ABSTRACT
The ritual calendar of the Orange Order offered regular opportunities for members to raise their glasses to sentiments such as these. While these toasts are just three of the many revealed in the records of the Orange Order, or in newspaper coverage of their meetings, they are illustrative of a key theme of this study: a sense that the Orange Order was a movement stretching beyond the confines of the individual Lodge room. The Orangemen in the industrial and mining communities of the north-east of England clearly knew that, by the third-quarter of the nineteenth century, there were Lodges all over the English-speaking world. The printed matter of Orangeism informed them this was so; their own friends' migrations added to their knowledge. It is thus possible to deduce from expressions of empathy between far-flung brethren that the Irish migrants within Lodges were part of a web of social communication. They maintained affinities with other Lodges, and they continued to remember their homeland, especially (but not exclusively) through the articulation of support for shared political causes. The fact that these men and their families migrated did not mean they let the bonds of an earlier life wither away; in fact, migration sometimes intensified such connections.
