrick Sarsfield from Ireland to France, as agreed in the Treaty of Limerick on 3 October 1691, following the end of the Williamite War in Ireland. More broadly, the term Wild Geese is used in Irish history to refer to Irish soldiers who left to serve in continental European armies in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.[1]

An earlier exodus in 1690, during the same war, had formed the French Irish Brigade, who are sometimes misdescribed as Wild Geese.

  1. ^ Murphy 1994, p. 23.