"The Wind That Shakes The Barley" (Roud 2994) is one of those ballads for which we actually have a known author. It was written by poet and scholar Robert Dwyer Joyce (1830-1883) in 1861 about the failed Irish Rebellion of 1798. It tell of a young rebel who is trying to tell his sweetheart that he plans to leave her behind to fight in the rebellion. As they're talking, however, a British (or loyalist militiaman) shoots her and kills her. The young rebel then joins the rebel forces at the Battle of Oulart Hill as they slaughtered a small detachment of the British Army.
The young man then goes on to state that it's more likely than not that he'll be joining his love in the afterlife soon enough. Cheerful stuff!
The history of the many rebellions and the ongoing conflict between the Irish and British colonial rule is long, complicated, and far beyond the scope of a single folk music blog post, but to touch very briefly on what was going on in the 1790s, well, the British were being pretty terrible.
To grossly oversimplify, at the time, anyone Catholic (which included the vast majority of native Irish) had their rights severely restricted. They either couldn't own or were very limited in what land they could have, had not right to public office or to the vote, and were mostly ruled over by a small upper class of British protestant landlords. Around that time the few Catholics with any influence and Protestant sympathizers pushed for better treatment and more representation. They had some success, but achieved nothing near equality and that frustration, along with the influence of the more successful revolutions in America and France, stirred up a rebellion against the British.
France was supposed to lend military support, but various circumstances and crossed signals led to a lot of failures. And in response British forces in Ireland responded with tactics that would make even today's "tough on terror" crowd blanche. British forces burned homes and murdered those suspected of supporting the rebellion, and used torture methods such as half-hanging and pitchcapping (look them up if you want to, but they're not nice things, trust me) to attempt to extract information or (more likely) to intimidate Irish citizens.
In the days leading up to this particular battle, British militiamen burned a number of homes and killed civilians all around the Wexford area. The narrator's sweetheart may have been fictional, but her fate was very much based on real events. Once Irish forces had massed, though, they greatly outnumbered the British, and by holding the high ground and having set up an ambush near the battle lines, they killed almost all of the British troops.
Other encounters during the short-lived uprising didn't go so well and by the autumn of that year the rebellion was over, though resistance to British rule would continue at various level of intensity until the Republic of Ireland had formed in the 20th Century, and beyond in Northern Ireland, which is still under the flag of the United Kingdom, a fact which not everyone who lives there is entirely thrilled about (though, like I said, I'm not going to even try to tell that whole story here).
One important, but easily overlooked bit of symbolism, though, is worth noting. The Irish rebels were sometimes called "Croppy Boys" for their close-cropped haircuts. Often the Irish who were killed in battle, or executed as prisoners would be buried in unmarked mass graves, which were nicknamed "Croppy Holes" A lot of these men carried rations made up of barley grains with them, and after a time the grains that were in the pockets of the dead men would sprout from the ground of the Croppy Holes, which the Irish took as a symbol of how their resistance to British rule would rise, again and again, no matter how many times it was cut down.
The wind through the barley isn't just an example of a pretty rural setting for this story, it's a powerful symbol for a movement that continued beyond the end of our Dead Lovers, and into the modern day.
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